Last December, RUDOLF THOMAS INDERST served as an external examiner for Zhaoyin Zhang’s doctoral thesis at the University of Limerick. A recent Erasmus mobility stay brought them together again and provided the perfect occasion to discuss games, education, and intercultural communication.
Rudolf Thomas Inderst: Let’s start off nice and easy! Please tell our readers who your are and … of course … what are you playing at the moment?
Zhaoyin Zhang: Sure! I’m Zhaoyin Zhang, and I recently graduated from the University of Limerick with a research PhD in Languages, Arts, Culture and Communication. My research mainly sits at the intersection of commercial videogames and intercultural communication.
As for what I’ve been playing lately, a few games have really caught my attention: ›The Blood of Dawnwalker‹, from a team including former ›Witcher 3‹ developers; Remedy’s ›CONTROL Resonant‹; and, because I have a bit of a weakness for aerial combat, ›ACE COMBAT 8: Wings of Theve‹.
Zhaoyin, your dissertation is titled COTS Computer based RPGs in Chinese Universities: Assessing Their Role in Cultivating Intercultural Communicative Competence. Could you briefly explain what first drew you to this topic and why you chose commercial off-the-shelf RPGs rather than purpose-built educational games?
Sure. When we talk about purpose-built educational games, we often also use the term serious games. These are usually designed for a specific learning or training purpose, ranging from a small classroom activity to a large-scale simulation system. There is already a substantial body of research on serious games, especially in areas such as medicine, where real-world clinical practice can involve considerable risk. So I would absolutely say that serious games have their own particular value.
But at the same time, we also have to think about accessibility. Large simulation systems can be very expensive and difficult to move or maintain. Even classroom-based serious games, such as BAFA BAFA, may not work equally well for every group of learners. And if an institution wants to develop a serious game from scratch for a specific educational purpose, that can require a great deal of time, money, iteration, and maintenance, especially from teachers and researchers.
That is where commercial off-the-shelf games become interesting to me. I see three main advantages. First, video games are already a major part of contemporary popular culture and everyday life. As commercial products, they are usually designed to be engaging and playable in ways that many educational games simply cannot match. That willingness to play can be the first step towards getting students genuinely involved in the learning activity.
Second, their development, publication, and maintenance are normally handled outside educational institutions, while the cost of access is still relatively affordable for most users. So from an educational perspective, it can be far more economical to identify and extract useful learning content from an existing commercial game than to build and maintain a serious game from the ground up.
And third, this is perhaps the most distinctive advantage of commercial games. Many of them, especially large-budget titles, make use of highly advanced visual, audio, and interactive technologies to create immersive experiences. Mature production pipelines also mean that the quality of interaction is usually much more stable and polished. For teachers who already have very heavy workloads, that can make the process much more manageable.
I sometimes compare this to the moment when film entered the classroom. Nobody argued that only documentaries could be educational. Commercial films could also be discussed, interpreted, and used pedagogically. I think commercial videogames can be approached in a similar way, especially because they combine narrative, audiovisual media, interaction, and player agency in ways that other media do not.
Of course, in some contexts, serious games may still be the better choice. But for intercultural education, I think commercial games have a particular strength. They can stimulate intercultural awareness and allow students to explore cultural situations in a relatively low-risk environment. International travel has become more accessible, but it still involves significant financial and practical barriers, and short-term tourism does not necessarily allow learners to meaningfully understand another culture. Some cultural experiences are also historical and can no longer be accessed directly at all.
Commercial games can reconstruct or reimagine those contexts. For example, ›Battlefield V’s The Last Tiger‹ allows players to engage, from a first-person perspective, with a representation of German wartime trauma and memory. That kind of situated, experiential encounter is something I think commercial games can offer particularly well, and it is much harder to reproduce through a purpose-built educational game alone.
What are the main limitations of traditional intercultural learning materials in Chinese universities, and how can commercial RPGs help address them?
I think the biggest limitation is not simply the teaching material itself, but the wider teaching ecology around it.
