RIOT GAMES®

There's a version of this brief that's easy. Riot Games wants to understand Gen Z gamers in Turkey and Germany. You run some focus groups, map some personas, identify content preferences and platform behaviours, and deliver a segmentation framework with neat boxes and clear labels. Everyone nods. The deck gets filed.

I wanted to do something different. Partly because neat boxes are almost always wrong when it comes to Gen Z (a generation that treats identity categories the way previous generations treated music genres; as starting points for remix rather than fixed allegiances). But mostly because the question underneath the brief was more interesting than the brief itself.

The surface question was about engagement. How should Riot show up for these audiences? What do they care about? What earns their attention?

The deeper question was about meaning. What does gaming actually mean to this generation? Not as a leisure category or a market segment, but as a lived experience? Because if you don't understand that, every engagement strategy you build is decoration on a structure you haven't examined.

Twelve Months Inside

The research spanned a full year; long enough for the usual performance of "what participants think researchers want to hear" to give way to something more honest. We ran longitudinal ethnographic tracking with cell members across both markets, monthly creative tasks that explored different dimensions of identity and belonging, and deep-dive interviews on specific themes ranging from heroes and tribal affiliation to stereotype navigation, diversity, and the role of social media in self-construction.

What emerged, gradually and then unmistakably, was a fundamental shift in the relationship between gaming and identity. Previous generations treated games as something they did. Gen Z treats games as somewhere they are. The distinction sounds subtle but its implications are enormous.

"With more than 2,500 hours on Tekken, you can easily say that this game is part of my identity," one participant, Billy, told us. "It is hard to find other things I think about than Tekken." This wasn't hyperbole or the enthusiasm of a superfan. It was a straightforward description of how identity actually works for this generation; not as something you discover and then possess, but as something you construct through sustained investment in spaces, communities, and practices.

Stuart Hall in the Server Room

To make sense of what we were seeing, I turned to Stuart Hall's theories of cultural identity; specifically his argument that identity is not a fixed essence but a continuous process of "becoming." Hall was writing about postcolonial subjectivity, not gaming, but the framework mapped with striking precision onto what our participants were describing.

What emerged was something I came to think of as the "third space" of Gen Z identity; a zone between the fixed identities of previous generations and the purely fluid, choose-your-own-adventure model that gets attributed (usually by marketers) to digital natives. The reality was more nuanced than either extreme, and it manifested in three distinct patterns.

First, identity as process. "When I was a teenager, I thought I knew what I wanted from my life," Duygu told us. "But now, I am like, is this really what I want? My ideas change a lot. I am never the same person I was a month ago." This wasn't confusion or indecisiveness. It was a deliberate orientation toward change as a feature rather than a bug of selfhood; an active resistance to settling into a single version of yourself.

Second, identity as performance. "I'm Vera from Germany and I'm a Twitch Streamer, Gamer, Cosplayer, Dancer, Model, Actress, Singer, Youtuber and much more," Vera introduced herself. The "and much more" is doing real work in that sentence. It's not a list of hobbies; it's a refusal to be contained by any single label. Each role is simultaneously genuine and provisional; fully inhabited in the moment, held lightly enough to be expanded or abandoned.

Third, identity as community. This was perhaps the most significant finding. For Gen Z gamers, identity isn't something you construct alone; it's something that emerges through participation in communities that recognise and reflect you. The game isn't just a context for socialising. It's the material from which shared identity is built.

From Consumption to Inhabitation

Underneath these patterns, we identified three broader shifts in how this generation relates to digital culture.

The first was a movement from definition to exploration; from fixed, singular, individual identity toward something changing, multiple, and collaborative. This isn't the relativistic "anything goes" that older generations sometimes project onto Gen Z. It's more structured than that; a deliberate practice of trying on identities within communities that provide both freedom and accountability.

The second was a shift from consumption to creation. "I downloaded TikTok as a joke at the beginning of the pandemic and now it is the only platform I am using," Melis explained. "TikTok is for EVERYTHING." The platform collapse here is telling. When a single platform becomes the site of entertainment, education, self-expression, community, and commerce, the distinction between consuming culture and producing it dissolves. You don't watch TikTok the way you watched television. You inhabit it.

The third was the most consequential for Riot: a shift from gaming to living. "I play games to go to places that I have never been to," Rose told us. "There are endless possibilities which you can create yourself." Games have become therapy spaces, community builders, identity markers, economic opportunities, and cultural bridges. When Duygu described gaming as "free therapy," she wasn't being flippant. For a generation navigating genuine precarity (economic, political, ecological), gaming spaces offer something increasingly rare; a sense of agency, belonging, and emotional safety that the physical world often fails to provide.

What This Means for Brands

The strategic translation was necessarily uncomfortable, because it required Riot (and any brand operating in gaming) to reckon with the weight of what they're entering.

If gaming is an identity space rather than an entertainment category, then brand engagement isn't really about content or messaging. It's about whether you're contributing to or extracting from the spaces where people construct their sense of self. The difference between those two orientations is the difference between a brand that earns genuine loyalty and one that gets tolerated until something better arrives.

The principles that emerged were deceptively simple but demanded genuine commitment. Create space for authentic self-representation rather than channelling expression into brand-convenient formats. Understand the cultural overlaps and fluidity that define this generation rather than segmenting them into static categories. Demonstrate real value rather than performing proximity to culture. And above all, respect the depth of meaning that gaming holds; because dismissing it as "just games" is the fastest way to signal that you haven't been paying attention.

The Bigger Question

What stayed with me after this project was how thoroughly gaming has outgrown the frameworks we use to discuss it. We still talk about "the gaming audience" as though it's a demographic segment, when what we're actually describing is a set of spaces where a generation is doing the fundamental human work of figuring out who they are, who they belong to, and what matters.

The brands that understand this won't just succeed in gaming. They'll understand something important about how identity, community, and culture are being reconstructed in digital spaces more broadly. The brands that don't will keep making content strategies and wondering why nobody cares.

This research was conducted for Riot Games in 2024 as part of a year-long ethnographic study across Turkey and Germany.