Screens and consoles are not usual fixtures in Westminster’s committee rooms, but during the first week of June – before the UK’s restrictions on social media use for under-16s came into effect – they shared space with briefing papers and bill amendments. Westminster Games Week brought studios, trade bodies and parliamentarians together to celebrate the UK games industry as a national success story.

Celebration in Westminster

Throughout the event, games were presented as a core part of the UK’s creative economy and an engine of ‘levelling up’, with studios clustered in cities around the nation. The week’s programme underscored this narrative: themed days on growth, skills and ‘responsible play’, showcases in parliamentary buildings, dinners where MPs hear how games nurture digital skills and provide safe, structured spaces for play and socialising. Underneath the economic language there also emerged a narrative that British-made games help to shape the everyday environments in which people now spend their time.

For many people, those environments are not abstractions but concrete digital spaces. A Fortnite lobby or a Roblox server functions as a youth club, common room and public square rolled into one. These are designed worlds with their own architectures, rules and forms of movement in which players meet friends, experiment with identity and organise collective activities.

The geography of play has shifted from pitches and parks toward hybrid landscapes of bedrooms, consoles, servers and fibreoptic cables. Even when accessed from home, they are shared spaces in which copresence, encounter and exclusion are experienced very directly.

Digital spaces and their borders

These digital spaces are grounded in physical infrastructure, data centres, undersea cables, and local broadband networks. They are also overlaid with platform governance: codes of conduct, moderation practices and design choices that structure how people can move, speak and assemble within them. Long before new laws are written, games already have borders and zones, aggregated areas, private and public instances and gated content that determine who can go where.

Recent UK policy debates add another layer of bordering. The Online Safety Act imposes a duty of care on platforms, particularly towards children, backed by strong enforcement powers for the communications regulator. Social media and user-to-user services must assess risks, prevent access to illegal content and limit exposure to material deemed harmful to under-18s.

Separately, amendments attached to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill seek to go further still, envisaging either an outright ban or severe restrictions on under-16s’ access to social media, enforced through age verification.

Close up on phone — The changes of social media access will likely have uneven effects across children and teenagers. Image: Shutterstock

That legislative work is ongoing, but the direction of travel is clear. The government has consulted on options that range from a full ban to graduated restrictions and platform design changes.

New powers would allow ministers to move quickly after the consultation, using secondary legislation to set detailed rules. Alongside this sit proposals to curb features thought to encourage compulsive use, such as infinite scrolling, autoplay and algorithmic optimisation of engagement. Together, these measures amount to a project of reshaping the spatial conditions of life online.

The line between social networks and game platforms is blurred. Many games now bundle in messaging, voice chat, live events and user-generated content in ways that are functionally indistinguishable from social networks. A person’s day might move seamlessly from a group call on a messaging app to a cooperative session in a multiplayer game, with the social experience spanning both. The same peer group moves through a series of linked digital spaces, treating them as parts of a single environment rather than as separate categories.

Any attempt to cordon off social media from children therefore risks spilling over into the game worlds that policymakers are simultaneously being urged to support. One obvious route is definitional. If a service is classified as a social media platform, then age-based restrictions and verification obligations will apply, regardless of whether it is marketed as a ‘game’ or a ‘network’. Another route is infrastructural.

Age-assurance systems introduced to comply with social media rules, whether they rely on ID checks, facial estimation or third-party verification services, are likely to be adopted across companies’ wider portfolios for simplicity and risk management. A decision taken in relation to a messaging app or video platform could quietly reshape access to a range of online games provided by the same parent company.

Uneven access and fragmented worlds

Age gates, app store restrictions and identity checks function like passport controls at the entrances to online environments, determining who is allowed in and on what terms.

The powers given to regulators to disrupt or block noncompliant services operate at the digital edge of the nationstate, creating a distinct UK internet with its own corridors and cul-de-sacs. Within that bounded domain, further internal lines appear: those above a certain age, or able to prove their age, can traverse more of the landscape; those below it, or unable to verify, are confined to a shrinking patchwork of allowable zones.

These changes are unlikely to be felt evenly. The children of parents willing and able to provide identification, pay for the latest devices and navigate verification systems will usually find ways to remain connected, even if some routes become more cumbersome. Others may find themselves effectively excluded from digital spaces that their peers still share: because their families are reluctant to hand over documents, because they rely on older hardware, or because their access is mediated through public or shared devices where verification is more difficult.

There are also likely to be displacement effects across digital space. Children and teenagers do not simply disappear from social interaction when rules tighten; they move. Restrictions on formal, visible social media platforms may encourage a shift towards encrypted messaging, overseas services accessed through VPNs, or the communication tools embedded in games and apps that sit just outside whatever definitions the law ultimately uses. Rather than cleanly shrinking screen time, regulation may fragment young people’s digital lives across more opaque and less easily governed terrains.

Mixed messages about the digital future

None of this is to argue against regulation or to dismiss the harms that can occur online. Concerns about bullying, exposure to inappropriate content, commercial surveillance and design practices that maximise attention are real and well documented. The question is whether the emerging policy mix aligns with the way digital spaces actually work, and with the values that events like Westminster Games Week claim to champion: creativity, connection and opportunity in the environments where people now live significant parts of their lives.

Seen from that angle, the juxtaposition becomes hard to ignore. On one side, Parliament opens its doors to celebrate games as a flagship part of the UK’s digital future, showcasing richly designed virtual worlds and the communities that form within them. On the other, it develops tools that could constrain or complicate young people’s access to some of the very spaces where those communities flourish. The same institution is courting an industry built on shared online environments while contemplating measures that may significantly narrow the domestic audience most immersed in them.

One vision emphasises open, vibrant online spaces in which UK-made games and platforms attract global audiences and support dense forms of social and cultural life at home. The other emphasises controlled access, hard age borders and a more fragmented, heavily intermediated experience for young users. As legislation and regulation continue to evolve, the balance between those visions will determine not only how safe children are online, but also how far they are recognised as legitimate participants in the shared digital spaces that adults are so keen to celebrate.