Civic education is too often weighed down by jargon and cynicism: delivered in technical language that distances people, reinforcing the sense that politics is opaque and detached from everyday life. Instead of sparking agency, it sometimes risks becoming a reminder of mistrust and fatigue. In this NECE Campus session, Tracy Saad – founder of Commence Games – offers an alternative: politics as play. Her gamification studio develops tools designed not to trivialise politics, but to make participation approachable, bias-free, and resilient enough to mirror the unpredictability of real democratic life.

In this session, Tracy described how Commence Games grew out of frustration with the one-sidedness of political learning. Rather than being handed perspectives, she wanted to create spaces where participants could explore multiple strategies, test competing interests, and build empathy through role-play. The result was Off Limits, a strategy game that forces players to navigate shifting perspectives and unpredictable outcomes – more like politics than most textbooks dare to admit.

The session highlighted three guiding principles behind the work:

• Perspective-taking as practice – players rotate roles to inhabit different standpoints, learning to hold complexity rather than reduce it.
• Unpredictability as design – events unfold in ways that resist neat binaries, echoing the uncertainty of real civic life.
• Cultural fluency as baseline – games are multilingual and globally informed, avoiding narrow perspectives while staying grounded in lived realities.

Examples ranged from Commence’s collaborations with UNESCO to more grassroots experiments. What unites these cases is a simple premise: participation grows when people are invited to engage differently – not as passive recipients of information but as co-players in a shared system.

The session showed that gamification is not a gimmick but a working method. In classrooms, workshops, and even citizen assemblies, games can lower barriers, spark dialogue, and help people test perspectives they might otherwise avoid – bringing politics back within reach for those who had tuned it out.