Katharine Sarikakis, Project Coordinator, GAMEHEARTS; Media Governance and Industries Research Lab, Department of Communication, University of Vienna
As the funded part of the GAMEHEARTS project is closing, it is time to take stock of some of the most important findings
What Vienna brought to GAMEHEARTS
The Media Governance and Industries Research Lab led the project’s research on governance of the gaming industry in Europe. We conducted policy studies that covered Austria, Finland, the Netherlands, Poland, the United Kingdom and the EU level, explored policy as context, but most importantly policy as future shaping action. To do that we focused on three levels, the overall provisions (and gaps) of the governance regime of videogames; the specific needs around its most vulnerable but also enthusiastic customers, children and youth; and the governance regime found in its working cultures and conditions as the place of games production. We spoke to regulators, policymakers, industry representatives and researchers. In 2025 the team spoke further with child protection, education, regulatory and industry actors on how the child player should be governed, and sought out the input of women and women-led initiatives in the games industry, the basis of the research on women described below. In May 2024 we brought Austrian studio executives, regulators, journalists and youth-protection specialists together for a closed workshop in Vienna, and in 2025 we published the Vienna policy recommendations and two GAMEHEARTS guides for children and parents produced by the University of Vienna Team: A Guide for kids who love video games and A guide for parents of young gamers.
The work with children is the part of the project we are proudest of. At Kinderuni Wien, where the Lab has taken its research to children since 2022, our 2025 science communication workshops put character diversity in videogames in front of children aged seven to twelve and ran three workshops, held in German, English and Turkish. The workshops engaged children not as an audience to be protected but as citizens with views of their own on who gets to appear in a game and who does not. Research and workshops on play, fairness and in-game spending went back into the research and into the guides A Guide for kids who love video games and A guide for parents of young gamers. The design of the workshops is itself the subject of a paper in preparation. Science communication ran through the whole project: the lab blog presented student research on games, gender and governance throughout, and seminar research by our students on the covers of the most-played games on Steam, most of which show no women at all, has become the empirical base of a book chapter described below.
The research on women is where the Vienna work has gone furthest into print at the time of writing this note. Our open access article in gamevironments, Asymmetries and Limits in the Transformative Power of Video Games for Women (Sarikakis, Becerir, Gudkova and Baumgartner, 2026) draws on the interviews with women and women-led initiatives to separate two claims that the sector runs together. On the one hand, games can transform individual women’s lives, through skills, community and careers, and they do. On the other hand, however, individual transformation does not bring necessary structural change, as the asymmetries of a workforce and work culture that is three-quarters male persist underneath it. The pipeline article, currently finalised, follows women through the stages at which they disappear, from education and training to entry, retention and leadership, and shows exclusion as cumulative rather than as a single moment of hiring. A further article, The Second Tax, is also recently finalised and examines the additional burdens women face in the gaming industry, which we conceptualise as a “second tax”. Beyond games, the chapter Visibility without equality: Convergence and the shared inequality regime in Europe’s film and gaming industries reads film and games together and argues that digital convergence has consolidated one shared inequality regime across the two industries, built on project precarity, gatekeeping infrastructures and hostile participation environments and held in place by the distance between who plays and watches and who makes. The chapter will appear in Critical Perspectives on Gender and Media: Representation, Performance, and Resistance, edited by D. L. Larochelle and published by Brill. Finally, the covers of video games study is becoming Feminine Enough to Fight, a work on conditional agency and the regulation of femininity on game covers.
What we found, in a few words
Europe does not govern videogames as a sector, but rather by spillover: through industry self-regulation led by the PEGI age-rating system, through general consumer, competition and data protection law, and increasingly through rules written for platforms and social media that seem to address games almost by accident. The result has been a governance model closer to that of the press and the internet than to broadcasting. It relies on industry and users to regulate themselves inside a legal frame that was rarely or only of late designed with games in mind.
The combination of policies leave gaps: the people least able to manage risk are the ones left carrying it, as the case of loot boxes show most clearly. The same mechanic is a protected purchase in one country and a prohibited gamble in the next, and the line moves even inside one country. In Austria a district court called FIFA packs illegal gambling in 2023, and the Austrian Supreme Court (Oberster Gerichtshof) ruled in December 2025 that, judged within the game as a whole, they are not. Age ratings show it too. PEGI is a real European success, yet in Austria youth protection rests with the nine Länder, so the applicable rating regime can differ from one Land to the next, and the major platforms do not always display ratings prominently. Where rules run out, governance falls to parents, who are asked to oversee an environment their children often understand better. Yet, the people who make games are left out of the governance frame altogether: women are close to half of Europe’s players and roughly a quarter of its games workforce.