In China, intercultural education at undergraduate level is still very often embedded within foreign-language education, particularly English-language teaching. Many teachers have themselves been trained within the same model of intercultural education that they later teach. Even when they have opportunities to study or visit abroad, those experiences are often relatively short, so it can be difficult to develop sustained engagement with another cultural environment and then bring that experience back into the classroom.
As a result, teachers can become quite dependent on textbooks. And many of those textbooks are highly standardised. They normally go through formal educational approval processes, and this can sometimes encourage a rather simplified relationship between nation and culture. That is why we so often encounter categories such as »American culture«, »British culture«, or »European history and culture«, as though one country could be neatly associated with one cultural system.
Another problem is time. Textbooks can take years to be written, reviewed, approved, and finally adopted, so some of the cultural information may already feel dated by the time students actually encounter it. Commercial games, by contrast, often engage with cultural issues that are much more up to date and closely connected to contemporary social debates, anxieties, and changes.
If teachers have not been given enough intercultural training or flexibility to critically adapt the materials they use, teaching can also become quite static. Students may end up memorising descriptions of cultural practices almost as they would memorise vocabulary, and then reproducing them in an exam. In that situation, intercultural education can unintentionally reinforce the very stereotypes it is supposed to challenge.
This is one area where I think commercial games can be especially useful. They do not simply provide teachers with more cultural content. They can also give teachers and students something to analyse, interpret, and discuss together. That includes not only the cultures represented inside the game world, but also the cultural assumptions and values brought into the game by its developers and production context.
The interactive nature of games matters here as well. Rather than having the teacher explain a culture and the students simply receive that information, players have to engage with characters, communities, values, conflicts, and choices within a virtual environment. That can shift the classroom away from one-way transmission and towards something much more participatory and interpretive.
Of course, commercial games are not automatically free from stereotypes. They can reproduce them too. But contemporary game development increasingly involves cultural consultants, historical researchers, sensitivity readers, and other forms of specialist input. More importantly, even when a representation is questionable or problematic, that itself can become something worth critically discussing in the classroom.
For example, ›Frostpunk 2: Fractured Utopias‹ can become a starting point for thinking about collective environmental imagination: how different communities imagine responsibility, sacrifice, governance, and survival in response to climate crisis. The game is not simply teaching students a fixed cultural fact. It gives them a cultural and social problem to interpret.
So for me, one of the most important advantages of commercial games is that they can move intercultural learning away from memorising what a culture supposedly is, and towards discussing how culture is represented, negotiated, contested, and experienced.
How did you select the specific CRPGs for your study? What criteria did you use, and how did censorship, age ratings, and cultural sensitivities shape your selection?
First, I should probably clarify what I mean by C-RPG, because CRPG is already a very familiar genre label in game studies. In my research, the »C« stands for cultural-oriented. I use the term in a broader sense, closer to the idea of role-play in classroom activities, where students may take on the perspective of someone situated within a particular cultural context without necessarily relying on conventional RPG mechanics such as character creation, skill allocation, or numerical progression.
One influence here was Richardson, who suggested in a 2025 article that scholars from different disciplines might benefit from developing more specific genre terms for commercial games that have particular relevance to their own fields. That helped me think about C-RPG as a category defined primarily by its pedagogical and cultural potential rather than by a fixed set of game mechanics.
For selecting games, I mainly worked with three criteria.
The first is that the game needs to contain cultural elements that are worth analysing. These can be explicit, such as clothing, architecture, food, or language, but they can also be more implicit, involving issues such as gender, environmental values, cultural memory, social relationships, or ideas about community.
The second is practical. I prefer games that are divided into relatively self-contained chapters or sections and allow multiple independent save files. This comes directly from thinking about the realities of classroom use. A teacher can select a particular section in advance, prepare a save file at the right point, and then reuse that same material with different groups of students. It also makes it much easier to stop, repeat, or revisit a specific scene without asking students to play through the entire game.
The third criterion is safety. More specifically, the selected section has to be appropriate for the particular group of learners and should not expose them to material that could cause unnecessary harm or distress without any clear pedagogical value. For example, ›Heavy Rain‹ contains a number of scenes involving self-harm, but I would not select those sections for classroom use simply because the game itself might otherwise have intercultural value.
