Building a Unified Framework For

UK Video Games Impacts

The video games sector is a major economic, cultural and social force in the UK, its reach and influence extending across everyday life and into sectors as diverse as health and education, the arts and defence.
However, despite this proliferation and scale, the body of research into its full breadth of impacts is still at a relatively early stage of development.
As a result, decisions about and within the sector are based on a limited, partial view. Without an overarching framework, it is difficult to see a building body of evidence and a challenge to gain momentum around research priorities. This has vital and far reaching implications for how decisions about games innovation, creativity, policy, partnerships and investment are made.
This scoping study responds to a strong cross sector call for this to rapidly change. With support from the BFI National Lottery Fund, OKRE and Ukie have partnered to identify what is needed to advance further research, giving a richer and more nuanced understanding of how the video games sector shapes our lives, British society, and the UK economy.
It provides research frameworks for the sector's wide ranging impacts along with a reframed sector definition and interactive supply chain visualisation. In doing so it lays the foundations for a unified impact framework for the social and economic impacts of the UK video games sector, offering a truly innovative means of understanding its widespread and powerful influence.

Methodology & Learning Journey

This study was broken down into three Workstreams, each exploring key questions
Video Games Selector & Supply Chain Definitons
What should we consider the boundaries of the UK game sector when seeking to understand its full value to the UK?
What definitions and categories are most helpful to use?
How do different types of organisations and actors in the supply chain interact?
Scoping a Unified Impacts Framework
How might we create an overarching framework that can map out the full impact of the video games sector?
What would be needed to further develop such a framework to reflect the wide-ranging economic, cultural and societal impacts?
Developing Social & Cultural Impact Frameworks
What would be the most useful tools to progress a richer and more robust research base in key identified areas of social impact?
What would initial impact frameworks look like for the sector’s social and cultural impact?
This is a fantastic resource for the UK games industry, revealing and mapping the extent to which the industry has grown and evolved. Our games have such a significant and wide variety of impacts, and you’ve been able to generalise and map that here with great clarity.
Kate Edwards
CEO and Principal Consultant, Geogrify
Having this research framework to be able to link to, would really enable us to build more proactive collecting projects and to work with research institutions globally.
John O’Shea
Creative Director & Co-CEO, National Videogame Museum

Key developments resulting
from this work

Five strands of progress that together lay the foundations for a unified impact framework for the UK video games sector.
01/ Supply chain
Expanding and reframing the sector’s supply chain categorisation,
including an interactive visualisation to allow the relationships between different actors to be explored.
02/ Framework
Creating a unified impacts framework, which allows social and economic impacts to be assessed side by side.
This uses an adapted Theory of Change model to allow a better understanding of how and why impacts happen, tracing each of the steps in an impact chain from specific games related activities through to outcomes.
03/ Anchor points
Defining three distinct Anchor Points of games related activity which drive all the impacts of the sector.
In doing so, we have identified a growing area for attention and further research: the indirect activities by third parties harnessing and exploiting games, their platforms, and technologies for a wide range of uses.
04/ Social impact
Developing initial social impact frameworks for three broad areas of impact: Culture & Society, Health & Wellbeing, and Education & Learning.
These are designed to propel forward collective evidence gathering and stimulate a much broader conversation about how and where the sector is impacting in each area.
05/ Economic impact
Creating an aligned economic impacts framework which can sit alongside these,
and will allow for a more comprehensive econometric model to be developed in the future if desired.
Our report Building a Unified Framework for Video Games Impacts lays out our learning journey and each of the impact frameworks developed.

Supply Chain Interactions

In order to map out the impacts of video games we first needed to define the boundaries of the sector.
This work has expanded on existing sector definitions to include a wider range of organisations in the supply chain, as well as intersecting sectors. We have also developed an interactive visualisation of the sector supply chain to explore the relationships and interdependencies between different types of organisations.
Our definition of the UK Video Games Sector includes:
1
Service providers
Companies in the supply chain for video games, including those who supply or are supplied by video games organisations, including all specialist and many generic services providing services to video games organisations.
2
Organisations influenced by video games
Organisations influenced by production, design, technology (hardware or software), sale, consumption in any format or medium (digital and analogue), or their rights ownership.
3
Arts, research, non-profit & education
Organisations and individuals that research or educate the public about the production, art, science, history, technology, commercialisation, and impact of video games.
4
Funders
Organisations and individuals that provide funding of any kind (such as equity or debt finance, grants, and tax credits) for video games organisations.
5
Government, regulatory & trade bodies
Organisations that represent, regulate, govern, or tax video games companies.
6
Extant in the UK
Organisations that are extant in the United Kingdom, which may include organisations headquartered overseas.
How to Explore the Supply Chain Definition
01
Select “Network Maps” from the left-hand menu to open the interactive diagram.
02
Navigate through the map to explore different parts of the supply chain.
03
Click on any node to view more information about that area.
04
Click onthe node’s “Definition” section for a detailed explanation.
Below is the interactive visualisation of the video games sector as structured through its supply chain.
The language can be exclusionary…there’s a contested space around who is a gamer. People play games and engage with games culture for all kinds of reasons and this is becoming a really hybrid space … it’s less are you in or are you out? It’s more to do with interaction.
Contributor insight.

Conclusions and Recommendations

This scoping study has reframed our understanding of the video games sector supply chain and highlighted the enormous range and complexity of ways in which games-related activities impact on our lives, culture, society and economy.
It has created a unified framework enabling understanding of social and economic impacts to be considered side-by-side and developed initial impact frameworks in three significant areas of social impact.