Video Games as Social Institutions

This article invites social scientists to treat video games as social institutions. Starting with a brief presentation of sociological perspectives from Parsons to Giddens on institutions, this article highlights multiple features that characterize video games as such: historicity, internalization, conflict and change, legitimating ideology, State intervention, and interdependence. Through brief examples from games such as Assassin's Creed Origins, Second Life, Far Cry 5, and Metin2, I argue that understanding video games as social institutions would considerably improve both the perspectives of digital sociology and social theory in general, through: understanding the ubiquitous elements of gamification of our material life, understanding gamer identity at the confluence of other social institutions, such as gender and sexuality, highlighting ideology and the neoliberal agenda, emphasizing gamic agency as a form of institutional control, and redefining time-oriented interactions to explain adaptation and resistance with which the play element has crossed multiple cultures and historical periods.