Open Innovation Factory: Inclusivity in Games

The Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs) are at the forefront of technological innovation, often turning speculative ideas into transformative tools. To harness this potential, ekip’s Open Innovation Factories foster industry awareness of new methods for collaboration, ideation, and development developed through ekip’s original research and policy initiatives. By bringing together creatives, technologists, and policymakers, Open Innovation Factories empower participants to shape vibrant, inclusive futures for the CCIs across Europe and beyond. In March 2025, we hosted an innovation factory on the topic of inclusivity in the games industry and how this can contribute to innovation. With a rich interactive workshop following a panel of experts in the field, the Innovation Factory allowed participants to understand how they can apply inclusive principles in practice in their day-to-day work.

PANEL: WHY INCLUSIVITY IS THE KEY TO GREAT GAMES

Chaired by Gemma Milne of Gecko Box, our panel welcomed Luke Hebblethwaite (Head of Games, BAFTA), Jérôme Dupire (CapGames), Nikolina Finska (Rebel Studio) and Sophia Coney (Included Games and Out Making Games) discussing the challenges and best practices for fostering inclusivity and accessibility in the games industry.

What is Inclusivity?

The panel began by considering what inclusivity – a complex topic – means for games design. Panelists first considered inclusivity within companies and among design teams in terms of creating spaces where people feel safe, supported and heard. Businesses can foster an equitable workplace by inviting all staff to participate in decision making, so people from all backgrounds feel supported in their careers. Nikolina recounted that, from her own experiences leading companies, this approach leads to a healthy working environment and is simply good business.

Speakers also acknowledged the enormously diverse set of people who play games around the world, arguing that how we make them and who is making them should reflect that diversity. Inclusion should then encompass inclusive teams who design games with diverse onscreen representation and content, making sure characters portrayed in games reflect the diversity of players – people should see themselves in games, feeling represented and heard.

Finally, our experts acknowledged the importance of inclusive and diverse communities around games, in online environments and at events, spaces, allowing people to feel comfortable accessing these spaces.

Where is the Industry Currently?

The speakers all see Europe slowly improving in terms of diverse representations on screen. Jérôme also has seen greater energy in making shifts towards accessible and universal design.

Pushing against this trajectory, panelists acknowledged, is the current political climate, with the US particularly positioned to damage the progress made over the last several years. Nikolina, who lives in Croatia but co-founded a gaming startup in the US based on DEI principles, described the terror her US-based partner currently feels given the company’s mission of trans and gender-inclusivity. Luke mentioned the potential for the extreme right to target player communities, requiring the industry to do more to protect those spaces. Our speakers see this moment as an opportunity to stand up to these political forces and build robust work practices that resist American-inspired politics and are fitted for European needs.

Panelists acknowledged the industry is also facing financial difficulties, with widespread layoffs, shuttered studios, and a more bottom-line focus that puts inclusivity practices under pressure. Jérôme discussed how, even so, inclusivity in terms of accessibility should not be thought of as a costly add-on, but integrated into game design from the beginning, through increased education into its low- to-no-cost feasibility through existing solutions. The panel argued that making games more accessible and more diverse leads to new markets, ultimately improving a company’s bottom line.

Best Practices

Our speakers all discussed what they thought works best to improve inclusivity in the industry. Sophia argued for empathy and inclusivity at the level of design teams and by encouraging support groups within companies, such as women’s, BAME or LGBTQ+. Her charity Out Making Games supports businesses to incorporate such practices into their business framework.  Karolina also recommended seeing inclusivity as a daily practice and part of “business as normal,” rather than a top down managerial policy; she recommended offering several ways for staff to express themselves and contribute to game develop – as the “more voices you hear, more viewpoints, you’ll make better decisions and products.”

Luke describes how Bafta has been at the fore of pushing for changes that improve access to the industry for people across different backgrounds. Among its several efforts in the area, Bafta has hosted workshops on authentic representation in games and to improve blind driving assist mode; it also does outreach to schools in underprivileged areas. Luke also mentioned the work of UKIE to collect good data on inclusivity and diversity in terms of demographics, mental health, and caring responsibilities. Companies and charities can benchmark against this data to evaluate businesses, advocate for change, and understand the impact of diversity practices. Even so, collecting good data on diversity in the industry remains a challenge and could be an important policy intervention

Finally, Karolina, who teaches in Zagreb and Finland, argued for the importance of diversity in teaching to model diversity for students; she calls for more industry people to do guest lectures. Jerome agreed on the importance of educational settings to teach accessibility and inclusion in the earliest stages of the industry pipeline.

The panel provided truly thought-provoking insights regarding the state of play for inclusivity in the games industry, setting our audience up for a fruitful interactive discussion during the second half of the event.

