Games can influence our world in many ways.
Samuel Pizelo, assistant professor of game studies at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, explores games as system-modeling tools.
Samuel Pizelo is an Assistant Professor of Game Studies at the Institute for Communication, Culture, Information and Technology at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. He completed his PhD at the University of California, Davis, and has formerly held a visiting professorship at New York University. His research argues that games are modeling technologies that have been centrally important to the global development of computing technology, technoscientific research, artificial intelligence, and neoliberal capitalism itself. He is also a founding member of the Degrowth Game Design Project, a multi-campus research cluster that uses game design to help us imagine a post-growth future.
Games as System-Modeling Tools
We are playing games, even if we don’t know it. That is the central claim of my research, which spans the globe and several millennia of game materials and player practices. By focusing on how games were used to model various systems—from cities to economies and even the universe itself—I was able to establish an intimate relationship between various games and technological developments at pivotal moments in our history. It turns out, games have helped to change every part of our lives. From modern mathematics, to linguistics, economics, and the social sciences, games have influenced how researchers model and understand the world. Your AI chat assistant and even the computer itself owe their existence to the study of games.
There has been a lot of excellent work on the history of games in the last century, which has catalogued instances of games and play at nearly every moment in human history. My work builds on this scholarship by examining the surrounding social context of various games and asking why games change over time and how these changes show up in society. For instance, modern probability theory arose out of a mathematical study of dice games in response to the gambling crisis that raged in seventeenth century France. The earliest attempt at creating a general-purpose computer—by Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace—was inspired by a study of chess, tic-tac-toe, and the board game solitaire. And contemporary scientific simulation techniques were inspired by games like go and even SimCity.
My goal with this research is not just to convince the public that games aren’t a waste of time. It’s to serve as a reminder that the world around us was built with play and can be built, and played, differently.