In terms of age ratings, I mainly refer to the PEGI system. Since my target learners are university undergraduates, I do not automatically exclude PEGI 18 titles. But the rating itself is never enough. I would still avoid sections containing excessive gore, violence, strong language, or content that exists mainly to intensify excitement, unless that material itself creates something meaningful to reflect on interculturally.
A good example is ›Watch Dogs‹. Its crime-intervention system can invite students to think about what justice means, who has the authority to intervene, and whether the way justice is carried out can itself become ethically problematic. Once students begin comparing those choices with real-world assumptions about policing, responsibility, or public intervention, the violent content is no longer simply spectacle. It becomes part of the cultural question.
So overall, my selection process is not really about asking whether a whole game is »educational« or »safe«. It is about identifying specific parts of a commercial game that are culturally meaningful, practically usable in a classroom, and appropriate for the learners involved.
In your empirical work, you conducted interviews and classroom simulations at three Chinese universities. What were the most surprising or revealing findings about how students engaged with these games?
What surprised me most was that, within my sample, students from what would normally be considered top-tier Chinese universities were not necessarily the ones who showed the strongest critical engagement.
They were often very good at remembering the kind of cultural knowledge presented in textbooks, but once the activity moved beyond recall and asked them to interpret the game independently, their responses were sometimes less distinctive than I had expected.
By contrast, students from institutions with a stronger focus on foreign-language education, or from joint-education programmes, often seemed much more willing to develop their own lines of reasoning. They relied less heavily on textbook formulations and, after gameplay, were often able to give much longer and more individual responses.
One example came from discussions of Aiden Pearce in ›Watch Dogs‹ and his role as a vigilante. Participants from the more traditionally prestigious universities often moved quite quickly towards familiar debates around procedural justice and outcome-based justice. Some participants from joint-education institutions, however, started from what they had actually experienced in the game world. They asked why, in a city saturated with surveillance, violent crime still remained so common. From there, they began questioning whether surveillance systems were really designed primarily to prevent crime, and this led into wider discussions about private corporations, social governance, and even the idea of a »necessary evil«.
Another issue that was impossible to ignore was political sensitivity. In my interviews, some students from public universities became noticeably more cautious when questions moved towards governance, social systems, or politically sensitive cultural issues. Some gave very brief answers, while others preferred not to answer at all. That became important enough that I eventually added a separate discussion in the thesis about political sensitivity as part of the screening process. If this kind of pedagogical model is to be implemented in China, teachers would need to consider not only whether a game is culturally useful or age-appropriate, but also whether the selected material enters politically sensitive territory.
There was also one much more practical surprise. Before the study, I had assumed that recruitment might be difficult. Playing games privately is one thing, but playing while being observed and then being asked to explain your thoughts is quite another. In fact, the initial response was much stronger than I expected. I actually had to screen out some applicants, particularly players whose experience was overwhelmingly concentrated in competitive FPS games, sometimes with thousands of hours of playtime, because their gaming background did not fit the kind of engagement I was trying to examine.
So overall, the most revealing finding for me was that institutional prestige, gaming experience, and intercultural engagement did not line up in the straightforward way I had originally expected. What mattered much more was how willing students were to move beyond memorised knowledge and use the game as a space for interpretation.
Your thesis develops a screening framework for educators. Could you explain how it works and what makes a game suitable, or unsuitable, for cultivating intercultural communicative competence?
I should probably begin by saying that the framework I developed in the thesis was still quite preliminary. Looking back at it now, there are definitely parts I would revise. But the basic idea was to give intercultural teachers, especially those with limited ludic literacy, a practical way of narrowing down commercial games without asking them to become game scholars first.
My starting point was publicly available information. If you search for most commercial games, you can usually find out fairly quickly what kind of production they are, whether they are small indie titles or much larger-budget games, what they look like, how they play, and what kind of experience they are trying to create.
From there, the teacher first needs to think about what kind of game world they actually want students to interact with. Do they need a smaller, text-heavy game with a lot of narrative content, or a much larger game with highly realistic visual presentation? These choices matter because visual presentation can affect immersion and the sense of authenticity, and may also give some indication of how much of the world students are able to interact with.
