How many years ago is it now since I hurried to disconnect the Xbox from a Call of Duty session as my wife pulled into the drive after a day at work? Not that I had done anything wrong, exactly—but there was something in the act itself, the quick flick of the power button, the casual repositioning of the controller, that suggested I understood, at some level, that this was not quite how a grown man should be spending his time. If I had been watching a film, reading a book—fine. But gaming still carried a faint whiff of embarrassment, a lingering association with teenage bedrooms, cheap adrenaline, the mindless click of buttons.
That, at least, was the cultural assumption. It was an easy assumption to make, too: the image of gaming as a time-wasting diversion, something unserious, best left to children or socially stunted adults, has proved remarkably resilient. Even as gaming grew into the dominant cultural industry of the 21st century, overtaking cinema and music, its legitimacy as an art form has remained oddly unsettled. Minecraft has been played for more cumulative years than the entire span of recorded human history. The industry is worth more than half a trillion dollars. Call of Duty now outsells Hollywood franchises; competitive League of Legends finals draw more viewers than the Super Bowl. And yet, there is still that moment of hesitation, the brief instinct to downplay it, as if gaming were not just trivial but faintly embarrassing. A kind of digital wank?
Marijam Did’s Everything to Play For: How Videogames are Changing the World arrives at precisely this moment of crisis, or perhaps acceleration. It is both celebration and warning, cultural critique and political manifesto. “Videogames are the future of art, entertainment, sports, and community organising, no matter how reluctant some people are to accept it,” she writes. This is not a prediction so much as a statement of fact. The question is not whether gaming will dominate the cultural sphere—it already does—but what kind of world it will build in the process.
For Did, the most pressing transformation gaming now faces is the rise of artificial intelligence, not just as a tool for design, but as a fundamental restructuring of the industry itself. Games have always used AI in small, invisible ways: the enemy soldier’s pathfinding, the scripted conversation of an NPC, the algorithmically generated terrain of an open world. But Did warns that what is coming next is something else entirely. “Entire departments [could be] replaced by AI bots that instantly generate desired work with a few commands,” she writes. Concept artists, programmers, even writers are already seeing their labour absorbed by machine-learning models trained on their own work, a process so efficient in its extraction that the workers themselves barely register as an inconvenience.
The corporate fantasy of AI is a familiar one: infinite content, conjured at will. No more expensive writers’ rooms, no more slow, expensive animation, just type a prompt and let the machine do the rest. The problem, of course, is that this is less a utopia than a kind of algorithmic composting, a system that digests previous human creations and regurgitates something slightly worse. The results, at their most absurd, resemble a kind of proceduralist Dadaism, but without the self-awareness, landscapes smeared together from an aggregate of past aesthetics, characters speaking in tone-perfect but nonsensical lines, narratives that mean nothing but are structurally indistinguishable from the ones that once did.
If AI threatens the workforce, it also threatens the experience of play itself. Did is particularly sharp on the ways automation is already eroding the communal aspects of gaming. Online multiplayer, once a space of chaotic improvisation, is now increasingly populated by algorithmic ghosts—bots designed to mimic real players, to give the illusion of human engagement. The point is not simply that AI is replacing human labour; it is replacing human interaction. If the medium once promised infinite agency, it now risks collapsing into a kind of pre-scripted simulation, in which the player’s choices are ultimately irrelevant.
Yet for all its bleakness, Everything to Play For is not a pessimistic book. Did is acutely aware of the industry’s contradictions: its reliance on exploitative labour practices, its complicity in environmental destruction, its role as a recruiting ground for reactionary politics. But she is also attuned to its radical potential. If gaming has been a tool for financialisation and social control, it has also been a space for resistance. Trade unions in the videogame industry are growing, developers are pushing back against corporate AI integration, and the independent game scene, long the industry’s counterweight, is finding new ways to resist.“The workers of this hyper-capitalist industry might yet find ways to reclaim their agency,” she argues. The question is whether the rest of us will notice in time.
The final challenge Did raises is whether games will ever be granted the kind of cultural seriousness they deserve. Literature and film, despite their industrial realities, have long been afforded the dignity of critique. Games, for all their influence, still seem to exist in a liminal space, celebrated for their economic might, dismissed as an art form. Perhaps, as Did suggests, this is because games have not yet acquired the kind of institutional self-reflection that art and cinema enjoy. “A confident medium that did not perceive itself as being particularly harmful would not feel the need to justify its own merits,” she writes. The future of gaming may not be a battle over content but over perception: will it remain a commodified spectacle, or will it be allowed to mature into a medium capable of serious cultural thought?
One suspects that, at some point, games will be taken seriously, perhaps too seriously. A century from now, some university professor will be standing in front of a lecture hall, solemnly unpacking the semiotics of Call of Duty 47, tracing the algorithmic influence of AI-generated Elden Ring clones on 22nd-century military propaganda. Perhaps even this review will be generated by an AI, its cadences sampled from a thousand past critiques, its conclusions shaped by a probability model of what a review of a book like this should say. If so, one hopes it would at least be able to get it right.
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