Transformation of the video game phenomenon: from hedonistic to relevant sociocultural narrative

The work is focused on the transformation of video games in the socio-cultural space of modernity. It is shown that over the more than 60-year history of the existence of video games, in their socio-cultural purpose, they have gone from being a means of exclusively entertaining functionality to reflecting significant narratives of modern culture. The authors offer and substantiate an original periodization of this transformation process. A conventional boundary in the evolution of video games is shown by the set of factors/events of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when, according to the authors, video games, preserving their hedonistic orientation, began to overcome exclusively entertainment purpose, as from this moment actual socio-cultural narratives begin to be actively included in the video-game narrative. The entire set of identified factors/events contributing to this transformation is divided into two groups - technological (internal) and sociocultural (external). The second part of the paper analyzes specific examples of socio-cultural practices of modernity, confirming that video-game reality has already gone beyond the scope of entertainment functionality and, by broadcasting an actual socio-cultural narrative, contributes to the transformation of the modernity discourse in the perception of the average person.