Not that long ago, video games were considered the cultural equivalent of fast food: lowbrow, overstimulating, and best left in a packed lunch. They were something your 12-year-old cousin yelled about during Christmas, not something you’d bring up in an essay about postmodern narrative structure. Fast forward to 2025, and now the same people writing dissertations on Mrs Dalloway are also clocking 80 hours in Disco Elysium and calling it “research.”
The question is no longer should gaming be taken seriously – it’s how seriously are we prepared to go? Whether you like it or not, gaming has crawled out of the basement and into the seminar room.
Academia Has Entered the Chat
Universities have started offering actual modules on game theory, digital storytelling, and ludonarrative dissonance (a fancy way of saying “why does the story say one thing while the game makes me commit war crimes?”). Students are analysing level design like it’s architecture. Some even argue Minecraft should be on the syllabus next to Brave New World, which makes sense when you realise both involve dystopia and extensive resource gathering.
And yes, before anyone says it, gaming still has its lowbrow reputation, but you can’t deny its growing narrative sophistication. Games now explore grief, identity, civilization collapse, and late capitalism. That’s more depth than most Victorian novels that end with a marriage and tuberculosis.
Breaking the Stigma
There’s still this lingering belief, especially among people who keep Proust on their nightstand for clout, that video games are all guns and gore. The idea that games can tackle real, messy emotions still makes some critics squint. But they do. And not in a token “one sad character in a cutscene” way. Full narratives are built around depression, anxiety, grief, and identity crises.
Subscription services like Game Pas Core are filled with games like Celeste strap a metaphor for mental illness to your back and make you climb a mountain with it. Night in the Woods drops you into a dead-end hometown full of capitalist despair and talking animals with unresolved trauma, and somehow it all feels way too familiar.
Cultural Legitimacy: Now Loading
Of course, the old guard still scoffs. They see gaming as unserious – flashy, addictive, emotionally shallow. But let’s be honest: the same argument was made about novels in the 18th century, film in the 20th, and literally every medium that’s ever had the audacity to be popular and enjoyable.
Gaming is how a generation is learning to understand the world – through boss fights, dialogue trees, and morally grey decisions that have real consequences. It teaches logic, empathy, ethics, and how to keep going under pressure. Playing Dark Souls isn’t just punishing; it’s become therapy for many. Games are already doing the emotional heavy lifting, whether some consider them a lesser form of art or not.
So, has gaming finally earned a seat at the academic table? Maybe. It’s still showing up in jeans and a graphic tee while everyone else wears tweed, but at least it’s here – and probably holding a surprisingly articulate opinion on Hegelian dialectics in The Witcher 3.
And if nothing else, it’s giving students a break from essays, lectures, and the crushing weight of existential dread. Which, frankly, might be the most educational experience of all.
