Key actors (stakeholders)

What this is

Key actors are everyone whose priorities shape the game: designers and development teams, client organisations, governments and regulators, investors, subject matter experts, and the end users themselves. Discovery starts by mapping who these people are and what each of them wants the game to be.

Why it carries values

A serious game is never a neutral product. Its values emerge from continuous negotiation among stakeholders whose agendas sometimes align, sometimes clash, and sometimes run entirely independently of each other. No single person carries the skill, influence and determination needed to make a game that changes the world — so collaboration is essential, and the moment you collaborate, the game starts to take on the values of every actor involved, not just the primary visionary. Successful projects are the ones where those diverse values are surfaced, discussed and at least partially aligned early, rather than colliding mid-build.

Patterns from practice

Designers and development teams

Designers hold enormous power because they control the creative vision and the thousands of micro-decisions along the way. They can — and do — override or redirect a client's initial ideas based on their own tastes and moral stances. In small, fast-moving teams, individual developers "can't help but put their own values" (P2) into the game: what they find fun, what looks good, what they consider ethically acceptable. That can enrich a game or derail it — a developer's personal preferences may not serve the target audience, and some developers refuse whole categories of work (defence, law enforcement) on principle. When teams have high autonomy, such as on self-initiated projects, they freely embed their own visions: science-inspired futures, empathy and narrative over gamification.

Client organisations

Clients bring their own culture and objectives, and often treat a serious game as an extension of marketing and organisational identity — insisting their terminology, tone and internal values permeate the simulation. When values genuinely align, as with a conservation-focused client, the result carries "fingerprints from both of us" (P7). When they don't, clients tightly control representation, character design and tone to protect how they want to be seen, leaving designers "partly responsible, but not entirely in control" (P6). Understand the client's organisational culture from the outset — it will set the value boundaries you design within.

Government

Regulation, curriculum mandates and funding conditions define what success looks like, and therefore what the game must value: safety, compliance, environmental stewardship, particular health outcomes. One project's core environmental-protection values traced directly back to state government conditions on an oil and gas operation. Regulation also constrains content in odd ways: the developer of a youth social services game found they could have included guns without any classification issue, but the drug-related content they actually wanted to include would have triggered one.

Investors

Investors and market forces pull attention and resources away from intrinsic social or educational goals and towards timelines, impressions and profitability. When one studio became a listed company, design decisions were no longer solely its own — investor and public opinion entered the mix. The pressure to satisfy investor expectations can quietly dilute the core purpose, with decisions catering to the perceived desires of the investment community rather than the genuine needs of the audience.

Subject matter experts

SMEs shape content and messaging the moment they join the process — usually for the better, keeping the game accurate and preventing misleading or biased content. SMEs from a disability agency insisted on adult, non-pandering games for adults with intellectual disabilities, and on authentic representation using photos of actual service users. But SME demands for fidelity can collide with the designer's need for engaging gameplay. One useful pattern is "disagreeing commit" (P7): agree to test contested design decisions in practice and let user feedback adjudicate between competing value claims, rather than arguing from authority. SMEs also act as a conduit to communities — the youth services developer reached out to local elders to understand "cultural significance" and "specific places that are important" (P10).

End users

Players both shape and reinterpret the game's value structure. Good designers learn the subject matter deeply and take a human-centred approach, tailoring mechanics, aesthetics and platforms — down to choosing low-spec Android phones — to serve accessibility, inclusion and respect. Remember there are usually multiple end users with different priorities: a physiotherapy game must satisfy patients (engagement), physiotherapists (clinical efficacy) and clinic owners (return on investment). And players will impose their own values regardless: teenage boys turned a deliberately non-competitive road safety game into a competition, and the same vast simulated galaxy struck some players as awe-inspiring and others as existential dread. You control a game's value intentions, never its value reception.

Questions to ask your team

1. Who are all the actors on this project — including the ones who haven't spoken yet, like regulators, investors and secondary users?
2. What values is each stakeholder bringing, and where do they align, clash, or simply not touch?
3. Whose values are we, the development team, quietly embedding through our own tastes and micro-decisions?
4. What value boundaries has the client set around representation, tone and terminology — and are we designing within them or against them?
5. Which regulatory or funding conditions define "success" for this game, and what values does that definition smuggle in?
6. Where SME fidelity demands clash with engaging gameplay, can we "disagree and commit" — test both and let user evidence decide?
7. Who are the multiple end users, and whose needs win when they conflict?
8. How might players reinterpret or subvert our intended values once the game is in their hands?