BARRIERS TO INCLUSIVITY FROM AN INNOVATION LENS

Following the panel, participants engaged in an interactive workshop online workshop designed to explore how open innovation can help overcome barriers to truly inclusive gaming. We used the online whiteboard tool Miro to create structured steps guiding participants through a thought-provoking series of reflective exercises to discover what barriers to inclusivity exist, and how open innovation approaches might be used to overcome those barriers. The workshop entailed:

1. Narrowing the focus. Breaking into three groups focused on specific aspects of inclusivity for the games industry: accessibility, workforce diversity, and in-game representation. We recognise that these are not exhaustive facets of inclusivity and other aspects of inclusion, but they provided a useful starting point for conversations.
2. Introduction to inclusivity in practice. As a warm-up exercise, participants in each group shared what ‘inclusivity in games’ means to them in their specific context.
3. Challenges and barriers. Participants then worked in small groups to answer the question “What are the top challenges and barriers for inclusivity?” with reference to their specific group (accessibility, workforce diversity, and in-game representation.)
4. Applying an open innovation lens. Using the ekip Open Innovation prompt cards which are available in the Knowledge Bank, previously used in the Immersive Technology Innovation Factory in October 2024, participants highlighted specific aspects of open innovation practices might be helpful to overcome barriers identified in the previous step.
5. Consolidating learning and take-away actions. To conclude, participants discussed key discoveries made through the event, and specific actions they planned to take in the future to further their knowledge, networks, or inclusive capabilities in the future. Participants also discussed any remaining questions they wished to take forward and explore further on how to use open innovation to improve inclusivity for the games industry.

Figure 1: Miro board frames outlining the activities participants engaged in during the Open Innovation Factory on Inclusivity in Gaming.

Participants were able to highlight some things that were currently going well and making an impact as well as room for improvement; for instance the accessibility group focused on the growing awareness of accessibility needs and resources and the growth of guidelines that help companies achieve accessibility basics regardless of their size and resources. However, there was also an acknowledgement that the leaps and bounds for accessibility policies made over the past 40 years (in the US and UK specifically, but also thinking more broadly about other locales) are now facing an oppositional atmosphere which may lead to protections and resources being eroded. Toolkits, manifestos, and frameworks for studios to share best practices – as well as underlying interoperability standards – were all proposed as means for overcoming barriers to accessibility.

For diversity in the workforce, creating inclusive innovation hubs, networking platforms and ecosystems were highlighted as key means for fostering inclusivity that spurs innovation. Education and training was also a key policy area here: focusing on inclusivity not just as a requirement but also a demonstrable improvement factor for business outcomes would be a key powerhouse for driving innovation in the games industry. And finally, as ever, putting financial backing in all these initiatives through funding incentives or tax breaks that drive up inclusivity KPIs across the industry – which would require much more granular and reliable data across the industry to understand the inclusivity picture more effectively.

The in-game representation group also focused on the primary importance of having a diverse workforce and a funding landscape which is receptive to backing inclusivity in order to make the choices that lead to on-screen representation. A key policy element could include convincing public or private funders to create an attractive investment landscape for early-stage startups and small businesses headed by diverse groups of people who are making more diverse in-game choices for character representation. A second key element of funding is making the time to invest in the development requirements for creating specific experiences and narratives within the game, perhaps including narratives that challenge assumptions about what audiences do and don’t want to see on screen. This group also highlighted the importance of having the right lived experience or reference material to work from by involving key stakeholders in game development. There can be fears about ‘getting it wrong’ which prevent developers from even trying to represent certain types of experiences, but some policy interventions that could be made to overcome these fears include better formal and informal education, mentoring and peer support, and nurturing crossovers with adjacent industries like film, TV and visual arts, who may be experiencing similar challenges and able to pool resources for additional support. The importance of getting out of one’s ‘home zone’ and seeking out perspectives through mixing with other industry expertise (eg. attending a healthcare industry event) in order to learn more about different perspectives was also highlighted as a route to improving diverse representation within games.

INCLUSIVITY IN GAMING: THE WORKSHEET

To ensure participants continue to feel supported on their journey to making the games industry more inclusive, and to continue to spread the message to wider audiences, we devised a free, open-access worksheet for participants to use and circulate to peers. We developed this to assist those working in the games industry with a series of critical reflection questions and prompts guiding users to think through how they are making their games products and games companies more inclusive for all sorts of stakeholders: Osborne, N., & McDonald, C. (2025). Inclusivity in Games: a Critical Reflection Toolkit. ekip. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15022367

Figure 2: the Inclusivity in Games Criticial Reflection Toolkit Cover

Figure 3: example activities from the Inclusivity in Games Critical Reflection Toolkit

KEY CONCLUSIONS

One key concluding question from a participant was “How do we get policymakers to treat gaming with the seriousness of other industries?” Getting policy-level backing for using inclusivity as a driving engine for innovation within the industry would certainly empower improvements across accessibility, workforce diversity, in-game representation and more. The ideas, thoughts and resources shared by participants will be analysed and included in our scoping documents for the forthcoming Inclusivity in Games Policy Lab taking place in May concurrent with TwitchCon, the world’s leading live-streaming festival.

A full how-to guide for running these Open Innovation Factory workshop activities and our Inclusivity in Games toolkit will be published in the ekip Knowledge Bank, and the video of the panel can be viewed here.