Professor Frans Mäyrä is an explorer of alternative worlds: “Gaming literacy is a core competence for everyone”

Like familiarity with a nation’s literary canon, gaming literacy is a core competence that everyone should possess, argues Professor Frans Mäyrä, a pioneer of game studies who has taught courses on the relationship between humans and technology since the 1990s. 

According to Mäyrä, who will celebrate his 60th birthday in May, all adults should take an interest in games, even if they do not play games themselves. Otherwise, they risk losing something important to their self-understanding. 

“Adults who do not know how to play at all have suppressed something within themselves,” says Mäyrä.  

In the early years of game studies, gaming literacy was not considered part of the shared body of knowledge expected of educated adults, and games were primarily examined through the lens of their perceived negative effects. When the contemporary field of game studies began to emerge around the turn of the millennium, much of the work centred on defending and legitimising gaming culture, with researchers wanting to highlight the cultural value and artistic potential of games.  

Since then, cultural game studies have also adopted a more critical stance. For example, researchers are critical of low-quality game production that focuses solely on profit, such as the AI‑assisted production of thousands of games per day. Nor are mindless shooting games placed on a pedestal. 

“Casual games, such as Candy Crush, only scratch the surface of what gaming can be. However, there are also games that demonstrate immense artistic ambition and profound insight, almost akin to Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace or the monumental tomes of Fyodor Dostoevsky – works that take time, but are tremendously rewarding,” says Mäyrä. 

Game studies emerged as an academic discipline through sustained efforts 

When Frans Mäyrä enrolled as a student at the former University of Tampere in 1985, game studies was yet to emerge as either a degree programme or a recognised field of research. 

Mäyrä majored in comparative literature, specialising in literary and textual analysis and the study of the arts, which led him to develop an interest in the relationship between humans and technology. In the late 1990s, he completed his doctoral dissertation on demonic texts and textual demons and was soon appointed to lead research projects examining audiovisual media culture. 

“As the University was unable to fund the establishment of a new academic discipline at the time, we started to seek see external research funding,” says Mäyrä, who has since led more than 50 research projects and headed a research group that was awarded Centre of Excellence status by the Research Council of Finland. 

At the time, games were being studied at well‑resourced universities in the United States, where game studies was largely framed as an engineering discipline within computer science and multimedia technology. In contrast, research in the Nordic countries and elsewhere in Europe was predominantly led by researchers specialising in the humanities, with a background in literary studies. 

The connection between comparative literature and game studies may not appear immediately obvious, but Mäyrä offers a logical explanation. 

One important influence was the emergence of hypernovels, or digital narratives incorporating images, sound and multimedia elements. These elements were connected through hyperlinks, allowing readers to move between sections and, for example, across different time periods. Hypernovels functioned as experimental artistic games, where the emphasis lay not on fast‑paced action but on interactive storytelling. Users navigated a hypermedia environment, encountering fragments of events, such as memories or moments from a character’s life. Today, this form of interactive fiction is classified either as a subfield of literary studies or as a type of gaming activity. 

Mäyrä has played a significant role in establishing game studies as an academic discipline in Tampere, but he stresses that this achievement has been the result of collaboration. 

“It is about talented and committed people working together with a long‑term perspective. This has created an ‘idea engine’ that has sustained momentum and allowed the discipline to gain traction. I see my own role as that of a catalyst, encouraging new ideas and creating opportunities for talented researchers,” says Mäyrä.  

Frans Mäyrä’s influence has extended well beyond Finland as Mäyrä and his Nordic colleagues organised many of the first international seminars and conferences in game studies. After the turn of the millennium, Mäyrä was involved in founding the Digital Game Research Association (DiGRA) and served as its first President. 

Tampere remains one of the few places in the world where game studies can be studied at university level. Another example is Charles University in Czechia, and the establishment of a new programme is currently underway at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland. An academic degree in game studies is a relatively rare construct, but Mäyrä understands why this is the case.  

“Today, the position of the humanities within academia is challenging. Resources are being reduced, and greater emphasis is placed on faster and more immediately measurable outcomes from higher education. This leaves less room for broad‑based and innovative research,” he Mäyrä.  

At its core, game studies does not fit neatly within the natural or engineering sciences as it seeks to develop an understanding of how meaning and meaningful experiences are constructed. Research in this field draws on perspectives from the arts, the humanities and the social sciences. 

