Games Without Borders: Digital Play as a Global Communicative Infrastructure for Climate Policy Engagement
Rebecca Harris, Paul Hollins, Anchal Garg, Pradeep Hewage, Paul Watson, Celestine Iwendi, Jude Ower, Joost SchuurABSTRACT
Background
Digital games are increasingly used for civic purposes, yet questions remain about whether commercially mediated, non‐deliberative interactions can constitute meaningful civic engagement. Existing research largely overlooks how entertainment platform infrastructures shape the democratic legitimacy and interpretability of user input at scale.
Objectives
This paper investigates whether ambient interactions within commercial games can meaningfully be understood as civic engagement, and under what conditions.
Methods
We analyse Play2Act, a climate‐focused questionnaire embedded across 24 popular commercial mobile games as part of the GREAT project, which engaged over 181,000 participants from nearly every country. Drawing on civic media, platform studies and digital participation literatures, we examine the methodological, ethical and interpretive dimensions of embedding policy‐relevant surveys in entertainment environments. The analysis focuses on how civic voice is structured by game design, platform affordances and datafication logics.
Results and Conclusions
Play2Act exemplifies what we term para‐civic infrastructure: socio‐technical systems that simulate civic input without supporting deliberation or accountability. Without evidence of participant intentionality or comprehension of the civic framing, these data are best understood as ambient civic signals rather than direct expressions of democratic will. We conclude that digital games are valuable diagnostic sites for understanding civic engagement at scale, and call for more dialogic and transparent design in future civic‐technological interventions.