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1. Introduction
Digital technologies have transformed how individuals communicate, engage with content, and participate in civic and political life. Among these technologies, digital games have emerged as a dominant global medium, not only as a source of entertainment but also as a potential vehicle for meaningful communication and social engagement. With an estimated three billion players worldwide (Costello, 2025), digital games possess unparalleled global reach, cutting across cultural, linguistic, and geopolitical boundaries. As such, they represent a promising yet underexplored channel for engaging citizens in dialogue around complex and urgent global issues, such as the climate crisis. This paper investigates the communicative potential of digital games through the lens of the Games Realising Effective and Affective Transformation (GREAT) project, funded by the European Union (EU) and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). The study focuses on a significant case study, Play2Act, developed in collaboration with the UNDP. The initiative aimed to explore whether digital games could serve as effective conduits for citizen engagement and data collection on climate attitudes, ultimately informing policy at national and international levels.
By embedding a short climate-focused survey within popular mobile games, the Play2Act study sought to overcome traditional barriers to civic participation, particularly among demographics that may be underrepresented in conventional public consultation processes. The project reached over one million players globally-representing nearly every UN-recognized country-and generated approximately 181,000 completed surveys. These findings underscore the capacity of digital games not only to attract attention and foster engagement, but also to function as participatory platforms through which citizens can communicate their views to policymakers. In positioning games as instruments for policy-oriented dialogue, this paper contributes to interdisciplinary research at the intersection of digital media, cultural studies, and political communication. It examines the implications of engagement strategies using digital games for enhancing democratic representation and participatory governance, especially in contexts where institutional mechanisms for citizen input are limited or inaccessible. Furthermore, it addresses the broader question of how emerging technologies can be leveraged to facilitate inclusive and scalable communication in response to global challenges.
This paper investigates the central research question - "Can digital games function as effective communication channels between citizens and policymakers?" By addressing this question, our research seeks to contribute to a...