That said, this is one area where I would now add more qualifications. When I originally developed the framework, Unreal Engine 5 games were not nearly as widespread as they are now. Today, a game can look extraordinarily impressive while still offering fairly thin content or poor gameplay. So graphical quality alone is obviously not enough to tell us whether a game is pedagogically useful.
Smaller indie games can work just as well. What matters is that the teacher knows what kind of classroom experience they want to create. For example, will one student play at the front while everyone else watches and discusses what happens, or will every student play the same section individually and then compare their experiences afterwards? Those practical decisions can completely change what kind of game is suitable.
I would then ask whether the game is primarily competitive. Competitive games can be very useful for studying gaming communities and player culture, but they may be less suitable when the aim is to explore a particular real-world cultural context. Their lower density of relevant cultural information, higher learning demands, and stronger potential for frustration can make them difficult to control in a classroom environment.
Once competitive games have been filtered out, the central question becomes much simpler: does this game actually contain the cultural issue the teacher wants students to engage with? That can often be checked through publicly available sources such as developer interviews, promotional material, reviews, walkthroughs, or discussions of the game’s themes.
And I think there is one more element I would now make much more explicit: the screening process should not end once the teacher has chosen the game. Student feedback after the activity should become part of the framework as well. Their responses can show whether the selected section actually generated the kind of interaction and reflection the teacher expected, and that information can then help refine, reposition, or even replace the material for the next group.
So I now see the framework less as a fixed checklist for deciding whether a game is »good« or »bad« for intercultural education, and more as an iterative process of selection, classroom use, feedback, and reselection.
Intercultural communicative competence is often described in terms of cognitive, affective, and behavioral dimensions. Which of these do commercial RPGs support most effectively, and where do they fall short?
I think this needs to be treated quite carefully. We cannot simply say that AAA games are better for cognitive or behavioural development, or that emotionally powerful indie games are naturally better for the affective dimension. In practice, identifying which particular section or activity in a game might support one or two of these dimensions is itself an important part of the selection process.
In my study, I used ›Hogwarts Legacy‹, ›Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments‹, and ›Assassin’s Creed Syndicate‹ mainly to explore the cognitive dimension. The participants’ responses suggested that Victorian London in ›Assassin’s Creed Syndicate‹ and the Kew Gardens case in ›Sherlock Holmes‹ were particularly useful for thinking about issues such as modernity, masculinity, class differences, parenting expectations, gender roles, and inequalities affecting women.
›Hogwarts Legacy‹, by comparison, was much less effective in this respect. I think one reason is that its cultural coordinates are already filtered through a fictional world, so learners first have to interpret what the fictional setting is symbolising before they can connect it to a wider cultural context. For participants whose ICC was still developing, that extra layer of interpretation made the task much harder.
Interestingly, the three games I originally selected mainly for the affective dimension, ›Baldur’s Gate 3‹, ›Heavy Rain‹, and ›Detroit: Become Human‹, also supported quite a lot of cognitive learning. They helped participants build emotional connections with virtual individuals from different cultural contexts, but at the same time those relationships also led them to recognise and think about a wider range of intercultural issues.
The behavioural dimension was much more difficult. I used ›Cyberpunk 2077‹, ›Watch Dogs‹, and ›Watch Dogs 2‹ to explore whether gameplay could encourage interculturally appropriate behaviour, but the results were weaker than I expected.
There may be several reasons for that. Intercultural behaviour is perhaps already an outcome of ICC rather than something that can be produced directly through gameplay. In my study, there was also no teacher constantly present to guide participants’ decisions. On top of that, all three games are set in highly fictionalised or dystopian worlds and give players a great deal of freedom, so the behaviour participants chose in the game did not always reflect respect, equality, or other principles we would normally associate with intercultural communication in real life.
But I would not say that this meant the games failed completely. Quite a few participants were able to recognise afterwards that what they had done in the game would not necessarily be appropriate in a real intercultural encounter. So even when the game did not directly produce the desired behaviour, it could still create a kind of reverse reflection: players could look back at their own actions and realise why those actions might be problematic outside the game.
