Publication
Video games are the new soft power 💪
Last week I had the opportunity to speak in Khanty-Mansiysk at the VIII International Conference “Information and Communication in the Digital Age,” which was held as part of the IT Forum and the UNESCO Information for All program.
Video games are the new soft power 💪
Last week, I had the opportunity to speak in Khanty-Mansiysk at the 8th International Conference “Information and Communication in the Digital Age,” held as part of the IT Forum and UNESCO’s Information for All Programme.
My thanks to the Russian Committee for UNESCO’s Information for All Programme for the invitation. It was encouraging to see video games discussed not only inside the industry, but on a major international stage alongside AI, digital culture, and the future of the creative industries.
I took part in a session on games, AR/VR, and the digital economy—and once again found myself thinking about how often games are underestimated.
🎮 First, games are quite literally at the frontier of technology. Curiously, today’s AI boom rests to a considerable extent on game development. The NVIDIA GPUs now used to train LLMs and generative models grew out of a decades-long race for better graphics, higher frame rates, and more advanced rendering. In that sense, modern AI runs on the legacy of the game industry.
🎮 Second, games are a powerful instrument of soft power and cultural promotion. One slightly provocative idea emerged during the session: if we want Russian culture to appear more often in games, we need to make it easier for developers to use. Like everyone else, developers often choose the path of least resistance. If high-quality assets, references, architecture, ornament, and cultural artefacts from Russia are readily available, they are much more likely to appear in international projects.
🎮 Another important point: games have long been about more than entertainment.
Game mechanics thrive far beyond Steam and consoles: in corporate training, HR, education, simulations, and the gamification of user experience. For game teams, working with corporations is sometimes not a compromise but a perfectly viable route to a sustainable business.
We also discussed a more controversial idea: using games to show young people the consequences of their decisions. I approach this cautiously, but there is some truth in it. Interactivity can do something lectures and presentations cannot: let people experience the consequences of their own actions instead of merely hearing about them 😩
Once again, I came away convinced that when we talk about games, we are not talking only about entertainment. We are talking about technology, culture, education, economics, and the way digital society will be structured in the years ahead. So let’s keep diving.
And if you are currently considering or developing a video game project from a corporate perspective, let me know 🤫