Into Games has been invited to this year's TIGA Games Educational Conference to discuss our work around building community games ecosystems.

Since our Difficulty Level report in 2024, we've known that people from working-class backgrounds aren't missing from games education pathways. In fact, some university courses report up to 60% of their intake coming from these backgrounds. The problem isn't access to courses. It's everything else around them.

That's what led us to our Waypoint regions: six UK areas where high deprivation overlaps with strong games education provision and a good number of studios. Rather than run isolated programmes, we wanted to map the whole local ecosystem, from schools right through to employers, and find the gaps.

Dundee is a good example of what that looks like in practice. We used our 5-pillar framework (Inspire, Guide, Nurture, Hire, Ignite) to map existing provision, spot where young people were falling through gaps, and bring in local partners to fill them.

Five months in, the results are encouraging. Most 12 and 13 year olds in Dundee have now had a games careers workshop with an industry professional. A youth centre board games club, run with a local studio collective, has become the centre's most popular session. Our Saturday Club is running with 80% of its members from low-income families, all working towards BAFTA Young Game Designer entries.

We also built a new training pathway with local provider HELM, sourcing equipment and a tutor for a 13-week accredited course. Many attendees had dropped out of every other council initiative going. Seven students have now graduated this course, with places lined up at college or on foundation courses at Abertay.

None of this happened in isolation. It relied on youth centres, schools, colleges, universities and local studios all playing a part, often at the same time, often supporting the same young people at different stages.

That's the core of the ecosystem approach: games as a genuine community endeavour, not a single programme. Community, particularly for those from low-income backgrounds, holds people's worlds together. If we build pathways that reflect that, we open doors that stay open.

A full evaluation of the Dundee pilot will be published later this year.