Professor Patrick Jagoda introduces and discuss his new book Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification (University of Chicago Press, 2020), and to reflect upon his role as co-founder of the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab and the Transmedia Story Lab.
Digital games alone engage an estimated 2.5 billion people worldwide as of 2020, and other forms of gaming, such as board games, role playing, escape rooms, and puzzles, command an ever-expanding audience. At the same time, “gamification”—the application of game mechanics to traditionally nongame spheres, such as personal health and fitness, shopping, habit tracking, and more—has imposed unprecedented levels of competition, repetition, and quantification on daily life. Drawing from his own experience as a game designer, Professor Jagoda argues that games need not be synonymous with gamification. He studies experimental games that intervene in the neoliberal project from the inside out, examining a broad variety of mainstream and independent games, including StarCraft, Candy Crush Saga, Stardew Valley, Dys4ia, Braid, and Undertale. Beyond a diagnosis of gamification, Jagoda imagines ways that games can be experimental—not only in the sense of problem solving, but also the more nuanced concept of problem making that embraces the complexities of our digital present. The result is a game-changing book on the sociopolitical potential of this form of mass entertainment.
Professor Jagoda is the author of The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer (MIT, 2016) and Network Aesthetics (University of Chicago Press, 2016).
