Christian Schwarzenegger on digital gaming cultures and social change

ZeMKI member Prof. Dr. Christian Schwarzenegger is an expert in digital media cultures, particularly in the field of digital gaming. His research examines how computer games function as spaces for communication and memory and what social functions they perform. He regularly contributes his expertise to public debate, for example on issues relating to gaming and memory culture, identity, and the digital public sphere. At the Gamescom trade fair in Cologne, Christian Schwarzenegger explains why digital gaming cultures should be understood as drivers of social change.

Digital gaming culture: leading medium, living environment, communication space

Digital gaming has long been a key economic factor in the media industries. However, its social and everyday cultural significance is still underestimated in German-speaking countries. Gaming culture is playing a decisive role in shaping the transformation of our communication culture – not only technologically, but also aesthetically, emotionally, and socially. Digital games have become a leading medium for younger generations, and not just for them. Games and their accompanying communication phenomena—such as streams, Let’s Plays, and community platforms—are now an integral part of contemporary life.

Streamers and Let’s Players such as Gronkh, Papaplatte, and HandOfBlood are media figures with enormous reach (feel free to ask yourself why you haven’t heard of them yet). They appear with the same regularity and naturalness as news anchors or show hosts once did. However, they do so in a different mode. Their approach is closer, more direct, more personal, but also more subjective. The content they convey goes far beyond gaming. In addition to entertainment, it is also about experiencing community, belonging, and differentiation—in other words, orientation and sometimes even meaning. These digital media actors offer parasocial relationships, act as role models, and, even if they often lack sufficient qualifications, expertise, or distance, also serve as sources of information. They stand for authenticity and approachability and create spaces for resonance in a highly professionalized media world.

This has consequences for many areas of everyday life, but also for information behavior and even political communication. Where pop stars and Hollywood celebrities used to influence election campaigns, today it is streamers and gaming creators who combine media reach and trust. The first collaborations with streamers were observed in the 2025 federal election campaign. In the future, political actors will (have to) go where their target groups are already present, and the enormous presence of gaming-related creators and influencers will be taken into account more strongly in order to engage in dialogue with groups that are difficult to reach with traditional means of political communication and information. Politicians who are active at Gamescom are an indicator of the increasing relevance of such a segment. The primary question here is not how fact-based or “well-founded” the information circulating there is, but rather how this new type of content has an impact: emotional, exemplary, embedded in everyday life. This is neither trivial nor automatically problematic, but it follows a different logic than classic journalistic communication.

Overall, we are witnessing an increasingly differentiated media landscape with some deep cultural divides. The long-running debate about the fragmentation or pluralization of public communication is taking on new relevance thanks to gaming culture. This is because an alternative world has emerged here—with its own stars, its own topics, and its own publics. This world is not a marginal phenomenon. It offers new spaces for information, entertainment, and community building—and it demands to be taken seriously as part of social communication. Science, media policy, and political education are faced with the challenge of no longer viewing gaming as merely a leisure activity or economic segment, but as a genuine component of our digital public sphere.

Gaming culture as a driver of media and social transformation

Since the early days of digitalization, gaming communities have been key drivers of technical and cultural developments. Back in the 1980s and 90s, the desire to play games was a major factor in the spread of computers in private households. Games motivated people to learn foreign languages, read up on technical knowledge, or become creative themselves. This ranged from building and pimping computers to circumventing copy protection mechanisms or exchanging game scores. These practices often gave rise to new applications, platforms, and technologies, or the self-taught individuals who emerged from them were later able to capitalize on their experience in computer-related professions.

Today, playful logic is deeply embedded in everyday culture. In fitness apps, digital learning platforms, and nutrition programs, we encounter mechanisms such as progress indicators, reward systems, and rankings, which originally came from the gaming context but are now so established that their origins are hardly noticeable. The playful disappears behind its self-evidence The playful has also become part of everyday language: terms such as “level,” “boss,” and even “NPC” have long been used in everyday life beyond gaming.

Digital games not only deliver content, but are also a medium and driver of profound change processes. The need to talk about games and exchange ideas has given rise to new forms of communication: from the first fanzines and magazines to specialized forums and today’s livestreams, Let’s Plays, and game commentary formats. Platforms such as Twitch and Discord are not just side effects, but have become central infrastructures of digital community and public communication. Here, too, a shift is evident: from physical ownership to digital licenses, from individual consumption to collective experience. The development of gaming culture tells the story of media transformation in fast motion. It reveals the emergence, establishment, and widespread social dissemination of media phenomena and, in some cases, their disappearance into irrelevance.

It is also remarkable how strongly gaming vocabulary, imagery, and symbolism are spilling over into other areas of society. When Elon Musk wears Half-Life T-shirts, for example, and gaming references find their way into political communication, subtexts emerge that are only readable to those with the relevant gaming literacy. For others, they remain invisible. In this way, the audience is divided into several camps within the same communication, a development that, at least in the long term, will determine who feels addressed and who does not.

Digital gaming culture is thus much more than just leisure entertainment. It is an aesthetic laboratory, a social platform, a space for experience, and a resonance chamber for entire generations. Anyone who wants to understand how we will use media in the future, how we communicate, learn, network, or even orient ourselves politically, will find numerous examples of new forms of participation, information transfer, and cultural production in digital gaming. Games are not only a medium of the future—they are a cultural present in their own right that must be taken seriously.

Gamescom is a permanent institution and a window into the future and present of gaming and digital culture with a ritualistic recurrence

Gamescom is more than just the venue where something happens. It has become a player in its own right and has gained a special social significance. Gamescom itself, as a ritually recurring social, spatial, temporal, and functional framework for communication about gaming and gaming culture, is more than just a trade fair or a conglomerate of exhibitors. It offers the promise that something relevant will happen there, that the future (the imminent arrival of new consoles or game generations) will unfold or can be anticipated: it thus becomes a formative element of this future itself. This also gives rise to public attention and expectations: Gamescom is a media event, not only because of what can be seen and experienced there, but because it is Gamescom. And because Gamescom is an event, what can be seen and experienced there also becomes an important element and event in itself. Thus, in the course of the attention logic of the digital public sphere and media reporting, the event becomes an event because it is perceived as an event. This also explains why, for years, not only the major news formats have been reporting on it, but also political and other prominent figures have been trying to be seen and noticed.

Gaming has outgrown its niche and nerd status, so everyone wants to be part of it. As an established institution, Gamescom is a window into the future and present of gaming and digital culture with a ritualistic recurrence: this makes reporting predictable, calculable, plannable, and also surprising when something unexpected happens. From research on comparable events, such as computer trade fairs like CeBIt, we know that the promise of making the future tangible and experiential is stronger than some disappointed hopes. Not every predicted future comes to pass. Not every promised title is released. Not every innovation is exciting or inspiring. But what lives on regardless of disappointments is the self-created myth that it is worth being at Gamescom if you want to experience the future of digital gaming. When the future comes to town, you don’t want to miss it, even if it’s just to get thoroughly upset about it.