From play to policy success: The prospects of using serious games in public policies

Public policy practitioners increasingly face complex, value-laden problems where the conditions for success or failure are difficult to anticipate and even harder to test in advance. This article examines serious games (SG) as a practical method for exploring these conditions before high-stakes commitments are made. Drawing on three literature reviews and a survey of 143 policy practitioners conducted across multiple institutional settings between 2020 and 2025, we ask: what is the current trend in SG use within public policy scholarship, what are practitioners’ preferences regarding different game types, and what are the prospects for deploying SG in the context of policy success? Our findings reveal a striking diffusion gap: while SG research has grown substantially across adjacent disciplines, it remains largely absent from mainstream public policy journals, despite growing practitioner interest. Building on these findings, we apply an existing typology, which distinguishes four categories of SG: Teaching Knowables, Testing Retention, Crash-testing Mechanisms, and Exploring Systems, and we position each type in relation to the Marsh’s and McConnell’s process, programmatic, and political dimensions of policy success. We argue that SG offer a scalable, low-cost complement to existing experimentation infrastructures, particularly in settings marked by uncertainty, value conflict, and the ever-present risk of policy failure.