Games for Change 2026: “Reimaging Play” Through Social Impact and Tools for Raising “Good” Gamers, Part 2

Last week, Design Deck highlighted four sessions from the first day of Game for Change (G4C), which took place in Manhattan in late last month. This week, we’ll rinse and repeat on day two.

Some context may be helpful before going there. In its latest Impact Report, G4C described itself as a champion of “the power of games to drive real-world change.” The NYC-based nonprofit also emphasized student outreach in 2025, and reported that “students from 91 countries engaged with our programs, and for the first time, the majority of our Awards submissions came from outside the United States.” The topline goal is to help “people learn, improve their communities, and make the world a better place.” The festival sessions that are outlined below shed some practical light on how such aspirations are translated into action.

More context on G4C and some of its current programs, by the way, is available in a podcast Player Driven recorded onsite in NYC. We interviewed the President of G4C, Susanna Pollack (pictured left above), and G4C’s Dr. Rachel Kowert and Arana Shapiro, who are associated with a new-ish science-backed program, Raising Good Gamers. It’s designed to help parents/caregivers and kids/minors have more constructive conversations about video games and to set mutually agreed upon, healthy boundaries around gameplay.

From Design Desk’s perspective, a clear day two stand-out talk was, “What if I ran the game industry?” by SYBO’s CEO, Mathias Gredal Nørvig (pictured right above). We’ll unpack his remarkable “What if…” thought experiment below.

This week, we’ll also cover: The underappreciated love of games that the Broadway legend Stephen Sondheim had; how Minecraft has been used to support IRL free speech and to improve, through cocreation, IRL public spaces; and how creators leverage the Roblox platform to support real-world communities as well as provide parents/caregivers and children/minors a safe space to communicate and share.

While we won’t cover them in as much depth, three other sessions/events at G4C 2026 are worthy of a shout out:

1. The session “Free to Play: Supporting Inclusive, Fair and Free Play Within Game Communities” featured Lucy Chow, an author and investor, and George Osborn, editor of the Video Games Industry Memo. It highlighted several connection points between mental health and video games. They also noted the WHO appears to be backing away from its controversial stance that something called “gaming disorder” exists; the speakers underscored the weakness of the scientific evidence on that front.
2. The father of Mats “Ibelin” Steen, Robert Steen, discussed the life and legacy of his son, who positively impacted the lives of many in his World of Warcraft guild even as he was succumbed to muscular dystrophy. Unfortunately, I had to catch a train back to Boston late on day two and so missed this session—but I’m sure it was excellent! If you haven’t seen the associated 2024 Netflix documentary, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, put it on your playlist as it’s an amazingly bittersweet story about the power of positive social connections in such gaming environments.
3. Last but not least, the G4C Awards went down the evening of day one. We didn’t get dig this topic last week and a full Awards recap is here. One headline is that South of Midnight, a PC/console title by Compulsion Games, took home the top honor. Other notable winners were Hexecutable's Consume Me and Paintbucket Games’ The Darkest Files. Congrats to all the winners and nominees!

Lucy Chow and George Osborn discussed a range of topics at the intersection of games, health, and public policy in their session, “Free to Play: Supporting Inclusive, Fair and Free Play Within Game Communities,” on G4C 2026’s main stage.

Okay, let’s get to our day two session rewinds. Don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter and share this post with someone special!

What Sondheim Taught Me About Analog Play in a Digital Age

The high-energy author, consultant, professor, and co-founder of G4C, Barry Joseph, kicked off day two with a session that had the above title. Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021) is perhaps best known for writing the lyrics for an iconic Broadway show, West Side Story, but he also wrote the music and lyrics for Sweeney Todd, Into the Woods, Company, and other shows. What most people don’t know about Sondheim is that he was also a lover and creator of games. Joseph’s session set the record straight on this front.

The games Sondheim devised for friends and family over the years were tabletop games (parlor games, murder-solving games, puzzles, crosswords, etc.), but Joseph distilled a few design principles from them that are clearly applicable in a video game context.

Sondheim’s three big game design principles, per Joseph, were:

1. Generosity: Players should be able to navigate to the end of games and feel smart about themselves—not the game designer(s)—when they arrive there. There are tricks to doing that, and it’s harder than you might think.
2. Playfulness: Get your players in a playful mindset right off the bat, and don’t be shy about using “icebreakers” to help push them there. When Joseph took the stage, he did exactly this: he immediately asked people to make up fake names and fake jobs and introduce themselves to their neighbor.
3. Mentorship: Not only did Sondheim do this in his life for many people, the game designer can and should be a mentor to players of their game. Deep empathy for the “learner” (the player) as a fellow human being is a key piece of what makes a mentor different from a teacher who may simply tell students/players what to do or make them memorize uncontextualized facts.

