Digital games engage over four billion individuals globally, accounting for more than a trillion hours of play annually. This activity underpins a \$230+ billion industry and sustains a dynamic, cross-disciplinary field of academic inquiry. Games now operate as social infrastructures, educational tools, and platforms for citizen science. Yet this broadening role brings significant challenges, including concerns around physical and mental health, exploitative monetization models, and contested public narratives about gaming's value.

Gaming continues to drive technological innovation in areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), data science, and human-computer interaction (HCI). Early academic work identified the transformative potential of games to support education, foster social bonds, and enable personalized digital experiences.

However, many of these ambitions remain unrealized. Issues such as predatory monetization and problematic play have come to dominate discourse, overshadowing the field's more constructive capacities. At the same time, research leadership has increasingly shifted from academia to industry, widening the gap between the two despite overlapping expertise. The resource asymmetry limits academia’s ability to scale initiatives aimed at producing broader societal benefits. While recent policy frameworks from the EU, UK, and UN have articulated clear expectations for the societal contribution of games, the research community has yet to deliver a coordinated response.

The Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop 25102: The Future of Games in Society, sought to address this gap by formulating strategic directions for both academic policy and industry actors. Our goal was to realign the scale and influence of gaming with emerging societal imperatives. The workshop employed a cross-disciplinary structure, organizing participants into focused working groups tasked with producing actionable strategies to inform future developments across research, practice, and policy.

The digital gaming ecosystem is approaching a pivotal moment. By convening a broad coalition of stakeholders, one can leverage the medium’s vast cultural and technological reach while confronting its pressing challenges. The related manifesto will seek to unify currently fragmented efforts into a coherent and strategic agenda that benefits players, researchers, developers, and society as a whole.

Through this initiative, we reaffirm our commitment to ensuring that digital games realize their potential as instruments of meaningful and lasting societal benefit in an increasingly digitized world. We also establish the following key priorities for the future of games in society (these cut across the nine themes of the seminar):

1. Design for human flourishing: Ensuring games promote and facilitate human flourishing and designing games that promote mental health and wellbeing and create inclusive online communities and digital environments. This includes creating games that explicitly promote psychological well-being and prosocial behavior, grounded in robust research and guided by ethical design principles. It also involves implementing proactive design strategies to combat the harms of games, e.g., to reduce toxic behavior.
2. Realizing the potential of educational games to transform education: Integrating games into formal curricula through evidence-based design, teacher training, and rigorous evaluation to enhance student engagement and educational outcomes.
3. Establish sustainable research infrastructure at scale: Building sustainable, large-scale research infrastructure, which enables industry-academia-policymaker collaboration but also provides the evidence needed to drive good policymaking in games and beyond. Furthermore, utilize the scale of games for large-scale behavioural research. This also involves creating shared platforms, accessible data repositories, and standardized tools to support research between academic and industry actors.
4. Develop standardized evaluation frameworks: Creating robust, context-sensitive metrics and assessment tools to evaluate the impact of games on learning, behavior, and social dynamics across diverse populations. There is also a need to enhance the rigour, assessment, evidence, and knowledge generated from games research and mobilize it to ensure the positive impact of games on society.

The full Dagstuhl Report summarizes the outcomes of our seminar through a series of abstracts that introduce the nine themes.

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Anders Drachen, Johanna Pirker and Lennart E. Nacke