Tom Gillingham
If podcasts won the 2024 US election for Donald Trump, could video games be a deciding factor in the next wave of western democratic contests?
This is not as fantastical as it might first sound.
Let’s start with the stats, since misconceptions linger about video game audiences. Some 40% of the global population is estimated to play video games, with the average age of a gamer being 35. In the US, 48% of gamers identify as female.
As young people disengage from traditional media and news sources, they are flocking to social gaming platforms like Roblox, which claims 380 million monthly active users, 39% of whom are 13 years or younger.
As well as engagement with games themselves, gaming content is huge on video and streaming platforms. Unsurprisingly, brands and companies are scrambling to target this demographic in a medium that they favour.
Politics and political messaging are yet to grasp the opportunity to engage in this space.
But this gap is being exploited. During the last UK general election, AI generated footage of Nigel Farage, Keir Starmer, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak ‘playing’ Minecraft in the style of streamers drew in millions of views across various platforms, including TikTok.
Perhaps the most successful intentional political user of games-adjacent platforms is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the US congresswoman. A semi-regular Twitch streamer, she has almost one million followers on that platform and her most popular stream to date is a six (six!) hour session from her playing Among Us – a multiplayer social deduction game – in 2020. With 2.3 million views, at the time it was one of the most watched videos on Twitch.
In different ways, both examples suggest there is appetite for games-adjacent content from politicians. As ever, with ‘newer’ mediums, pitching it correctly and authentically is the challenge.
Much like the perennial prime ministerial banana skin of declaring an interest in football, any level of faked interest or expertise in the gaming sphere will have similarly negative results.
But what about politics or political messages within games?
The biggest barrier to successful political engagement within games themselves can be tied directly to why people play. After all, “to relax” is the most cited reason. Politics hasn’t exactly fulfilled that particular definition recently, but games with underlying political themes, like the critically acclaimed Papers Please, or overt political themes like Democracy 4 are gaining traction.
Perhaps the least jarring role for games in this space is to engage players in the systems of politics and the sort of decisions being taken by elected representatives, rather than being directly targeted as potential platforms for political messaging. The Financial Times dabbled in this contextual piece with its budget game last year, which offered an interactive taste of the tough choices ahead, in a way that a piece of writing alone might struggle to do.
Looking at the number of gamers alone, and the audiences for associated content, there is a huge theoretical opportunity for politicians to engage with a demographic that might otherwise be drifting away.
So, in the spiritual home of Grand Theft Auto and Rollercoaster Tycoon, am I suggesting John Swinney and Anas Sarwar crack out the streaming decks and jump into a battle royale ahead of May 2026?
Well, no, not quite.
But is there a huge, relatively untapped, opportunity for a new generation of politician to engage with disenfranchised audiences? Absolutely.
Think you now know your way around the politics of video games? Test yourself here.