CAN GAMES BECOME THE FUTURE OF POLICYMAKING?


As governments strive to engage younger audiences, PlanetPlay Chief Strategy Officer, Jude Ower MBE, explores why games are emerging as powerful tools for civic participation, climate dialogue and public policy insight


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any policymakers struggle with the same problem: how do you engage citizens, particularly younger, digitally native


generations, in serious public debate? Traditional consultations rarely reach mass


audiences. Public policy processes can feel distant, formal and inaccessible. Yet at the same time, billions of people spend their time inside interactive digital worlds where participation, collaboration and decision- making happen naturally every day. Increasingly, governments, institutions and


researchers are beginning to ask an (perhaps) unexpected question: What if games could become part of democratic infrastructure itself? It’s a conversation gaining momentum well beyond


the games industry. Political language has become increasingly gamified. Election campaigns borrow mechanics from online communities. Public discourse now spreads through participatory digital ecosystems. Even geopolitical narratives increasingly resemble multiplayer strategy systems, complete with factions, identity-building and real-time audience feedback loops. As George Osborn explores in his forthcoming book


Power Play, games are no longer merely entertainment products. They are cultural systems that shape how people communicate, organise and understand the world around them.


32 | MCV/DEVELOP May/June 2026


FINAL DISSEMINATION That shift sits at the heart of the GREAT Project, a major Horizon Europe and UK Research & Innovation (UKRI)-funded initiative that explores a core question: Can games become participatory infrastructures for climate governance and policy insight? PlanetPlay has proudly supported the project


alongside partners including SYBO, Tencent, UNICEF, Serious Games Interactive and the University of Greater Manchester. Across international case studies, the project set out to test whether games could function not simply as awareness tools, but as credible and scalable infrastructures for participation and policy insight. The findings have been difficult to ignore. At the project’s Final Dissemination Event in


Brussels earlier this year, stakeholders from across games, academia and policymaking gathered at the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Research and Innovation to discuss the results. The central challenge GREAT aimed to address was


straightforward: traditional public consultation often struggles to reach younger audiences and digitally native communities. Games, meanwhile, already provide highly engaged environments where people willingly spend time, make decisions and interact with complex systems.


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