Abstract
Background: Digital games are increasingly used for civic purposes, yet questions remain about whether commercially mediated, non-deliberative interactions can constitute meaningful civic engagement. Existing research largely overlooks how entertainment platform infrastructures shape the democratic legitimacy and interpretability of user input at scale. Objectives: This paper investigates whether ambient interactions within commercial games can meaningfully be understood as civic engagement, and under what conditions. Methods: We analyse Play2Act, a climate-focused questionnaire embedded across 24 popular commercial mobile games as part of the GREAT project, which engaged over 181,000 participants from nearly every country. Drawing on civic media, platform studies, and digital participation literatures, we examine the methodological, ethical, and interpretive dimensions of embedding policy-relevant surveys in entertainment environments. The analysis focuses on how civic voice is structured by game design, platform affordances, and datafication logics. Results and Conclusions: Play2Act exemplifies what we term para-civic infrastructure: socio-technical systems that simulate civic input without supporting deliberation or accountability. Without evidence of participant intentionality or comprehension of the civic framing, these data are best understood as ambient civic signals rather than direct expressions of democratic will. We conclude that digital games are valuable diagnostic sites for understanding civic engagement at scale, and call for more dialogic and transparent design in future civic-technological interventions. Lay Summary: What is currently known about this topic? • Digital games are increasingly used to gather public input on political and social issues • Civic engagement online is often assumed to require deliberation, awareness, and intent • Entertainment platforms shape what kinds of participation are possible, yet are rarely examined critically • Large-scale digital participation raises concerns about data quality and democratic legitimacy What does this paper add? • Introduces the concept of para-civic infrastructure to describe systems that simulate civic input without deliberation • Shows that game-embedded surveys can reach vast, globally distributed populations including under-represented groups • Argues that participant intentionality cannot be assumed in commercial gaming contexts • Reframes games as diagnostic sites for studying civic engagement rather than civic tools in themselves Implications for practice and policy • Designers of civic-tech interventions should build in transparency about how data will be used • Policy actors should treat game-derived civic data as ambient signals, not direct democratic mandates • Future platforms should incorporate deliberative or dialogic elements to strengthen legitimacy • Regulatory frameworks may need to address the civic claims made by datafied participation systems