So overall, I would say the cognitive and affective dimensions were easier to support, while the behavioural dimension was much more difficult. But more importantly, the three dimensions were never completely separate. A game selected for one purpose could easily generate learning in another.
Based on your research, what are the biggest practical obstacles for teachers who want to use digital games in the classroom, both in China and in other educational contexts?
I think the biggest obstacle is definitely ludic literacy. Many intercultural teachers simply do not understand games very well, and some are still quite resistant to the idea of bringing them into the classroom at all. In China, this is partly connected to the long history of video game stigma. Games have been described in public discourse with labels such as »spiritual opium« or »electronic heroin«, and that kind of language makes it very difficult for people to take their educational potential seriously, let alone to develop the literacy needed to analyse and use them critically.
In other parts of the world, the stigma may not be as strong, but I think the same problem still exists in a different form. Many teachers who are not working in game studies, and I am thinking particularly of intercultural educators here, may still have quite limited experience in understanding how games actually work as systems, texts, and interactive environments.
There is an older framework, TPACK, which talks about the relationship between technological knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and content knowledge. But in practice, technological pedagogical knowledge can still be interpreted very narrowly. For some teachers, »using technology« may still mean little more than preparing slides or moving existing classroom materials onto a digital platform.
That is partly why, in the current AI era, we talk so much about digital literacy. And I think game-based education needs something similar: ludic literacy. Teachers need to know not only how to operate a game, but also how to read it, analyse it, interpret its mechanics and representations, and understand what kinds of player experiences it produces.
Only when teachers have that level of understanding can games be integrated into the classroom in a systematic way, rather than simply being added as an entertaining extra.
I also think this could eventually benefit the game industry itself. Ubisoft’s ›Assassin’s Creed Origins‹, for example, later introduced a combat-free Discovery Tour that allowed players and educators to explore ancient Egypt in a much more explicitly educational way. But examples like that are still relatively unusual.
If intercultural educators develop stronger ludic literacy, they may also become more active players and more informed users of commercial games. That means they could give developers much more meaningful feedback about how games are being interpreted and used in educational contexts. At the same time, the industry could reach audiences who might never previously have considered commercial games relevant to education.
So I see this as potentially a two-way relationship. Better ludic literacy among educators could improve game-based teaching, while also encouraging the games industry to think more seriously about the educational and cultural possibilities of the experiences they are already creating.
Since you completed your dissertation, the gaming landscape and educational technology have changed rapidly. Which developments, such as AI, online multiplayer, or new platforms, do you think are most relevant for the future of game-based intercultural learning?
For me, AI is definitely one of the developments I want to follow most closely, and more specifically, AI-assisted graphics technology.
Recently, demonstrations of NVIDIA’s latest DLSS5 technology have been circulating widely online, and what caught my attention most was how dramatically it could improve the visual quality of older games. That matters quite a lot for my research.
In my original study, I deliberately selected several older titles in order to keep the dataset relatively controlled and reduce unnecessary variables. But one consequence was that some participants found it difficult to become fully immersed in games from an earlier graphical generation. ›Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments‹ is a good example. Some participants commented that its visual quality made the environment feel less convincing, and in a few cases that even affected how they interpreted what they were seeing.
There was one very specific example in the Kew Gardens case. Some participants could not clearly identify the pale yellow glass structure of the greenhouse, and that created unnecessary confusion. A few of them suggested that greater visual realism might have reduced that kind of perceptual error.
I think AI-enhanced graphics could therefore be valuable not simply because they make old games »look better«, but because they may help preserve or restore the clarity of cultural information contained in those environments.
Facial expression is another area that interests me. If AI-assisted rendering can make NPC faces, gestures, and emotional reactions feel more lifelike, that may also reduce the emotional distance between players and virtual intercultural others. In intercultural learning, that could be very important.
This connects with something else I noticed in the behavioural part of my study. Some participants who behaved violently towards NPCs told me afterwards that they did so partly because they were very aware that these characters were just rendered 3D figures. They did not really perceive them as people.
I found that especially interesting when I compared their behaviour across different games. Some of the same participants who behaved rather badly in ›Watch Dogs‹, ›Watch Dogs 2, or Cyberpunk 2077‹ showed much more care and empathy towards characters in ›Detroit: Become Human‹.
