Labour should fight Reform by pitching a "Gamer's Charter"

How the red team can pwn the n00bs on the radical right.

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, we dig more into plans to use AI to speed up the planning system, speaking to Faculty AI’s Paul Maltby, who is working on the Augmented Planning Decisions programme. Plus – does Wychavon even exist?! Listen here, or wherever you get your pods!

---

I was reminded of this post and I still think it’s making a good point, so I thought I’d share it more widely. It was originally published last December as a paid post. So if you enjoy reading it, please consider taking out a paid subscription to support my work.

Traditional politics has a problem with young men.

Sure, they don’t vote with the same enthusiasm as older generations, but with the rise of the manosphere, the re-election of Donald Trump, and the surprising social media success of Reform UK, it’s clear that something is going on. Today, Nigel Farage is the most followed MP on TikTok, with 1.4m followers.

We can also – possibly – see this in polling data too.

Though Reform only captured 12% of the 18-24-year-old male vote in last year’s General Election, there are signs that Farage’s party is gaining ground with Gen-Z men.

For example, according to JL Partners polling for the think-tank Onward, 31% of men aged 16-25 back Reform – compared to just 18% who support the Labour Party.¹

Just made myself depressed by realising I’m almost not young enough to be on this graph anymore.

However, I’m not entirely convinced by this polling, as I can’t find similar data elsewhere, because annoyingly the major pollsters only seem to split out their tables by gender or age, not both at the same time.

The closest I’ve found is a reference to More In Common polling by Laura Kuenssberg, where she suggests that in an average of four polls carried out last autumn, Reform was leading among young men who don’t have a degree.²

But in any case, whether or not the above polls are outliers doesn’t really matter. Because we all know that as things stand, at the next election Labour’s primary opponent will be Reform.

And even if Farage only captures a smaller proportion of young men than Labour, it could still be what makes the difference between a Labour majority, a progressive coalition – or Nigel Farage in Downing Street.

So this is all to say that aside from everything else, Labour will need something to offer this group, who are typically thought of as wildly disaffected, and as a cohort who spends more time on their Playstations and Discord servers than they do thinking about politics.

This means that even if Labour does come up with a serious policy offer on important young-people issues like housing, childcare³ and education, it will still struggle to get a hearing, as it will need a way to reach them too.

This is a hard problem, and no one has yet landed on a good solution, because traditional media is a dead-end, and social media – particularly the male-coded parts – are not exactly friendly territory for centre-left politicians. It’s hard to imagine Keir Starmer bantering with the Sidemen, or surviving an ordeal with Triggernometry. And I’m not massively confident about Andy Burnham’s ability to do so either.⁴

However, I think there could be a way to reach disaffected, Reform-curious young men and get their attention. And the secret is to serve the interests of a wildly underserved interest group, where a significant proportion of members are these hard-to-reach Gen-Zs.

That’s right. I’m actually serious. I think it’s time for Labour to become the party of… gamers.

And I think that Labour should fight the next election with a ‘Gamer’s Charter’.

So let’s dig into what it could include – and why I think it will work.

Green benches zone

It’s hard to overstate just how central videogames are to younger generations. According to Ofcom, 85% of all UK 16-24 year olds say they play games.

And sure, some of those will be casuals who play little more than Solitaire on their phones, but a full 52% say they play on consoles like Playstation or Xbox. This is a mark of a ‘serious’ gamer. And though we don’t know what the gender split is for this age group, for everyone 16+, it’s 32% male, and 16% female.

So I’d bet that, for young men specifically, ‘serious’ gaming is almost completely universal. It’d be far weirder to find a Gen-Z man who doesn’t play games.⁵

And that’s why I think there’s such a large opportunity here. Because just like other pools of voters, gamers have gripes that politicians could take seriously, and try to fix.

Think of it like how after the Oasis ticket pricing controversy, the government got involved and ordered an investigation. It was obviously not the most important issue, but it was a high-salience, tangible way to capture the headlines and the attention of an important demographic. (In this case, 90s teenagers who are now old and wealthy enough to consider voting Tory).

