Societal input

What this is

Societal input is everything the wider world presses onto your project: public discourse, evolving cultural norms, legal frameworks, market enthusiasm for particular technologies, and direct community feedback. It's the layer of influence that no stakeholder sits across the table to represent — but it shapes the game anyway.

Why it carries values

The values of a serious game emerge from the ongoing interplay between designers and the societies they live and work in. Studios have to work through competing societal values — innovation versus risk-aversion, uniqueness versus representation — while balancing their own creative vision against broader market demands. Your job as a designer isn't to passively absorb these pressures: it's to interpret, negotiate, and sometimes resist them, weighing them against your own creative, educational and ethical commitments. Every project involves a constant weighing up of whose values will be centred, whose will be softened, and where it's possible to gently push against prevailing norms.

Patterns from practice

COVID-19

The pandemic reshaped the ground under several of the studios studied. In Victoria especially, harsh lockdowns shifted societal attitudes to gaming and online learning while hammering the industries around them. Rapid adoption of video conferencing lifted the general population's digital literacy — parents who once found installing an app "much more of a battle" (P9) became far more capable — which opened opportunities for serious games to reach wider audiences, though the technical challenges of accessibility remained. The costs were real too: universities rushed to digitise teaching and cut funding, putting innovation projects on hold, and while VR use grew overall, VR arcades shut down and never returned, cutting off a distribution channel for the space-themed game. A society-wide event can rewrite your audience's capabilities and your delivery channels at the same time.

Culture

Society's enthusiasm for technology filters straight into design decisions. A studio training first responders was asked, in public, how it planned to use VR and XR — and the wish to stay current pushed real investment into those technologies, sometimes at the cost of focusing more on innovation and spectacle than on the quality of learning. The same team met the opposite force in defence, where senior leaders were conservative and wary of change. Market-facing pressure cuts both ways.

Cultural difference among players demands deliberate design. The facilitator of play-based workshops chose activities — like sharing a favourite food — that players could personalise to their own cultural standards, building adaptability in rather than assuming one norm fits all. Assumptions about audience break down quickly in practice: the clinical lead of early childhood games found that when you "set out to target a certain age group, you end up realising pretty quickly that it's transferable to a lot of different age groups" (P9). And elements that feel neutral in one cultural context can carry very different meanings in another. When designing for communities they don't belong to — another country, Indigenous communities, LGBTQIA+ groups — experienced developers actively seek perspectives from SMEs or community members. Cultural input acts as a check against assumptions, promoting respect, recognition, and the sharing of representational power with the communities being portrayed.

There is also an ongoing negotiation between global and local standards. Australian safety and training games draw heavily on local legal concepts — chain of responsibility, executive liability — which surface in the scenarios depicted and the roles players adopt. Working internationally forces a decision: how far to adjust the design to other societies' expectations, and where to hold your own standards. Localisation is partly a matter of values, not just language and interface.

Finally, societal expectations push against a studio's own creative and political aims. Client-led briefs may insist on specific characters and settings; studio-led projects give developers scope to promote causes that matter to them — like the visibility of Australian women in science in the space-themed game.

Questions to ask your team

1. What societal shifts — technology adoption, public health, funding climates — have changed our audience's capabilities or expectations since this project was conceived?
2. Are we investing in a technology because it serves the learning, or because the market keeps asking whether we use it?
3. Which game elements feel neutral to us but might carry different meanings for players from other cultures?
4. Are we designing for a community we don't belong to? Who from that community is actually checking our assumptions?
5. Where our game encodes local legal or cultural norms, what happens when it travels — what do we adapt, and what do we refuse to compromise?
6. Can players adapt activities to their own cultural standards, or does our design assume one norm?
7. Whose values are we centring, whose are we softening — and where could we gently push against prevailing norms?