Lisa Baumgartner, Media Governance and Industries Research Lab, University of Vienna.
This contribution examines children’s gaming experiences in the context of media and cultural governance. It argues that responsibility for children’s digital safety must extend beyond families to include game developers and policymakers. While discussions often focus on screen time and parental control, children’s experiences are also shaped by commercial incentives and game design. This raises broader questions about accountability, children’s rights, and how digital environments are governed.
As the GAMEHEARTS project comes to an end, we have the opportunity to look back at our research and the people we have reached along the way. One particularly rewarding part of our work at the Media Governance and Industries Research Lab at the University of Vienna has been engaging directly with children and their families, bringing discussions about video games, digital safety, creativity, and participation beyond academic spaces.
Over three years, our team participated in KinderUni Wien (Vienna Children’s University), organising eight workshops in English, German, and Turkish, reaching a total of 145 children. This year we took it one step further by developing two freely available guides in German and English: one for children and another for their parents and guardians. The 2026 workshops were convened by Oleksandra Gudkova, Gentiana Ramadania, Ayca Becerir, and Lisa Baumgartner, and the guides were authored by Ourania Maria Ventista, Lisa Baumgartner, Grigorios Arkoumanis, Oleksandra Gudkova and Ayca Becerir under the principal investigation of Katharine Sarikakis, Director of the Media Governance and Industries Research Lab at the University of Vienna.
The guides were created with different audiences in mind, but they share a common goal: to encourage people to think about the experience of gaming, rather than simply telling them what they should or should not do. For children, the guide offers a starting point for exploring the world of video games, recognising potential challenges, and understanding their own experiences as players. Parents and guardians are provided with information and practical suggestions to help them navigate gaming alongside their children, from online safety to healthy gaming habits.
We printed 6,400 copies in total: 3,000 copies of each guide in German and 200 each in English. The German editions received particular attention because most children attending KinderUni Wien speak German. Both guides are now freely available on the GAMEHEARTS website, where families, educators, and other interested readers can access and share them beyond the project’s lifetime.
Making research accessible in this way is more than an exercise in public engagement. It creates opportunities to bring children’s perspectives into discussions that are often dominated by adults, researchers, policymakers, and industry representatives. Engaging with children also helps researchers understand how young players interpret their gaming experiences, including the pleasures, challenges, and social interactions that cannot be fully captured by discussions of screen time alone. Such engagement can help connect research with children’s everyday experiences and make educational resources more relevant to the people they are intended to support.
When Games Are Designed to Keep Us Playing
As conversations turn to children’s gaming habits, the focus often falls on screen time. How long do children play? When should they stop? What rules should parents set? These are understandable questions, but they tell only part of the story. They also risk placing the main responsibility for children’s gaming experiences on families, while giving less attention to the commercial and design decisions that shape those experiences.
One challenge deserves particular attention: the way newly released video games are designed to keep players engaged for as long as possible. There is nothing inherently wrong with creating an engaging game. After all, games are supposed to be enjoyable. However, an important distinction exists between designing something people want to play and something they find difficult to stop playing.
Many games now include features such as daily login rewards, limited-time events, endless challenges, and other incentives to return regularly. Some encourage players to maintain streaks or offer rewards that disappear if they do not log in. Others use random rewards or time-limited offers to encourage continued play (and often spending).
Individually, these features can seem harmless. A daily reward can be fun, and a special event can give players something to look forward to. But it creates a sense of urgency or fear of missing out. For children especially, this can make it harder to recognise when they have played enough and need to step away without feeling that they are losing something. There is an important difference between making a game enjoyable enough that people want to return and designing an experience that makes stepping away feel like a loss. When games compete for our attention, keeping players engaged can become a problematic priority.
This does not mean that every game or developer has the same intentions, nor that frequent gaming is automatically a problem. But it does invite us to look beyond individual choices and consider how the choices available to players are shaped in the first place.
From a media governance perspective, the issue is not simply whether children make responsible choices, but how far those choices are influenced by design practices and commercial priorities, and what obligations developers should have towards younger players.
Who is responsible?
This brings us back to a central question raised throughout our project: who is responsible for keeping children safe in gaming environments? Parents and guardians are often expected to manage their children’s screen time, monitor purchases, understand privacy settings, and establish healthy boundaries. Children, meanwhile, are encouraged to develop responsible gaming habits and recognise potentially harmful situations.
These are important steps, and our guides aim to support them. However, there are limits to what families can reasonably be expected to do. A parent can establish rules about gaming time, but they cannot change a game’s reward system. A child can learn to recognise manipulative design, but they should not be expected to resist systems deliberately created to encourage continued engagement.
Responsibility must therefore extend beyond individual households.
Game developers and publishers make decisions about how their games work, what they reward, and how they encourage players to return. These decisions create opportunities to support players’ wellbeing, for example by making breaks easier, avoiding unnecessary pressure to log in, and being transparent about purchasing systems and rewards.
There is also a role for policymakers and regulators. Where should the line be drawn between creative freedom, commercial interests, and the protection of children? Which design choices should be left to individual companies, and where might shared rules be needed? And how can we make sure that protections keep pace with games that are constantly changing?
These are not simple questions, and there is no simple solution. Games differ widely, as do the people who play them. But that makes an open discussion even more important. If we ask families to take responsibility for children’s gaming habits, we should also ask what responsibilities belong to the companies creating these experiences and the institutions shaping the rules around them. Education remains essential, but it cannot replace responsible design and meaningful protections.
This shared-responsibility approach also raises questions about accountability. If commercial systems encourage repeated engagement or spending, families need more than advice on how to manage their children’s behaviour. They need accessible information about how games work, meaningful tools for making informed choices, and safeguards that do not depend entirely on individual parents’ time, knowledge, or resources. Policymakers and regulators, in turn, need to consider whether existing protections adequately address the changing design and commercial practices of digital games.
Making space for better questions
Our guides are one contribution to this wider conversation. By making research accessible, we hope to help children, parents, and educators understand gaming from different perspectives and feel better equipped to discuss it.
But awareness is only part of the picture. Helping children navigate the digital world should not mean teaching them to cope with every challenge they encounter. It should also mean asking how that world could be designed to support them better. Video games will continue to evolve, bringing new opportunities for creativity, connection, and discovery. The challenge is to make sure that children’s wellbeing evolves from an afterthought into a shared priority.
Both guides are freely available in German and English on the GAMEHEARTS website. We invite families, educators, and everyone interested in children’s digital lives to read, use, and share them.
Click here for a direct link to the guides:
A guide for kids who love video games
A guide for parents of young gamers
Ein Ratgeber für Kinder, die Videospiele lieben
Ein Leitfaden für Eltern junger Gamer und Gamerinnen
This blog post is part of GAMEHEARTS: Games, Heritage, Arts, & Sport: the economic, social, and cultural values of the European video game ecosystem project. This project has received funding from the Horizon Europe program of the European Union under the Grant Agreements No 101132543 and No 101029543. It does not reflect the views of the European Union and is a publication encapsulated within the project.
Image credit: Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
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