Based on our research findings, we developed six recommendations that encourage the EU to build on what it already does well rather than create new structures. We call for:
- A common EU standard for loot boxes and in-game purchases under consumer law.
- EU-wide codes of conduct on ethical monetisation, transparent data use, player protection and inclusive practice, designed as co-regulation with public oversight.
- PEGI ratings that are visible and enforceable across all distribution channels, including the major platforms.
- A European Observatory on Youth and Gaming.
- Workforce diversity as a governance question, with sector-specific data collection and support tied to public funding.
- Full recognition of games within Europe’s cultural and creative policy.
Four screen sectors, four shared questions
For the Media Governance and Industries Research Lab, GAMEHEARTS was never a games project alone. The Lab leads or partners in four Horizon Europe projects, GAMEHEARTS on games, REBOOT on film, StreamSCAPES on streaming and ANIMA MUNDI on animation, and in the Erasmus+ project EuroCivic Lab on civic education. Read together, they treat Europe’s screen industries as one governance field where four urgent governance questions run through all of them.
Young people. GAMEHEARTS found children party protected but rarely heard: players have views on fairness, money, data and representation that policymaking almost never asks about. REBOOT’s research with young audiences and young filmmakers found the same silence in film, ANIMA MUNDI’s focus groups with young people on animation are giving them a voice in a third sector, and EuroCivic Lab turns that into teaching, with handbooks and teacher training on Europe and citizenship for 10 to 15 year olds. Our position is the same across all of them: media and civics literacy for the young is a governance measure, alongside the responsibility of industries.
Women. In games, no European country has a workforce in which women pass 30 percent. Our work described above shows the ways in which this is not simply a matter of numbers, through stages of exclusion that accumulate, and through a gap between individual success and structural change. REBOOT’s “fringes” report traced the same pattern for women, young people and migrants across six European film industries , the Visibility without equality chapter reads film and games as one regime, while our animation work, a fundamental element of Games, is beginning to do so for a third sector. The finding is consistent: inclusion left to voluntary programmes and general equality law does not move the numbers and does not change organisational and sector cultures.
Responsibility of industries. Interviewees in every GAMEHEARTS country agreed that protecting minors is a shared responsibility of regulators, platforms, device makers and developers, and described responsibility moving along the value chain, often from platforms towards developers. Shared responsibility without accountability is not good governance. The Lab treats self-regulation as governance but also studies absences as governance documented in the ethical media governance handbook for the industry we published in 2023, in StreamSCAPES’s analysis of how streaming platforms and the technologies behind them shape what Europeans get to see, and in our current research on how audiovisual organisations govern generative AI.
European governance. The instruments differ from games to film to streaming to animation, but the EU’s strongest levers are the same: consumer protection, cross-border coordination, recognising democratic and cultural value in the creative industries and cultural policy. Our recommendation for games is our recommendation for all four sectors.
Where to read more
The lab blog, mediagovernance.blog, carries our closing post with the full findings and, alongside it, the work of our students on games, gender and governance, drawn from all our projects. The research continues with drafting articles on media governance and the European videogames sector, on competing governance claims over the child player; on gendered career pipelines, and a special issue of the International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics on entertainment videogames within wider culture, built on GAMEHEARTS. From 7 to 11 December 2026, our free online Winter School, From Play to Policy: Games, Screen and Civic Participation, brings master’s and doctoral students together across all of our projects.
The Lab itself is at https://www.linkedin.com/in/media-gov-laboratory-3b11173b3/.
Thank you
My thanks go to the GAMEHEARTS partners, to the stakeholders who gave us their time and candour in interviews and workshops, to the children and young people who participated in our workshops, and to the colleagues in Vienna who carried out the governance research. A special thank you to Garry Crawford at USAL, whose idea started it all. Europe has shown that it knows how to govern the media in the public interest. Games deserve – and demand – the same attention. Our research shows where to begin.
GAMEHEARTS has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Research and Innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 101132543. Views and opinions expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
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