So what I’m imagining with the Gamer’s Charter is taking this and doing something bigger. Something analogous to Rishi Sunak’s Plan for Drivers – a basket of relatively small-bore policy interventions⁶ that can be delivered with relative ease, designed to appeal to a very specific interest group.

But now we get to the obvious and most important question. What exactly could a “Gamer’s Charter” contain?

The Gamer’s Charter

The good news for the politicians is that gamers like to complain – a lot. And as a result, there are plenty of games industry controversies to pick through, to look for low-hanging fruit the government could intervene on. Here’s a few to give you a flavour.

More restrictions on loot boxes

Back in 2023, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport updated its guidance on ‘loot boxes’ – a lottery-like game mechanic found in many big-name titles, where players make a small payment in exchange for mystery in-game items that are only revealed after purchase.

Since they first emerged, they have proven hugely controversial because they aren’t a million miles away from gambling. And in some cases, they create an element of “pay to win”. That’s why in 2018 Belgium effectively banned the practice, in response to concerns about the mechanic in that year’s FIFA title.

And over here, the 2023 guidance did make the situation better. For example, it urged publishers to display the odds of winning and to create spending controls for problem gamblers. And in the years since, publishers have voluntarily reined in their worst excesses. In the recent FIFA sequels (renamed EA Sports FC), the game has switched to a system where players can see the inside of loot boxes before purchase.

But the rules could still go further. Guidance is still only guidance, and could conceivably be ignored by publishers. So an easy win for the government could be to turn the guidance into law.

No more server shutdowns

A common frustration with modern games is that they are not just software loaded from a disc. They are live digital services, which only work as long as the developers maintain servers for online play, and so on. This means that when they pull the plug, the game ceases to function.

One particularly high-profile example of this was last year’s closure of The Crew, a mostly single-player racing game that nonetheless required an internet connection. This caused an almighty consumer backlash, and led to the foundation of the ‘Stop Killing Games’ activist group.

So here, the government could create new rules that mandate online services must maintain support for games for a minimum period of time, and only ‘sunset’ them after a prolonged notification period. Or perhaps, more ambitiously, it could oblige (large)⁷ developers shutting down games to open-source their server-side services, or hand them off to community groups⁸ to operate instead.⁹

Statutory cooling-off on digital purchases

Cyberpunk 2077 was one of the most expensive and hotly anticipated games in history. But when it was released in 2020, gamers quickly realised it was severely broken, and riddled with bugs and problems. At the time, Sony eventually bowed to pressure and offered refunds on digital downloads, but this was not a given. If Sony had wanted, it could have left the game broken, and told buyers to swivel.

So here there’s an opportunity for more pro-gamer regulatory intervention. The government could create new rules that oblige digital storefronts to offer refunds on software for a mandatory ‘cooling-off’ period.¹⁰ This would give consumers more protections against broken games, and incentivise developers to make sure what they are releasing is in a robust state.

Legal safeguards for the modding scene

One of the best things about videogames is that often fan communities will figure out how to modify games, and build their own add-ons, enhancements and remixes, long after the original developers have moved on.

In fact, some of the biggest games in the world started this way. Counter-Strike was originally a mod for Half-Life, and PUBG, which invented an entirely new genre of game,¹¹ started life as a hack of ARMA 2.

The problem is though that mods like this always exist in a legal grey area. Some developers embrace their modders, and others often take a heavy-handed approach to shutting down fan projects, such as Take Two going after the “Open IV” Grand Theft Auto mod.

So what the government could do here is essentially offer more legal protections for modders. Perhaps there could be a carve-out in copyright law for non-commercial modifications? Or a voluntary code publishers can sign up to, endorsed by the government, which makes it clear what sort of modding is and isn’t allowed, to at least set some agreed lines that cannot be crossed.

Preserve gaming history

Finally, the government should celebrate Britain as a gaming powerhouse. Not only were we home to many pioneering games developers during the early years of computing, but today the games industry is a rare British tech success story, supporting thousands of high-skilled jobs, and making a huge cultural impact. The forthcoming Grand Theft Auto 6, which will probably be the single biggest game release of all time, is being developed in Edinburgh.

