Diana Lu, Senior Program Officer, Journalism & Media, speaks with two experts about the growing social and political impact of influencers and games.
We are always seeking to learn more about how audiences engage with information and the digital spaces they go to find community, share stories, and feel safe. But often in today’s digital media environment, large segments of the American public are misinformed, disengaged, and cynical about their role as civic agents for social change.
Nonprofit journalism and media organizations are working creatively and entrepreneurially to produce and disseminate journalism and media content that is original and illuminating. Our Journalism and Media Program seeks to strengthen and sustain this ecosystem, which supports opportunities for public conversations and individual and collective action on urgent contemporary issues.
We invited two experts for a discussion on the social and political impact of influencers and games: Eunji Kim, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, studies how media shapes beliefs and impacts democracy, including apolitical creators. Allison Yang, a former journalist and founder of gaming studio Reality Reload, designs games that help people understand the world we live in.
They both take seriously what is often considered just entertainment, and work with communities that are often misunderstood or treated as a monolith. Their media work has fruitful intersections, and they joined us for a discussion on the social and political impact of influencers and games.
Topics of Conversation
Breaking Down Stereotypes
A Fractured Digital Landscape
Collaboration That Supports Information Sharing
Common Ground
Breaking Down Stereotypes
What assumptions, if any, did you have before starting this work, and how did that shift with your research?
Eunji:
Americans, and especially young adults, are turning away from traditional news and increasingly getting their information from content creators.
It is upon all of us to take seriously that a large and growing share of the public is making sense of the world through content creators and then to ask, with rigorous empirical evidence, what that's doing to them.
Americans, and especially young adults, are turning away from traditional news and increasingly getting their information from content creators.
In that spirit of evidence gathering, in a pre-registered field experiment during the 2024 election, my collaborators and I encouraged Americans aged 18–45 to start following five progressive-minded social media creators on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube, varying whether those creators posted mostly political, mostly apolitical, or entirely non-political content. We found that following political or apolitical creators nudged people toward more liberal positions. The political ones most directly influenced partisan evaluations and vote choice. But it was the apolitical creators who came across as more informative and trustworthy, and who generated larger effects per political video. The magnitude of the effects we observed was greater than what we usually see from traditional campaign outreach. I hope this evidence can convince skeptics that social media creators are indeed the modern-day opinion leaders.
Allison:
Statistically, the average player is no longer who the [gaming] industry thinks they are.
• Geography: Roughly half of the global gaming population is in Asia, with Southeast Asia and Latin America acting as important engines of growth, according to Newzoo.
• Gender: Women now make up 48 percent of global players, according to Entertainment Software Association.
Despite this diversity, mainstream content remains stubbornly anchored in sexist, racist, and homophobic ideologies. We can't wait for the industry to “self-correct” through the market alone; we have to intervene from within the culture to align the stories being told with the people who are actually playing them.
Most mainstream games rely on a colonial template: the male antihero conquering a “savage” land or the White savior modernizing a local population. These scripts are repeated mindlessly as the industry’s default setting.
The irony is that millions of players look more like the “villains” or the “savages” in these scripts than the protagonists. This reinforces a regressive racial power structure within the fantasy world.
My work focuses on replacing these “heroic" tropes with realistic, non-fiction-inspired narratives. By featuring women, queer people, and ethnic minorities in ordinary or heroic roles—drawn from contemporary history and news—we cultivate a market demand for truth over tropes. We are redefining games as a serious medium for observing the world.
Authentic representation requires a shift in who holds the tools of production. The “lone gamer” stereotype is best combated by the “connected creator.” For instance, I’m building a formal network for underrepresented makers to exchange skillsets and professional support. Instead of waiting for a seat at the table from mainstream publishers, we are building our own table.
We are moving away from a world where we ‘play the hero’ and toward one where we finally play ourselves.
The shift in my own thinking came when I realized that the “Lone White Male” assumption wasn't just a social bias—it was a gatekeeping mechanism that kept resources away from the most innovative stories. By disaggregating data and supporting a diverse workforce, we prove that games can be simultaneously playful and serious, made by anyone, and about everyone. We are moving away from a world where we “play the hero” and toward one where we finally play ourselves.
Eunji:
What shapes how we think about the world and the people around us? That's the fundamental question I always come back to. Most of our lived experiences are so limited, and I tend to believe that much of what we come to know about society reaches us through mediated information.
