The news service Reuters published an interesting article on “cozy gaming” earlier this week. The information contained in the article is itself fairly banal. But the article itself — the lightly “gamified” form it takes — is really interesting, and represents yet another way for games students to think about their futures: Not as devs working at some high-end AAA studio, but as agile developers in any number of business sectors (journalism, for example) who understand how game mechanics can be used to add variety and interest to otherwise generic content.
Yes, the article is about “cozy gaming,” but it could’ve been about beekeeping or car manufacturing and the approach — light interaction, friendly engagement, stickiness — would still have worked well.
This, to my mind, is our challenge: To think of ourselves as people who understand what digital video games really do, and their value, rather than thinking of ourselves as people who merely know how to make more games.