School of Social & Political Sciences

In the late 1960s, James Coleman, later president of the American Sociological Association, wrote several pieces pointing to the potential of games in social theory (for example Coleman, 1966, 1969). Games provide sociology with an under-utilised resource to model and explore the systems we are interested in in dynamic and exciting ways. They provide a means for designers to express world views in fascinating and often affecting ways, and for sociologists to unpack games to explore the assumptions they make about the world. Sociology in my view, needs more games. But games also need sociology – especially the methods and understandings that sociology can bring to their interpretation. Games are (in social science at least) a largely untapped resource, as well as having huge potential for our classrooms.

Games have come a long way since the 1960s. Many of them have designers who are deeply serious about what they do and want to make statements about it. These games have theories about the world which they enact and ask you to interact with. They are, to use the phrase of philosopher and game studies writer Nguyen (2020) – ‘libraries of agency’.

Let me make some claims about games that form the basis of my next book, and which explain their potential importance.

First, you might think you understand how something in the world works but playing a game about it will offer you new insight in relation to  it. Stonewall Uprising takes you through the struggle for civil rights in the United States, and the tactics used by both sides there. Playing it as the Pride movement, you suffer setback after setback but try  desperately to hold on, so as to change public opinion. And if you are playing ‘The Man’, it’s your job to detain protesters or close down the debate. Games can ask us to not only learn about the world, but to interact and participate in models of it. They can ask us to occupy roles that we might find uncomfortable and consider why people really occupying them behaved as they did.

Second, we can read about the relationships between economy and society or, in a game like Hegemony, we can occupy roles that immerse us in them. In that game, everyone works within the same game system but in very different ways. The capitalist class will have very different goals and abilities compared to the working class. As the capitalist player you’ll be trying to get legislation passed to achieve accumulation of greater wealth, while at the same as persuading the player representing the working class that their wage demands are unreasonable. And then, at some point, you might buy yourself a private island to increase your score. In return the working class might call a general strike and bring down the whole economy. Some of the cards available to the capitalist player are shown below, including the private island.  The game is about finding a path through competing goals where everyone can succeed. You can only play the game well once you understand how the whole system works – a claim worth sociologically exploring - and that understanding is continually tested as the game develops.

Some of the cards available to the capitalist player in Hegemony.

Third, games allow us to explore the same social phenomena from very different angles. Hegemony arguably does this in one game, but we can also play several games with very different perspectives. In Daybreak players work co-operatively as nations or groups of nations to alleviate climate change. There is a sense of everyone trying to help one another to prevent catastrophe, while every round more carbon accumulates, and trees and forests die. Kyoto sounds like it has similar goals, with players committing resources to solving common climate change problems. But if you do manage to overcome climate change, the player with the most resources left at the end of the game wins. So you are encouraged to try and get others to pay the price of cleaning the planet up. But…. if together you fail to prevent climate change, then the player with the most resources at the end automatically loses. This means you have to be both trying to achieve collective agreements to which everyone contributes fairly while there are incentives not to do this yourself. It’s a tragedy of the commons. Trying to work through this with others is very different to reading about this kind of problem as an abstract model.

Games are different to other forms of media because of the extent of their interactivity, and the ways they give players agency in playing them. Games are interactive cultural artefacts, and often, through their rules and systems make arguments about how the world works. Social science has a range of methods tools and idea for investigating games that have been underutilised, and which offer significant potential for illuminating both games themselves, but also the real-world systems that games are often modelled on. Exploring games such as those in this blog (but many others) offers exciting research and scholarship agendas where there is a great deal of work still be done.

References:

Coleman, J.S. (1966) ‘Introduction: In Defence of Games’, American Behavioural Scientist, 10(2).

Coleman, J.S. (1969) ‘Games as Vehicles for Social Theory’, American Behavioural Scientist, July-August, pp. 2–6.

Nguyen, C.T. (2020) Games: agency as art. New York, NY: Oxford University Press (Thinking art).


Card images taken from the Board Game Geek review of Hegemony.

 

First published: 20 July 2026

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