Games city plays

The article explores the preconditions for the expansion of social games. They include: (1) the progress of virtual reality technologies and platforms; (2) the digitalization of social life and the growth of smart cities connected with the implementation of technologies into different social processes, governance and technologically-mediated communications; (3) social experiments in the gamification of city interactions, practices and spaces; (4) developments in the theory and practice of social games, which provide new strategies for planning and organization; (5) futurological imagination influencing the ways of social change by prototyping alternative scenarios of the coming future. From the different perspectives the author shows how the demarcation between the real and the virtual, life and game, activity and entertainment can be smashed or blurred in the future. Experiments in the application of gaming mechanics and principles for social goals are growing in number. As the result, a question arises whether it is probable for VR/AR/MR technologies to transform the life of people into some big multiplayer game? Social effects of gamification can bring in democratization and humanization of society as well as the new pathological and destructive forms of games with human consciousness and personality. The future societies will balance between two alternatives such as cyber-utopia and gamified digital dictatorship. Thus, social development depends on our conscious imagination of futures and design of actions and counteractions in relation to the alternative scenarios of social evolution.