Playing Publicly

As younger audiences increasingly gravitate toward interactive, platform-native environments, public service media (PSM) face a mounting challenge: how to remain visible, relevant, and valuable in cultural spaces dominated by commercial infrastructures. Among the most significant of these are gaming platforms (GPs) such as Roblox and Fortnite - systems that are not only among the most widely used media platforms globally but also sites of participatory culture, social interaction, and identity formation. This thesis investigates how European PSM engage with GPs to create new forms of public value and examines the strategic, institutional, and legal tensions that shape this engagement. While gaming has historically been marginalized in public media discourse, it now presents both a threat and an opportunity. This research responds to an understudied intersection of public media studies, platformization, and game studies by asking: How do public service media leverage gaming platforms to create public value, and what structural tensions shape this process? To address this question, the study adopts a qualitative, interview-based methodology grounded in Faulkner and Kaufman's (2017) multidimensional public value framework. Ten semi-structured expert interviews were conducted with practitioners from public broadcasters, game developers, legal experts, and media strategists across Europe. Thematic analysis was used to map institutional logics, strategic rationales, and barriers to platform-native innovation. The findings reveal that PSM initiatives on GPs are more prevalent than expected, driven largely by the imperative to engage younger, digitally fluent audiences. Yet these efforts remain fragmented, short-term, and often misaligned with the affordances and expectations of gaming platforms. Key structural constraints include legislative fragmentation, risk-averse funding cultures, and internal skepticism about gaming's legitimacy as a public service format. Particularly salient is a tension between outcome achievement and trust and legitimacy: while PSM seek to expand reach and relevance, they remain wary of compromising editorial autonomy through partnerships with commercial platforms. Audiences, meanwhile, increasingly question the legitimacy of institutions that fail to appear in the cultural spaces they inhabit. Still, the study also identifies signs of institutional adaptation and collaborative experimentation. The Eurovision activation on Roblox, co-funded by nine public broadcasters, exemplifies the potential for cross-border innovation - even as it exposes the fragility of such efforts in the absence of structural support. More broadly, the findings suggest that GPs can serve as testbeds for reimagining public service in participatory, data-driven, and transnational contexts. This thesis argues that the future legitimacy of PSM will hinge on their ability not only to participate in emerging cultural infrastructures, but to shape them through ethically grounded, platform-native interventions.