• by Steven Rosenbaum , Featured Contributor, April 21, 2025

Something strange happens in video games. People cooperate. They build things -- big, complicated things. They lead raids, solve puzzles, defend towns, construct entire worlds, and they do it without likes, followers, or engagement metrics driving the action.

If you’ve ever watched a group of teenagers plan a coordinated mission in “Destiny” or build the Eiffel Tower in “Minecraft,” you know what I’m talking about. This isn’t just entertainment -- it’s civic practice, smuggled into a game engine.

In these moments, young people are doing what we keep insisting they’ve forgotten: They’re working together. They’re strategizing, collaborating, creating systems. These aren’t isolated clicks or viral dances. They’re examples of what researchers call “positive collective action.” And they’re not happening on Snap, X or TikTok. They’re happening in-game.

Let’s pause there, because it’s not a term we use often enough. In plain terms? It means people working together, on purpose, to get something done -- something bigger than any one person could pull off alone. It’s the stuff democracy is built on. And it’s what social media, as it currently exists, is failing to deliver. We built our platforms for frictionless performance. We optimized for individual influence, not mutual responsibility. The result? We got echo chambers, flame wars, conspiracy rabbit holes, and a generation drowning in likes but starving for purpose.

From Metrics to Missions

Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s former Digital Minister and one of the world’s clearest thinkers on civic tech, has been sounding the alarm on what social media gets wrong -- and what a better system might look like. “We optimized for individual influence,” Tang says, “not mutual responsibility.”

She believes social media should function more like civic infrastructure. “Community coherence is actually a common good,” Tang argues, “and many people are willing to pay for that.” Instead of stoking division, she suggests, platforms could highlight content that brings people together across differences, bridging communities instead of siloing them.

Tang’s vision is simple but radical: Shift platforms from metrics to missions. Forget what went viral. Ask instead: what did we build? Not who got the most likes, but who showed up, and got it done? In her view, the future of digital space should look less like a leaderboard, and more like a cooperative quest.

Meanwhile, in the shadows of gaming platforms -- sometimes messy, often overlooked -- a different story is playing out. In “Final Fantasy XIV,” thousands of players on the Gilgamesh server once formed a spontaneous tribute line for a deceased player, coordinating across time zones and languages. In “EVE Online,” players run massive corporations with real economic stakes and internal politics. These are not small feats. They require diplomacy, planning, collective memory, and trust.

And here’s the kicker: adolescents are taking part in these games. If you want to find the next generation of civic leaders, try logging into the game app Discord.

Building the Civic Muscle

Dr. Scott Seider, a professor at Boston College, has spent years studying how young people develop civic identities. His conclusion? Adolescence can be a window of opportunity. “When young people participate in real social action,” Seider explains, “they begin to see themselves as agents of change.” And that self-image, once formed, tends to stick.

In one study, Seider tracked students involved in hands-on civic projects such as community organizing and advocacy work. What he found wasn’t just short-term engagement. It was long-term rewiring. These students started building what he calls a “muscle for agency” -- a felt sense that they could shape outcomes, not just observe them.

That’s exactly the muscle games are flexing today. Not through lectures or campaigns, but through lived experience. A 200-person raid in “Destiny” isn’t just entertainment -- it’s civic rehearsal. And Seider’s research suggests that the practice matters.

That tracks with what we see in youth-led movements today. Look at climate activists organizing global walkouts before they’re old enough to vote. Look at students using Instagram and TikTok to run mental health campaigns and mutual aid networks.

As one contributor wrote in Voices of Youth, “I realized I could use social media to connect with people who felt the same as I did. It became less about posting selfies, and more about taking action.”

Designed to Connect

Professor Jan L. Plass, who leads digital media research at NYU, has been exploring what happens when games are designed not just to entertain, but to empower. His recent study on digital play and well-being found something surprising: When games are built around meaningful collaboration, they don’t drain kids—they strengthen them.

“The finding that digital play can enhance child well-being and meet children’s psychological needs, such as the need for connections to others, is especially important at a time when we are concerned about children’s mental health,” Plass said.

He’s not talking about isolated screen time. He’s talking about games that support autonomy, competence, creativity, identity -- and, yes, community.

Games, in Plass’s view, can be blueprints for platforms that actually work -- those built for more than just clicks, which help people grow skills, stay grounded, and build something together.

And what if the next generation of social platforms borrowed the mission-based, role-diverse, feedback-rich structures from gaming, and used them to build real-world capacity for action?

Imagine a platform where users aren’t just sharing hot takes, but actively participating in civic challenges. Maybe it’s verifying disaster relief requests in real time. Maybe it’s contributing to a decentralized public health dashboard. And maybe, just maybe, the system is designed so the reward isn’t a follower count -- it’s the sense of being part of something larger than yourself.

This isn’t speculative fiction. Reddit’s r/Place gave us a glimpse of this idea: millions of users placing colored pixels on a blank canvas, forming a massive, living artwork through negotiation, strategy, and sheer digital stamina. Wikipedia is perhaps the original version of this idea: a platform built not for virality, but for utility, maintained by a global army of volunteers who care about knowledge and accuracy.

And in the world of DAOs -- decentralized autonomous organizations -- we’re seeing early attempts at platform-native collective governance, where users don’t just consume content, they set the rules.

But let’s not romanticize this trend. Not every game teaches collaboration, and not every platform is equipped to handle governance at scale. We’ve seen how quickly Discord servers can melt down, how even the best-intentioned Reddit threads can get hijacked.

Building systems that scale cooperation is hard. It’s design-intensive. It requires clear rules, strong culture, and constant iteration. But we’ve seen it work. We know the ingredients. The question is whether anyone will put them together.

Because here’s the thing: Young people are already playing this game. They’re doing in Roblox and Minecraft what civic technologists wish they could do on Facebook. They’re leading. But they’re doing it with the wrong tools.

If we gave them better platforms -- ones designed around missions, not metrics -- what could they build?

Maybe that’s the real future of social media. Not more content or more scrolling -- but more action. Shared goals. Collaborative wins. Fewer influencers. More builders.

If we want to fix the public square, we have to start by asking a new question. Not “What went viral today?” but “What are we building together?”

The answers might be hiding in plain sight -- right inside the games we thought were just for play.