On 28.1.26, GREAT Project Coordinator Hendrik Drachsler and Project Manager Jane Yau were at the European Commission in Brussels for the project final event to showcase the project findings with EC Policy Officers and external Game Industry Partners including Sybo and Tencent. The 3-year Horizon Europe project started on 1.2.23 and finished on 31.1.26. The Final Event was titled “Play to Impact: The GREAT (Games Realising Effective and Affective Transformation) Project Showcase ‘How Games are Shaping Environmental Action, Culture and Policy”. It started with a joint session with GREAT’s sister projects within the Games for Culture Session, where the projects shared their policy relevance and recommendations for societal impact., followed by the next session, where the GREAT consortium together with the sister projects discussed with the EC Policy Officers the Video Games Strategy for 2026.
Thereafter, the GREAT team members showcased the 10 completed case studies using the projects’ dilemma-based learning approach and/or the integrated survey approach, that were developed in collaboration with different policy stakeholders including United Nations Development Program, Austria Climate & Energy Fund (Klima- und Energiefonds), Urban Gorillas NGO based in Cyprus, Waterwise (not-for-profit organisation in UK), Cyprus Ministry of Education, and South African Ministry of Environment, Forestries and Fisheries. The methodology of using these approaches were demonstrated to the audience to show how they can be used to collect data from citizens which can support policy-makers in their decision-making towards topics concerning climate change and sustainability. Summary of findings, results and lessons learnt were presented.
GREAT Commercial Partner, Jude Ower (PlanetPlay), then moderated two sessions. In the first session, she interviewed Sybo and Tencent on their perspectives on how GREAT has supported their game companies to increase climate action and they further elaborated on how their collaboration with GREAT has helped them to be placed globally for advances toward climate actions via games. UNICEF also discussed how they could envision using the GREAT method in the coming months for their work and is looking forward to starting an upcoming collaboration in 2026. In the final session, Sybo and Tencent further elaborated on concrete strategies on how future collaborations will look like.
More details will be available shortly on: linkedin.com/groups/12833899/
