Games for Change 2026: “Reimaging Play” Through Social Impact and Tools for Raising “Good” Gamers

Games for Change (G4C), a Manhattan-based nonprofit, bills itself as “the leading global advocate for using games and immersive media to drive social impact.” The full schedule for the 2026 installment is here.

This week and next, Design Desk will put a spin on its usual coverage by highlighting some sessions and key takeaways from G4C 2026 that we found especially...impactful. Player Driven’s founder Greg Posner and I were on hand for this two-day conference, and an associated podcast that features a pair of interviews recorded onsite was published yesterday.

Susanna Pollack, President of Games for Change, welcomed attendees and soon referenced its theme, “reimagining play.” Pollack said it was apropos given the chaos in and around the video game industry, not to mention the world at large. She also stressed that video games are a refuge where millions upon millions of people of all backgrounds get together daily to build relationships, have some fun, and much more.

Pollack didn’t stop there, however. She noted some game studios and publishers are helping to feed hungry people with assistance from the World Food Programme. She noted some game studios and publishers are working to raise awareness about the impact of climate change in the games they make, while also raising funds or contributing resources to help protect IRL habitats. She noted studios/publishers and academics have collaborated on ethical frameworks or toolsets that can help make video game communities—and real-world communities—safer and healthier for everyone. Such is the G4C vision.

But how do these things happen and what “impact” do they actually have? Design Desk will color inside the lines on these kinds of questions for the next two weeks.

Below, we’ll highlight four talks from the first day of G4C 2026 that are illustrative:

1. A college professor who argued play goes beyond math and logic and that, when we play together, we can reach transcendent places where the whole is > the parts
2. Insights from a studio head who’s toiled at the intersection of games and education for > two decades
3. A musician and futurist who’s focused on innovative mashups of social games and multi-format storytelling
4. A new G4C initiative, Raising Good Gamers, that’s designed to help families and households separate fact from fiction in regard to the health and wellbeing impacts of regular gameplay.

Before turning to our quick hits on these sessions, three additional day one talks merit an honorable mention.

First, SJ Xue, Head of Corporate Development at thatgamecompany, described how their popular mobile-first MMO, Sky: Children of the Light, is designed to engender feelings of wonder, happiness, and collaborative togetherness among its players. That discussion, “Reimagining Play Beyond the Screen: Building Connection Through Games, Film, and Shared Experiences,” also outlined thatgamecompany’s social media strategy and its liberal policy around influencer-posted videos, fan art, etc.

Constance Steinkuehler, Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, also offered some remarkable insights about how video games are helping to buttress low-trust social dynamics in some of California’s toughest prisons, including San Quentin. Her keynote, “Games in Cages,” outlined that (1) close to half of the prison population signed up for a monthly gameplay session once offered, (2) in the rooms where games are played, prisoners sign up for games, not who they played with, which means that prisoners from different social groups, backgrounds, and gangs have to sit down together to play, and (3) participants in the program showed elevated levels of “emotional regulation” and “emergent situated sociability” compared to the control group. My bottom-line takeaway was that the prisoners who played together tended to feel better, get along better, and exhibited less prejudice as a result of playing. Sounds like a welcome development.

Another point from her presentation stuck with me: Steinkuehler said the return to a joint state of play is where “our brains connect to the social” aspect of ourselves, meaning that whether one wins or loses a match isn’t what is important about the “emotional regulation” aspect of gaming—it’s the joint decision to engage in another match with “the other” where such reparations mainly happen.

Last but not least, Alan Lewis, Head of Global Corporate Communications at Take-Two Interactive, sat down with Stanley Pierre-Louis, President and CEO of the Entertainment Software Association, to discuss the empowerment of tomorrow’s game designers and developers. Their discussion, “The Long Game: How Take-Two is Investing in the Creators of Tomorrow,” highlighted how Take-Two in particular is working (mostly behind the scenes) to support diversity and inclusion in game dev.

Lewis noted that there were just a handful of universities in the U.S. that offered degrees in game development when he got into the industry, and today there are >400. Pierre-Louis pointed out that there are now 212 million video game players in the U.S., roughly two-thirds of the population. Despite the video game industry’s recent waves of layoffs, their point was that gaming’s ascendence to pinnacle of entertainment continues to unfold if one is able to step back and take the long view. Lewis and Pierre-Louis noted several ways their organizations support, financially and otherwise, the mentoring and uplifting of the next generation of video game creators, artists, and business execs, etc.

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If I Can't Play, I Don't Want to be Part of Your Revolution

Nicholas Fortugno is the Director of Digital Game Development at City College of New York. His talk (which went by the title above) was heartfelt and really set a tone for G4C 2026. Fortugno emphasized that two broad approaches exist by which studios can and have made “impact” games: The first option involves the "instrumentality" of play, and the second is about the more fundamental aspects of play and the design of gaming environments.

By instrumentality, Fortugno meant that some studios explicitly pull in “serious” information, or make content with clear political or environmental views, or bake health- or wellbeing-related insights into their core gameplay loops. It’s a relatively on the nose approach. It’s akin to the notion that “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” The idea is that a video game can be a means, a vehicle, an instrument by which certain views are explicitly expressed, and the hope is that players will absorb, internalize, and act on this information.

The alternate approach, Fortugno argued, is that “play in itself is revolutionary” if the overall user experience (UX) is imbued with change- or impact-focused systems, loops, or mechanics. Here, there’s no explicit message. The “meaning” of a game is implied, and its “message” may be experienced by players but they might not be able to even articulate what it is—they just know if they enjoyed it, want to play it again, or would recommend it.

