The General Election in the United Kingdom is mere days away, to take place Thursday, Dec. 12, and an industry-wide campaign called GameChangers Giveaway intends to encourage gamers to vote.
The initiative will feature over two hundred video game prizes, which voters can win by tweeting a selfie of themselves outside a polling station.
Additionally, one lucky voter will win the grand prize, which includes over twenty games, tickets to EGX Rezzed, a £50 voucher from Insert Coin, a Cyberpunk 2077 jacket, Modern Warfare x DRKN clothing, Dungeons & Dragons kit, and a range of game merchandise.
The giveaway was founded by video game presenter and voice actor Elle Osili-Wood and it is supported by AAA game studios such as Ubisoft, Bethesda, and Activision, PR agencies like Indigo Pearl, Dead Good Media, and Renaissance PR, and indies like Frontier, Spilt Milk Studios, and Raw Fury, as well as gaming-targeted companies like EGX and Insert Coin.
“It’s never been more important to vote — it’s time to step up and be a gamechanger,” said Elle Osili-Wood. “With 85% of UK adults under 35 regularly playing video games, gamers are a significant demographic in the upcoming election, so I’m thrilled to see the games industry come together to get out the vote.”
According to The Conversation, UK voter turnout has fallen from a height of 80% in the 1950s to a low point of just under 60% in 2001. Those numbers have been rising, reaching 68% in 2017 but only 7% of those ballots were filled by the 18-24 age band.
The gaming audience, worldwide, has an average age of 35, with 40% being between 18 and 35. Reaching out to this demographic to bring them on board, especially noting the sliver of the voting population in the UK, could be fundamental to getting better representation in that part of the world.
Gamers are not a generally targeted demographic, even in the United States. Examples include President Obama’s campaign in 2008, which paid for advertisements in Need for Speed: Carbon and 18 other games, and the Video Game Voters Network, launched by the Entertainment Software Association in 2006.
It’s rare to this sort of activism directed at gamers in the manner of just asking them, a mostly young audience, to get themselves involved politically.
According to its own materials, GameChangers Giveaway is not politically partisan. The vision of the initiative and its participants is to get gamers to vote, not to tell them who or what to vote on.
The GameChangers Giveaway goes live on Thursday, the same day polls open, and can be found at Elle Osili-Wood’s Twitter account, or by following the #GameChangersGiveaway hashtag.
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