So I think graphical realism may affect more than immersion. It may also influence how seriously players take virtual others, how emotionally close they feel to them, and perhaps even how they behave towards them.
That is why AI graphics technology interests me so much. If it can reduce the perceptual and emotional distance created by older or less expressive graphics, it may eventually become quite important for game-based intercultural learning.
I wonder, in a time of growing geopolitical tensions, how can digital games foster intercultural understanding without reinforcing stereotypes or political sensitivities?
ZZ: My short answer would be: games alone cannot foster intercultural understanding.
Stereotypes and political sensitivities are socially produced, and games are themselves cultural products. Without critical guidance, they can just as easily reinforce cultural hostility or stereotypes as challenge them.
I saw a good example of this around ›Helldivers 2‹, where a relatively small issue in community communication surrounding an in-game event triggered strongly nationalistic reactions among some Chinese players, partly because one fictional megacity was interpreted as resembling Shanghai. What interested me was how quickly a completely fictional space could become connected to real-world cultural and political identities.
This is why I have always argued that the teacher cannot simply disappear once games enter the classroom. Games may offer a very intuitive way of exploring unfamiliar worlds, but they also carry the cultural assumptions, political perspectives, and possible stereotypes of the people and industries that produce them. Those things need to be interpreted, not simply absorbed.
This is also where I think my next research direction may lie. If ludic literacy helps teachers select and critically understand games, perhaps we should also think about developing intercultural ludic literacy among players themselves: the ability to distinguish critically between stereotypical or hostile cultural representations and more nuanced attempts to represent cultural difference.
Only then, I think, can games realise their educational potential. Guidance and ludic literacy have to come first. After all, as scholars such as McCall have argued, even games like Call of Duty can become materials for critically reflecting on war. The important question is not simply what game we use, but how we teach people to read it.
If you could recommend one or two commercial RPGs today to a university teacher who wants to promote intercultural learning, which would they be and why?
I think the first thing I would ask is: what exactly do you want to use the game for? Are you mainly trying to develop the cognitive dimension of ICC, to work more with the affective dimension, or to give students a sandbox in which they can actually practise intercultural behaviour? I do not think there is one commercial RPG that works equally well for all three.
If the focus is cognitive, I would probably recommend parts of the ›Assassin’s Creed‹ series, particularly the titles outside Ubisoft’s so-called mythology trilogy and ›Assassin’s Creed Shadows‹. Of course, I would add one important warning: Ubisoft’s famous idea that »history is your playground« does not mean that what we see in these games is simply history reproduced as it really was.
But that is also exactly what makes the series useful. These games reconstruct major cultural communities from particular historical periods, and students can analyse both what is represented and why contemporary developers chose to reconstruct that community in this particular way. Culture, after all, includes people and the worlds in which they live, so any attempt to recreate a culture in a game inevitably involves selection, omission, and interpretation.
For the affective dimension, if we are talking about RPGs in the more traditional sense rather than my broader C-RPG definition, I think ›The Witcher‹ series and ›The Blood of Dawnwalker‹ are both very interesting possibilities. They can open up discussions around some of the most abstract and subjective aspects of intercultural communication, such as worldview, values, family, intimacy, and ideas about love.
The behavioural dimension is much harder, and to be honest, I do not think I have found my ideal game for it yet. I am also not convinced that the goal should be to teach students a checklist of »correct« intercultural behaviours, because such a checklist does not really exist.
What I would want instead is a relatively open and low-risk sandbox where learners can behave more naturally, interact with people from unfamiliar cultural communities, and then clearly see the consequences of those interactions. Ideally, their choices should matter enough that they have something meaningful to reflect on afterwards.
At the moment, the ›Red Dead Redemption‹ series is one possibility I would like to explore further for that purpose.
So my recommendation would really depend on the educational goal. I would rather choose the right game for a particular intercultural task than recommend one title as universally »good for intercultural learning«.
What do you hope readers, especially educators and cultural critics, take away from your research?
I think the main thing I hope readers take away is that we should stop thinking about games simply as containers of cultural information.