Fortugno also argued that play doesn’t lend itself to quantification. The more directly one tries to measure the fun of play, the more “the fun” recedes. This creates an unfortunate bias for those who are intently focused on science-based testing and results. You may wind up assuming that the point of play is something other than playing.

Fortugno additionally connected this notion to a 1910 speech by the suffragette Helen Todd. Todd said that people don’t only want and need “bread”—home, shelter, and security—we also want and need “roses”—music, dancing, education, nature, joy, etc. Hence the title of Fortugno’s talk. If you’re attempting to change the world for the better, your designs and your execution must include the fun of play, or few people are likely to stick with you in your journey. The bottom line is that I agree with Fortugno: An “instrumental” approach to impact games (the “bread”) is all well and good, but if you don’t bring the fun (the “roses”), especially in a social context, you’re unlikely to generate the “impact” one hoped for in the first place.

Twenty Years of Reimagining Play Through Learning Games

In this talk, Dan White, CEO of Filament Games, primarily offered a retrospective of the hybrid game-learning projects that his company built or co-developed over the years. He was refreshingly blunt about the studio’s misfires as well as its success stories. Remarkably, White said Filament Games had shipped >450 titles in the past 20+ years, and has a larger number of projects in its pipeline.

For the record, Filament Games has made “iCivics Games” such as Do I Have a Right? and Executive Command. They also made a popular STEM and robotics sandbox game, RoboCo (it’s here on Steam). They collaborated with the Museum of Science in Boston to make Mission: Mars, a free educational Roblox experience as well. In this one, players design rovers, collect water ice, and solve puzzles based on NASA’s data. One might conclude Filament Games is primarily in the business of making instrumentalized impact games, with an assist from brands and institutions.

White likened the evolution of “edugames” to the evolution of life on Earth. His points were that (1) there have been some big extinction events along the way, (2) it’s been a slower slog to “get there” than he anticipated in 2005, and (3) we’re probably in the equivalent of late Proterozoic Eon in terms of the confluence of the best and most complimentary elements of education meeting the best and most complimentary aspects of video games. We’re waiting for a Cambrian Explosion into multicellular lifeforms, which he anticipates will unlock a transformational, watershed phase of growth.

If Gaming is the Console, what are the Games?

Celia Hodent, PhD, a France-born UX strategist who’s worked for companies like Ubisoft and Epic Games, is currently focused on the intersection of ethics and video games. Manon Dave, a hip hop musician and innovative technologist who grew up in the equivalent of public housing projects outside London, is currently in charge of an R&D group within the BBC, Future World Design. In this session, the unlikely duo sat down to compare notes and talk about common interests.

The discussion was wide-ranging, but one of the subjects they got into was SIGNALS, an interactive television layer that Dave’s been testing that allows viewers to interact with each other and with on-screen content. For example, during the World Cup, there was deeper information available about the participating teams and even a 3D view of where the players were in real-time that viewers could manipulate. Another BBC project is called PATHFINDER. It was more loosely described, but the gist was that monetizable UGC (user-generated content) could be associated with broadcast content, and creators of interactive content could associate their content on-screen with complimentary broadcasts.

Hodent’s ethical interests were largely sidelined, but she certainly didn’t raise any ethical issues in regard to Dave’s experiments and, on the contrary, Hodent was quite complimentary about the approach Dave has been taking at the BBC and beyond.

From Panic to Partnership: Making SPACE for Engaged Parenting

This talk featured Rachel Kowert, PhD, a psychiatrist, a University of Cambridge researcher, and a research director at G4C. Kowert focused on a new white paper that she’s authored, “Raising Good Gamers: What Families Need to Know About Video Games and Well-Being.”

The white paper, which referenced some research that Tencent Games funded, addressed three main topics:

1. It framed a problem that the video game industry has long faced: Many non-gamers in particular appear to believe video games are either a waste of time or, worse, outright bad for players, especially kids. This view was summed up in the first picture below.
2. Kowert’s second point was that such perceptions, once you dig into the research methodologies and related datasets, may be misleading, especially once they’ve been distilled into headlines (which can show up as scary search results), or because subsequent tests have shown the initial results are outright false. And yet they persist, such as the trope that playing violent video games makes players more violent IRL, or that video games are inherently addictive.
3. Countering this narrative, Kowert highlighted some new resources and a process that may be followed by parents and other caregivers to separate fact from fiction in regard to the health and wellbeing impacts of gameplay. The gist was that video games generally benefit the mental health/wellbeing of players and can help them hone social skills—as the aforementioned talk by Constance Steinkuehler underscored—and that concerned parents/caregivers may now use a new tool that can help them pivot from stressful, negative conversations about games toward more informed, connected conversations. The new G4C-backed resource and process is called Raising Good Gamers.

Player Driven has you covered on a Raising Good Gamers (RGG) deep dive: The podcast noted in the intro features an interview of Dr. Kowert and Arana Shapiro, G4C’s Chief Operating and Programs Officer. Shapiro will help the run the initiative, which will feature additional resources, workshops, webinars, and community programs starting this fall. More info is also available on the RGG site.

That’s it for this week! We’ll dig into several day two G4C 2026 sessions next week—and our breakdown of how Mathias Gredal Nørvig, the CEO of SYBO, views “impact” games isn’t to be missed.

Left to right: Yours truly (Lewis Ward), G4C’s Arana Shapiro and Dr. Rachel Kowert, and a man who needs no introduction for fans of Player Driven, Greg Posner.