So what can the government do to support an already thriving industry?

It can help preserve it. Both the games, and the culture that surrounds it. There are already plenty of private projects working on preservation, such as the Video Game History Foundation, and the Video Game Heritage Society, and the government could show that it is on the side of gamers by supporting these efforts.

I’m not sure exactly what form this would take – perhaps it could be as simple as instructing Britain’s state-owned cultural institutions, like the Science Museum and British Library to dedicate more resources to preserving games? Or it could throw cash at places like the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge.

But either way, it would be a signal of intent – that the interests of gamers matter to the Labour government.

Patch notes

So that’s just a flavour of some gamer-friendly measures. There are many others I could pitch here. Right to repair? Legally mandated cross-play capability? Portable cloud saves? Something about “ethics in games journalism”?¹²

The details of what the Gamer’s Charter would include are not the most important thing at this point.

In fact, it could conceivably be the case that some of these ideas are bad, in terms of pure policy. If any of the above were tried, perhaps I’d be the person writing the “well actually this is bad” take.

This is because, for example, it’s possible that regulatory tweaks like this could have unintended downstream consequences. Protecting modders could shift the balance of power too far towards the pirates. Extra regulations and requirements could make Britain a more hostile place to develop and publish games. That wouldn’t be good.

But even if this is the case, I still think that a ‘Gamer’s Charter’ would be worth it, because of the vast plain of political opportunity here.

‘Gamer’ is not an ‘identity’ in the same sense as we talk about people with a shared ideology or background, but it is a very real group with shared interests. And just as politicians pander to motorists, farmers and homeowners, they could pander to gamers too. And given that ‘gamer’ is a description of upwards of maybe 90% of men under the age of 25, this would be a highly visible, very salient way to see politics delivering something that matters to them.

With a Gamer’s Charter in hand, it will create earned media for the Labour government. The games media will talk about it in positive terms, and the message will be heard by a group that is largely disaffected and tuned out. And hell, it would give Andy Burnham – or whoever is in charge – something to talk to the Sidemen about.¹³

Whether or not the appeal of Farage to young men is real or overblown then, I think the need for a Gamer’s Charter, or something like it, is clear. Labour still needs to do everything else to win – and if it can become the party of gamers, maybe it can reduce the odds of 2029 being Game Over.

This was a preview of one of my posts that usually sit behind a paywall. If you enjoy nerdy politics, policy, tech, infrastructure and media content, please consider taking out a paid subscription to support my work.

1. Polling correct as of original publication.

2. I’d love to know what is actually going on here. I’ve checked More in Common’s published data and can’t find anything multidimensional, so I’m assuming this insight must have been shared directly with Laura K.

3. Don’t forget the oldest Gen-Zs are already in their thirties.

4. I once went to a Substack pub quiz and was put on the same team as one of the producers of Triggernometry. In the moment, as I’m not super familiar with the show, I couldn’t remember whether it was broadly considered beyond the pale or not by my ideological allies.

5. These figures don’t even take into account those who game on PC, who are likely the biggest nerds of all.

6. Apart from the excellent National Parking Platform!

7. With this and most of the other ideas, you’d definitely want to legally differentiate the bedroom developers and large corporations, in terms of their obligations.

8. Apropos of nothing, a very cool example of fans continuing to support dead games is Insignia, which has reverse-engineered the online functionality of a bunch of original Xbox games, and maintains servers so that enthusiasts can still play them by modifying the DNS servers on their console.

9. Weirdly the best analogy for this I can think of is how during the austerity years, many former state-run assets were handed over to charities and community groups.

10. Perhaps the cooling off period could be limited to both 24 hours and two-hours of in-game play, to limit gamers from taking the piss.

11. The ‘battle royale’ format, later popularised by Fortnite.

12. If you’re unfamiliar with this notorious phrase, congratulations on being normal and well adjusted.

13. Though perhaps this is more of a job for Gordon McKee, the Gen-Z MP who recently explained the housing crisis while playing Minecraft.