At Nesta, our work over more than a decade of supporting creative industries to grow their social impact through our Arts and Culture practice is testament to this.

Today, we face a growing list of complex and worrying challenges – the climate crisis, the pandemic, social inequalities, poor public health, a stagnant economy. The list goes on. As such, it has rarely been more important to look to our creative sectors for inspiration – for how to get things done and how to drive the pace and scale of change we need to rise to these challenges.

While we are rightly proud of our rich and diverse creative sectors in Scotland, one area is often overlooked for celebration: video games.

It is well known that, historically, Scotland has been a powerhouse of innovation in sectors such as technology, medicine, engineering and science. What is often left off of these tourist-friendly lists of achievement, however, is the massive impact that companies and individuals in Scotland have had on the world of video games. From world-beating behemoths such as the Grand Theft Auto series or the pioneering Lemmings, to myriad indie gems produced by studios and game companies clustered in Dundee, Glasgow, Edinburgh and beyond, our video game and game tech sector is among the best and most vibrant in the world.

Games for good

We should be rightly proud of the economic and educational success story that this represents and we ought to celebrate it much more than we do. We also need to ensure we harness these skills, technologies and creativity to deliver social impact. We need to tap into the talent, innovation and passion of our video game designers and developers to help tackle some of the big social challenges we face in Scotland today.

The arts are a powerful tool for connecting people – to each other, to ideas and to places. The accessibility, adaptability and appeal of video games makes this potential even clearer. Video games are interactive, fun and challenging and can be played by people of all ages and demographics. We can learn so much from the way people play games – whether they are designed for that purpose or not.

This is why at Nesta, we are excited to be working with InGAME, the research and development body for the video game sector in Dundee, to explore how virtual digital models, powered by 3D game engines, can be used to tackle one of our most pressing health challenges.

Creative solutions

The Virtual Healthy Neighbourhoods Challenge called for Scottish video game makers to pitch ideas for developing virtual food environments, including high streets, supermarkets and fast-food outlets. These will be used to produce a more accurate understanding of how our food environments shape access to healthy and affordable food and to test new approaches to help ensure healthy and appealing food options are accessible and affordable for everyone.

The response to the challenge, launched in October, was as strong as you might expect from such a dynamic industry and we were able to take five applications forward to a two-week rapid development stage. The ideas presented to a panel including members of our Arts Practice, healthy life mission team, Nesta in Scotland and InGAME were incredible. They included an abstract tool that simulated food environments and allowed users to adjust indices on distance, transport, health and affordability and a local government simulator that challenged players to make planning and public health policy decisions to improve the health of their citizens. The creativity on show and the passion to demonstrate the potential of this industry to influence real-world change was inspiring.

Today we have awarded two companies – Konglomerate Games and Biome Collective, both based in Dundee – £45,000 each to further develop their ideas into playable proof-of-concept games.

The winning concepts both incorporate elements of popular resource management video games, such as Minecraft and SimCity, and will challenge players to design or redesign cities and neighbourhoods to improve health outcomes for a range of AI citizens.

Konglomerate Game’s winning idea involves building an environment in which players can build a city and adjust the food environment by building or moving takeaways, supermarkets and restaurants with different health and affordability ratings, set how different citizens interact with the food outlets and introduce blanket policies that affect the whole city.

Biome Collective’s idea is a management simulator in which players manage resources for a virtual version of the Hilltown area of Dundee. Players will be able to make changes such as adjusting infrastructure or reformulating food products in a bid to improve the provision of healthier food options.

The scope of the Virtual Healthy Neighbourhoods Challenge is to prove that video games technology and game design thinking can be used to test ideas for the real world and, rather than consumer gamers, we anticipate the proof-of-concept games to be played through by researchers and policy makers. Already this programme has showcased the enormous potential for social innovation waiting to be unlocked in Scotland’s creative sector.

It has been said that video games are for everyone – and I couldn’t agree more. But just from the early stages of this programme and getting a glimpse of the work of some of Scotland’s most exciting game developers, I would add that video games are also for everything.