From a playhouse to a spacecraft, from a human to a machine 

Mäyrä recalls that even his childhood games combined technology with imagination. His grandfather built a playhouse on the yard, and the parents of a boy living next door supplied it with all kinds of electronic parts as they owned a scrapyard. Mäyrä screwed these parts onto the interior walls, transforming the playhouse into a spacecraft. 

However, he never set out to become an engineer or a programmer, as he was always more drawn to art that invites alternative interpretations of visions, texts, worlds and possibilities. This path led him to work at the Moomin Museum and study at the University, where he was able to immerse himself in the fantastical worlds created by Tove Jansson and J.R.R. Tolkien. 

More specifically, Mäyrä’s research interests focused on cultural binaries. Like black and white, such binaries include life and death, human and machine, and human and nature. Mäyrä finds the intersections between these binaries particularly fascinating. 

“Within the arts, there are phenomena that are inherently ambiguous and consist of multiple overlapping elements. Through this complexity, we can learn to understand different and even contradictory phenomena,” says Mäyrä, referring to hybrids or mixed forms.  

In his doctoral dissertation, Mäyrä examined demonism and the ways in which different dimensions of being and different voices intermingle within us all. This plurality of voices may include those of parents, grandparents and, ultimately, the voices of history and culture. Ancient myths and horror stories have explored, for example, the boundary between the living and the dead through figures such as the walking dead, vampires and werewolves. Around the turn of the millennium, this same logic of liminal existence began to appear in representations of human-machine entities: beings that are partly lifeless mechanisms and partly sentient figures capable of experiencing and sensing the human world. Such hybrids include, for example, androids, cyborgs, robots and AI systems. 

“Is humanity’s place in the world, and our understanding of ourselves, changing? Do we continue to see ourselves as stable, unchanging and authentic human beings, or are we once again negotiating new boundaries in our self‑understanding?” asks Mäyrä. He adds that he believes that humanity is constantly being redefined. 

The relationship between humans and machine‑ or AI‑assisted systems is a complex one of interdependence. According to Mäyrä, it is important to consider how closely we wish to entwine ourselves with technology. 

For many people, this entanglement has occurred almost without notice, for example, when we immediately search online for answers instead of tolerating any uncertainty or contradiction in discussion or thought. Mäyrä reflects on whether this dependence may deepen in the future if an AI assistant manages our calendar and remembers conversations better than we do. In such a scenario, there will be little incentive to devote cognitive capacity even to remembering one’s own life. 

“The risk is that we become puppets operated by electronic systems, responding to stimuli at a pace that is ultimately harmful to us,” notes Mäyrä. 

“Throughout the modern era, we have increasingly evolved into cyborgs, or beings that are extended by technological add‑ons. Cyborg studies emphasise that when you provide a human with a tool, such as a calculator, you simultaneously, in practical terms, amputate the ability to perform mental calculations.” 

Hybridity is not ugly, and alternative worlds expand understanding 

Not everything associated with hybridity and otherness is ugly. Mäyrä is keen to emphasise that the human desire to encounter and experience otherness is something profoundly beautiful and capable of expanding the possibilities of life. Encountering alternative worlds offers an opportunity to engage with experiences and perspectives that might otherwise remain beyond our understanding. 

Mäyrä notes that the complexity and growing conflict of the contemporary world can occasionally feel overwhelming. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, he has taken up nature photography and birdwatching as a hobby. He enjoys spending time outdoors, moving, listening and sensing nature – experiences which he describes as having philosophical and even partly mystical qualities. On the final weekend of March, he went out at night to observe ionospheric storms, which painted the sky with the Northern Lights. 

“I stood outside, gazing at the stars. It made me think about how small we are here on Earth, and how vast epochs of time are, in a sense, present today, in the traces they leave behind and in the flow of time around us. I thought about how even a million years is only a blink of an eye when measured against the starlight arriving from the distant reaches of space, and about how mountains and seas change, and how species emerge and disappear.” 

“I ground myself with these experiences because the star‑filled sky, the rocks and the waves of the sea represent the most fundamental reality. Amidst this backdrop, our own struggles – political tensions and ambitions, warfare and the like – appear as an extremely limited way of understanding reality. Ancient rocks, oceans and the space will exist long after us, reassuring us that everything continues as it always has.” 

Although Mäyrä’s research is deeply intertwined with new technologies, his reflections are imbued with social and human dimensions, which, on closer inspection, lie at the very heart of his field. For good reason, he describes himself as an explorer of other worlds and otherness.