Public institutions have spent years trying to reach young people online and often missing. The campaigns are well meant, the budgets are real, and the message still fails to land. Part of the reason is location. Policy tends to speak from the places adults gather, while young people have moved into games, community servers and esports. For any government working on youth online safety, gaming is no longer a niche to delegate. It is the room where the audience already sits.

Gaming is where young people actually are

The numbers make the case without embellishment. Across OECD countries, 96% of 15-year-olds report browsing social networks and 83% report playing video games. A generation is forming friendships, learning norms and spending attention inside these environments every day.

The risks travel with them. BCG reported that 72% of children surveyed had experienced at least one online threat, from scams to harassment. Online multiplayer games carry their own hostility: ADL’s research has repeatedly shown that hate and harassment are widespread in online multiplayer games, and ADL notes that tens of millions of US online multiplayer gamers have been exposed to hate and harassment. A youth-safety strategy that treats gaming as entertainment rather than infrastructure is missing the environment where a large share of harm now happens.

Regulation is moving faster than delivery

Lawmakers have not been idle, and the pace is picking up. Three developments show where the ground is shifting.

  • The European Commission has presented an EU age-verification approach under the Digital Services Act, designed to let users prove they meet an age threshold while avoiding unnecessary data sharing.
  • The UK Online Safety Act places child-safety duties on online services and requires highly effective age assurance for certain harmful or age-restricted content.
  • Australia’s under-16 social media restrictions came into effect on 10 December 2025, requiring age-restricted platforms to take reasonable steps to stop under-16s from creating or keeping accounts.

Platforms are wiring age awareness into their foundations too. Roblox has introduced age checks for communication features, and app-store tools from Apple and Google, including a Declared Age Range and an Age Signals API, show that age-aware infrastructure is becoming a mainstream expectation. The gap for many governments is not ambition but delivery. Writing a duty is one task. Reaching a fifteen-year-old inside a game with something they will actually absorb is another.

Reach young people through gaming, not around it

Restriction alone rarely changes behaviour, and it can push young people toward workarounds while eroding their trust. The OECD’s 2025 report From Playgrounds to Platforms identifies cyberbullying, misinformation, privacy concerns and digital safety as policy priorities for children’s digital lives, which points to education and culture as much as to controls.

That is where gaming becomes an asset rather than a problem. A public campaign carried by creators young people already follow lands where an institutional broadcast does not. Cybersecurity advice framed around in-game scams sticks better than generic guidance. Age assurance introduced as safe access, paired with clear parent communication, meets less resistance than a blanket ban. Governments that partner with trusted community organisations, schools and platforms can translate a policy goal into a format that fits the culture, rather than fighting it.

The choice facing policymakers is not whether young people will spend their lives in these spaces. They already do. The open question is whether public value follows them there, through campaigns, education and privacy-conscious safeguards built for the way young people actually play. Governments that engage gaming as serious youth infrastructure, and work through partners fluent in its culture, will reach a generation that has otherwise learned to tune institutions out.