Dialogue Through Play: Games as a Bridge for Citizen Engagement

ABSTRACT Background Digital games are increasingly used as tools for civic and societal engagement, particularly to reach younger and digitally literate publics on complex issues such as climate change. While such approaches can facilitate large‐scale participation and raise awareness, their capacity to support deliberative forms of civic engagement within real‐world policy contexts remains insufficiently examined. Objectives This study examines whether and how survey‐based engagement embedded within a commercial digital game can move beyond surface‐level participation towards forms of engagement relevant to policy deliberation. Methods The paper reports on an exploratory case study (GCS1) conducted within the GREAT project, in which a multiple‐choice climate policy survey was embedded into a commercial multiplayer game. The design prioritised scale and accessibility over deliberative depth, enabling large‐scale, anonymous data collection from a predominantly young and digitally literate population. Descriptive and inferential analyses were used to examine patterns of engagement and policy preferences across demographic groups. Results and Conclusions The embedded survey achieved high levels of participation, demonstrating the feasibility of game‐based data collection at scale and the potential of games to introduce climate policy issues to digitally engaged publics. However, expressed engagement and policy preferences did not provide evidence of deliberative reasoning, reflecting constraints associated with survey design, platform demographics and the absence of reflective or dialogic mechanisms. Game‐based surveys are therefore best understood as complementary entry points for civic engagement rather than standalone tools for democratic deliberation, highlighting the need to integrate games within broader deliberative and institutional frameworks.