The games industry must look beyond dystopia to help us imagine a better future, says games pioneer and E-Line Media President Alan Gershenfeld in Good Game Club Podcast

The games industry should look beyond its reliance on dystopian worlds and use its extraordinary world-building power to help people imagine and create better futures, according to Alan Gershenfeld, President and Co-Founder of E-Line Media. 

Speaking on the new episode of the Good Game Club podcast, released on 17 September, Gershenfeld argues that the worlds created by games matter because they help shape society’s expectations of the future.

“The world right now is scary for a lot of people,” Gershenfeld tells hosts Jude Ower and Mathias Gredal Nørvig. “Popular media shapes our vision of the future, and then we shape the future often around those visions. But if we're just seeing dystopian visions of the future, it's reinforcing the fear and the overwhelming nature of what's happening in the world.”

Gershenfeld, whose career spans Activision, Games for Change, E-Line Media and Endless Studios, challenges developers to create futures that are neither dystopian nor unrealistically utopian: “Can we create equally evocative … aspirational and achievable visions of the future?” 

Games do more than entertain, says Gershenfeld, providing players with the opportunity to move from anxiety towards agency: they make choices, encounter consequences, fail and try again.  He describes this as one of gaming’s most powerful characteristics: “In a game world, you have agency - your actions matter, you make a difference.”

That philosophy is reflected in ‘Never Alone’, E-Line Media’s BAFTA and Peabody-winning game created with Alaska Native partners and built around an Iñupiat story passed down over generations. It has reached 15 million players – demonstrating how culturally authentic storytelling can reach a global audience.

He also discusses games’ potential in education, health and real-world collective action, and says that as AI lowers the barriers to creating games, problem-solving and collaboration become more important than ever.  AI is already affecting “every pathway” into game-making, from coding to design or art, making it essential for the next generation to learn how to engage with the technology critically and creatively.  “The skill that will always be there, even with AI, is problem-solving,” he says.

Good Game Club is hosted by industry leaders Jude Ower MBE, Chief Strategy Officer at PlanetPlay, and Mathias Gredal Nørvig, CEO of SYBO. It is supported by the Dubai Films & Games Commission, Tencent and Xsolla, working together to shape a more positive future through the power of games.

‘Alan Gershenfeld | Beyond Dystopia: How Games Can Shape the Future’ is released on 17 September and can be watched here.  For more information, please visit Linktree or contact comms@goodgame.club.