Here’s a funny example. When I was young, one of the most popular TV series in South Korea was Love Story in Harvard. I grew up watching it, admiring the gorgeous campus. Having never been to the United States before—and remember, this was well before the age of social media—the “pictures in my head” of an American college campus were based almost entirely on that show. But when I arrived on the Harvard campus alone at 18, nothing looked like what I'd seen on TV. There were (obviously) no palm trees in Cambridge, Massachusetts—but I'd assumed there would be, because the entire show turned out to have been filmed at UCLA.
It's a rather hilarious example of how uninformed I was back then, but it connects to something deeper. It's easy to assume that our lived experiences shape how we see the world—and they are important shapers. But in a world where nearly everyone I pass on a subway, bus, or airplane is engrossed in their phone screen, not really paying attention to what's in front of them, we have to take seriously the power of the mediated information we choose to attend to every day.
A Fractured Digital Landscape
How should funders and media makers be shifting their focus to better serve audiences?
Allison:
I can identify three critical areas for immediate investment and energy:
Meeting Communities Where They Play
For too long, journalism has expected the audience to migrate to its territory. We have perfected the long-form essay and the video explainer, but we have hit a ceiling with those formats.
In regions where traditional journalism and film are facing contraction—most notably in China—gaming has stepped in as a vital medium for social commentary.
I noticed a migration of film talent (directors, writers, and actors) into Full Motion Video (FMV) games. These titles are interactive reenactments of trending social events and reality-based anxieties. As the space for traditional reporting recedes, realistic game genres are becoming the primary lens through which people observe, simulate, and process the complexities of the world they inhabit.
Curation
We are entering an era of “hyper-overproduction.” With AI accelerating the volume of both high-quality and “junk” content, the value of a single article is plummeting. Success will no longer be measured by who publishes the most, but by who provides the most reliable map, providing them with portals to healthy content rather than just adding to the noise.
Career Portability
The current cycle of layoffs is a systemic failure that discards talent. Journalists possess high-value skillsets—investigation, storytelling, and trust-building—that are vital to other sectors, including the narrative and world-building layers of the gaming industry.
We need institutional support that helps news professionals bridge the gap to interdisciplinary projects. By broadening the imagination of what a “journalistic career” looks like, we can keep these vital skills within the broader information economy rather than losing them entirely when a newsroom closes.
Eunji:
I really wish funders invested in measurement as seriously as they invest in programs. There's a lot of enthusiasm right now for funding creators, gaming initiatives, and narrative-change work (and that enthusiasm is warranted!) but it's rarely paired with a rigorous account of whether attitudes or behavior actually moved. Too often, the deliverable is a report on what the organization did: how many videos, how many impressions, how wide the dissemination. But that’s not evidence of impact, if we define impact as changes in mass attitudes and behaviors.
Collaboration That Supports Information Sharing
How can nonprofits and newsrooms work with influencers effectively and incorporate lessons from gaming?
Eunji:
I don't think the pay-per-message model is the right approach. Too often, organizations hire influencers as contract workers—e.g., “produce five videos about a housing policy”—and once those are delivered, the relationship is over. But content creators, especially those who usually talk about non-political topics, build trust with their audiences through things like lifestyle, fitness, sports, or gaming. When a campaign or organization treats them as temporary, paid messengers, they can end up feeling used and so can their audiences.
Allison:
Given my background at the intersection of journalism and game design, I am hopeful that games can serve as a powerful vehicle for disseminating both information and empathy. This approach may be the most efficient way to communicate complex stories that span borders, races, classes, and genders.
I am hopeful that games can serve as a powerful vehicle for disseminating both information and empathy.
My theory is: when we provide a compelling environmental narrative and deep worldbuilding—supported by engaging play mechanics—games allow players to truly inhabit another person's perspective. Players are naturally motivated to learn and understand the reality of someone who might otherwise be a total stranger. This creates a first-person experience of another life, building a sense of rapport that traditional reporting often struggles to reach.
Common Ground
Your work has unexpected and fascinating intersections; would you have found each other in the wild?
Eunji:
Probably not on our own! It is quite rare for political scientists to be in the same room as game designers and entrepreneurs, so I am grateful to the MacArthur Foundation for serving as a bridge between us. I think what Allison is doing serves as a good reminder that changing American public opinion requires thinking hard about where the real public engagement is (that is, a lot of young people spent much more time playing computer games than reading news).
Allison:
My work naturally sits at the crossroads of media, academia, art, and design. For a long time, the challenge was trying to fit into those separate domains, and it was not easy. The turning point was realizing that I didn't have to choose a side. Instead, I could integrate and invent alternative systems of rules to build the world I wanted to see.