For educators, the question should not only be: what can students learn from this game? It should also be: how was this cultural world constructed, whose perspective does it represent, what has been selected or omitted, and why does this game imagine a culture in this particular way?
That is where I now use the idea of intercultural ludic literacy. It is not only about understanding how a game works. It is about learning to notice, contextualise, compare, question, and interpret cultural meanings both inside and around the game.
So learners can learn from games through their representations, with games through guided activities, in games through situated exploration, but also about games as cultural artefacts. That last part is especially important to me now. A game is shaped by developers, commercial structures, intellectual property, historical context, audience reception, and sometimes controversy. All of those things influence how we understand what appears on the screen.
›Hogwarts Legacy‹ is a very good example. It is not enough to ask what the game tells us about Victorian Britain or Scotland. We also need to ask why a contemporary development team chose to reconstruct those cultures in this way, how the Wizarding World franchise shapes that reconstruction, and how the wider cultural debates surrounding that franchise affect the way different players encounter the game.
So for educators, I hope the takeaway is that games should not simply be brought into the classroom and treated as immersive windows onto another culture. Teachers also need to understand the cultural and commercial conditions surrounding the game itself. ›Hogwarts Legacy‹ is also worth mentioning here. Its educational use cannot be separated completely from the wider Wizarding World IP, the controversy surrounding J. K. Rowling, or the different ways players may relate to that franchise. These issues do not mean the game should simply be accepted or rejected, but they do mean that educators need to think carefully about how they frame the material, what they ask students to engage with, and whether alternative forms of participation may sometimes be necessary.
And for cultural critics, I hope the research shows that we should look not only at representation within the game, but also at the cultural relationships through which a game is constructed, circulated, contested, and experienced.
Ultimately, I think the educational value of a game lies not in whether it gives us a perfectly accurate version of another culture, but in whether it gives learners something meaningful to interpret and question.
So, what are your plans right now? Where will Game Studies take you next?
Right now, I think the first thing I want to do is simply spend more time within Game Studies itself. I want to attend more game studies conferences, learn from people working in areas quite different from my own, and keep expanding the range of questions I am able to ask. One of the things I have really appreciated recently is how much my thinking changes after talking with scholars who approach games from completely different disciplinary directions.
I also have several writing projects that I want to continue developing. One is on ›Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag Resynced‹. I am currently thinking about it as a kind of »desynchronised history«, looking at the tension between the game’s anti-colonial themes and its simultaneous heroisation of piracy. I am particularly interested in the contradiction between resisting imperial domination while reproducing some of the violence, extraction, and appropriation associated with the colonial world itself.
Another project is on ›007 First Light‹. There I want to ask why contemporary developers are reconstructing James Bond in this particular way. Rather than simply reproducing the familiar template of Bond masculinity, the game seems to be renegotiating what kind of man Bond can be for a contemporary audience. So I am interested not only in how masculinity is represented, but also in why developers now feel the need to redesign such an established cultural figure.
I am also preparing a follow-up to my work on ›Life is Strange: Double Exposure‹ for a conference in Boston next year. With ›Life is Strange: Reunion‹, I want to look at how the series responds to some of the problems I identified in ›Double Exposure‹: where queer romance becomes more emotionally substantial, but also where it may still remain rather superficial or constrained by the structure of the game.
Although these projects look quite different on the surface, I think they are all helping me develop a broader understanding of intercultural ludic literacy. They force me to think not only about what games represent, but how they reconstruct histories, identities, cultural memory, gender, sexuality, and political ideas, and how players are positioned in relation to those representations.
If I have the opportunity to continue into postdoctoral research, I would like intercultural ludic literacy to become the central concept of that work. My longer-term aim would be to develop a much more complete pedagogical model for the use of commercial games in intercultural education, beginning with teacher training and ludic literacy, moving through game selection and classroom implementation, and finally considering how intercultural learning using commercial videogames can be assessed.
Eventually, I would love to turn that into a practical teaching handbook. So perhaps that is where I hope Game Studies takes me next: from asking whether commercial games can support intercultural learning, to working out how we can use them critically, systematically, and responsibly.
