The Political Economy of Play

Over the past decade, gaming has shifted from a niche hobby to one of the most important cultural and economic infrastructures on the planet. It is now a global industry with budgets rivaling Hollywood, distribution networks that cross every border, and communities that operate on a 24‑hour cycle of content, commentary, and conflict. That scale brings power: whoever shapes the stories, mechanics, and social norms inside these worlds also shapes how millions of people process questions of war, hierarchy, loyalty, and betrayal.

The political class tends to see this only in terms of “online radicalisation” or “screen time.” That is too narrow. Games are not just a channel where propaganda can appear; they are environments that train instincts. A player who has spent hundreds of hours immersed in a particular narrative universe does not simply remember the plot. They internalise who the heroes are supposed to be, what courage looks like, which enemies can be humanised, and which must be annihilated without thought. Those emotional shortcuts matter when real‑world crises hit and people reach for analogies to make sense of them.

Authoritarians Are Already in the Lobby

While European democracies debate platform bans and age restrictions, authoritarian regimes and illiberal movements have moved aggressively into this cultural space. State‑linked investors buy stakes in major studios. Developers close to Moscow or Beijing ship games that rehabilitate imperial nostalgia, recast Western alliances as villains, or quietly normalise the aesthetics and language of their propaganda. Around the games themselves, sprawling ecosystems of forums, Discord servers, and fan channels blend “edgy” humour with extremist symbols and narratives, making the politics feel like just another in‑joke.

The threat is not only ideological. Anti‑cheat tools and update systems effectively place low‑level code with privileged system access on millions of devices in NATO countries. In peacetime, that might feel like a theoretical concern. In a crisis, it looks more like a strategically placed backdoor. At the same time, sovereign wealth funds with clear geopolitical agendas gain soft influence over what gets made, what gets quietly shelved, and which creators can afford to stay independent. Europe’s cultural sovereignty is being eroded, one acquisition and content policy at a time, in a space regulators barely understand.

Games as Democratic Infrastructure

Yet the same medium that can incubate authoritarian myths can also be a powerful engine for democratic resilience. Games are unusually good at something democracies desperately need: building and rehearsing “will to fight,” not just in military terms but in civic terms, the inner narrative that makes people feel their choices matter when the stakes are high. Good games force players to weigh trade‑offs, coordinate under pressure, and deal with the consequences of their decisions. They offer a visceral education in interdependence: you win together or you lose together.

Used deliberately, this can reshape how a generation understands citizenship. Imagine story‑driven titles that centre prosecutors who bring war criminals to justice, activists who hold corrupt elites to account, or local journalists who expose captured institutions, and make them as thrilling as a special‑forces raid. Imagine games where defending an independent judiciary is not a line in a manifesto but a level you have to clear. These are not educational curios for school laptops; they are mainstream titles that make the boring machinery of democracy feel like an epic co‑op challenge rather than a grey abstraction.

From Neutrality Illusion to Democratic Strategy

Liberal democracies have spent too long clinging to the illusion that cultural products are “neutral” unless the state explicitly touches them. Games explode that illusion. Design choices about whose stories get told, whose flags appear as default, and whose history is treated as heroic are political whether or not anyone admits it. Choosing not to engage is still a choice, one that leaves the terrain to those who are already operating with clear ideological intent.

A democratic strategy for the gaming arena would start by abandoning the idea that the only legitimate role for politics is censorship at the margins. Instead, it would back creators who are open about their anti‑authoritarian, pro‑pluralist values and who understand the humour, rhythm, and visual language of contemporary gaming communities. It would treat hostile game ecosystems as potential security risks and scrutinise deep technical dependencies with the same seriousness applied to 5G networks or critical raw materials. And it would build up institutional literacy: from foreign ministers who understand what it means when a propaganda game explodes on Steam, to educators who can talk about games as formative civic spaces rather than mere distractions.



A Call to Fight for the Imagination

The real danger is not that one propagandistic shooter will turn a teenager into an extremist overnight. It is that, over time, liberal democracies allow others to monopolise the emotional vocabulary of courage, loyalty, and sacrifice. If the most compelling stories about standing your ground, defending your people, or confronting a hostile world are all written by regimes that despise open societies, then open societies will struggle to convince their own citizens that they are worth defending.

Games are where a huge slice of the world’s imagination now lives. They are where young people experiment with power, try on identities, and decide whose side they want to be on when things get serious. If democracy wants an answer other than a shrug when it asks for loyalty in a crisis, it cannot afford to treat those worlds as trivial. The fight for the future of democratic self‑defence will not be won in white papers alone. It will be won, or lost, in the game lobby.