The EPIC-WE project, Empowered Participation through Ideating Cultural Worlds and Environments, has reached the end of its three-year run as a Horizon Europe-funded research and innovation initiative. Coordinated by Aarhus University and brought to life by partner organisations across Denmark, the Netherlands, Portugal, Italy, and Belgium, the project explored what happens when you put young people, cultural institutions, game developers, and universities in a room together, and ask them to make games about culture.
The Idea Behind It
EPIC-WE started from a straightforward provocation: what if games were taken seriously as a form of cultural expression, and what if young people were treated as genuine contributors to European cultural life rather than passive recipients of it? From that premise, the project built a model (what it called a Quadruple Helix Cultural Innovation Ecosystem) that brought together four types of actors (youth, cultural heritage institutions, creative industries, and higher education) in a structured but open-ended collaboration format: the cultural game jam. The aim was to understand whether this kind of cross-sector collaboration could become a replicable model for cultural participation across Europe, and to document rigorously what it produces in terms of games, yes, but also in terms of what changes for the people involved.
Three Hubs, Twelve Game Jams, and a Lot of Games
The project ran through three cultural hubs, each with its own character:
In Aarhus, Aarhus University worked alongside ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum and Filmby Aarhus. The museum’s collection became source material for young game designers — artworks and cultural objects were treated not as things to be observed but as things to be interpreted, remixed, and turned into playable experiences. The partnership with Filmby Aarhus grounded everything in a working creative industry context.
In Hilversum, the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision led a hub together with Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and Dropstuff Media. Working with young people aged 16 to 24, the hub tackled current social themes including colonial legacies and democratic participation through game-making. The Tides of Heritage game jam was a highlight, drawing on archive material from Sound & Vision and contemporary youth perspectives in equal measure.
In Óbidos, Lusófona University and its research centre CICANT partnered with the Municipality of Óbidos and independent game studio BATTLESHEEP. With deep roots in participatory design and a strong focus on youth agency, the hub produced games that were closely tied to local identity and culture, including Puss in Books, developed as part of the Óbidos programme.
Across all three sites, twelve cultural game jams were held and over 100 game prototypes were developed. The full collection is documented and publicly available.
Research That Will Outlast the Project
Alongside the practice, EPIC-WE produced a substantial body of research. Publications appeared in Games and Culture, the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, and the International Journal of Games and Social Impact, as well as in proceedings from CHI, ACM IDC, ECGBL, NordMedia, and other conferences. A systematic 20-year review of cultural game-making with youth is among the most thorough contributions the project made to the field.
The project’s design kits, ecosystem frameworks, policy briefs, impact reports, and game catalogues are all publicly accessible through the EPIC-WE repository on the project website, as well as on the Zenodo community, written in-part to be used by other organisations who want to try something similar so be sure to check them out!
On the policy side, three policy briefs were produced over the course of the project, and in October 2025 the team ran a dedicated policy advocacy workshop in Brussels that brought together European stakeholders to discuss how cultural policy frameworks could better recognise games as cultural media and support youth co-creation in institutional contexts.
Events, Presentations, and Conversations Along the Way
The project was a regular presence at conferences and public events across Europe throughout its lifespan: the Viborg Animation Festival, Dutch DiGRA Symposium, ECGBL, CEEGS in Wrocław, DevGamm, the European Researcher’s Night in Lisbon, and Gameyard in Aarhus, among others. Also a series of expert interviews, which included Mary Flanagan (Dartmouth College), Annakaisa Kultima (Aalto University), Dimitri Schuurman (imec-MICT-UGent/ENoLL), Chris Solarski, Anneke van Woerden, Gaetano Dimita (Queen Mary University London), and Elias Carayannis (George Washington University), offered another bridge from the project to its external networks, and the expertise therein from each interviewee’s perspectives.
The project’s formal conclusion was marked by the EPIC-WE Legacies Event, held over two days in Aarhus in February 2026, moving between ARoS, Aarhus University, and Filmby Aarhus. It included game expos, research presentations, a policy session with interactive components, and a hands-on toolkit workshop where participants worked directly with the cultural game jam model. Youth Advisory Board members there to offer a youth perspective, presented as full project partners and offering some reflections in hindsight on their experiences as part of the project.
Thank You
None of this happened without the people who gave their time, thinking, and energy to it.
Most importantly, to the young people who participated in game jams in Aarhus, Hilversum, and Óbidos: thank you. You made games that were genuinely interesting, and you asked questions that pushed the research in directions it wouldn’t otherwise have gone. The games are yours, and so is the credit!
To the consortium partners, thank you for three years of honest collaboration, for the logistical effort involved in pulling all of this off across three countries, and for genuinely committing to something that required everyone to work in unfamiliar ways.
To our advisory board members, for generosity with your expertise and willingness to engage seriously with what the project was trying to do.
To everyone who attended events, engaged with the research, followed the project online, or simply reached out with questions and ideas over the past three years — it meant more than the usual metrics capture.
And to the European Commission and Horizon Europe for funding a project that was genuinely experimental, and for trusting that game-making, youth participation, and cultural heritage belong in the same conversation.
The toolkit, the game collection, the protocols, and all deliverables remain available at epic-we.eu, the EPIC-WE Resource Site and through the EPIC-WE Zenodo community. The networks built between the partners and participants are still active. Whether any of this gets picked up and carried forward is now in other hands, but we’re both proud and privileged to have had the opportunity to foster EPIC-WE’s truly epic legacy thus far!
About EPIC-WE EPIC-WE (Empowered Participation through Ideating Cultural Worlds and Environments) was a three-year Horizon Europe-funded project (Grant Agreement N°101095058), coordinated by Aarhus University (Danish School of Education). Full project information, all deliverables, and the games collection are available at epic-we.eu.
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Funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme.