At the end of the day, Joseph told the audience, it was his emphasis on the social dynamics of gameplay that differentiated Sondheim’s games, and his creations also had a way of leaving players with a “little piece of his heart” as well. This may be the strongest link to G4C’s mission: all games send a message to its players, but games that leave every player feeling better about themselves for having played them, even if they lose, are next level (prosocial) games.

Games for Urban Futures: Co-creating the Next Generation of Cities Through Play and Games

This session by James Delaney, the Founder and Director of BlockWorks—a “collective of designers, artists, and developers from around the world with a shared passion for Minecraft”—set a high bar for blending video games and positive IRL outcomes. BlockWorks doesn’t just have a passion for Minecraft, they’ve also partnered with Microsoft, the UN, and a wide range of universities and even architectural firms to help bridge the gap between this massively popular game and real-world changes that truly make a difference.

Delaney said that he grew up playing with LEGOs and later fell in love with Minecraft. He went on to study architecture and urban design. Somewhere along the way he turned back to his first love and began to mix the streams. To wit: he currently lecturers on “Videogame Urbanism” at University College London.

Three examples of projects with which BlockWorks and its partners are associated, and that were covered in Delaney’s session, included:

1. Exploring Victorian London in Minecraft Education. This was a collaboration with the London School of Economics and Lancaster University. Visitors don’t simply walk around in a faithful recreation of a huge swath of Victorian London, this 45+ million block space is littered with (1) facts and stories about specific places and people who lived/worked there, and (2) a combination of Charles Booth’s poverty maps from this timeframe and contemporary “police walks” through rich, middle class, and poor neighborhoods were also layered into the world, offering a sense of what London’s massive rich-poor divide circa 1890 was like for the people actually living there (spoiler alert: expect to see more rats, illness, and crime on the poorer streets!). More info about this world, which has been downloaded >2 million times, is available here.
2. In collaboration with the UN’s Games for Urban Futures program (formerly the Block by Block Foundation), BlockWorks has leveraged Minecraft’s inherent cocreation features to transform >140 IRL public spaces worldwide. An example Delaney got into was Nairobi, Kenya. Over the past ~15 years, a public park, an industrial area, a sports field, and a pedestrian area have been revitalized through a process that started in Minecraft. There’s more info on the project here, but his general point was that urban design can be crowdsourced, can include the voices of marginalized groups and children (that almost never have a seat at such tables but are often heaviest users of such IRL spaces), and that heightened pride and a greater sense of ownership flow from the process.
3. The Uncensored Library was built in collaboration with Reporters Without Borders (RSF). In this world, government press censorship is bypassed. It stores banned articles and books inside a giant neoclassical building. It’s been around for >6 years and, according to Delaney, the traffic and hours of use have been “massive” and sustained. Sadly, a new U.S.-focused wing was recently added. More info on this amazing project is here.

Play Beyond: Gaming for Wellbeing & Inspiring Today’s Creators

G4C and Roblox Corp. recently collaborated on a challenge, "Encouraging Positive Connection and Wellbeing." The fruits of that effort were discussed in a panel format. More specifically, the top two winners of the challenge were on hand to discuss their creations.

The runner up winner was Lais Chamarelli, a University of São Paulo student. She and a friend, Victor Gabriel Martins Seidel, made Island of Communion, the basic design of which came out of a 48-hour game jam.

Island of Communion is a co-op or group-based game with a mental health-supporting theme, as players rebuild a damaged island paradise across 12 mini-games. It subtly teaches communication and resilience as players cooperate on an adventure that’s spread across four islands. The duo received $10,000 for their creation.

Said Chamarelli at one point, "Gaming, at the end of the day, is about fun." Yes, it is, and she and Seidel found a way to skillfully and artfully balance fun and teamwork.

The first-place winner was Justin Jacobson. An American, the project was actually his capstone at the University of Miami. Jacobson is a licensed clinical social worker and child therapist (who recently earned an MFA in Interactive Media from the university).

His Roblox creation is Gather-2-Gether. The cozy two-player experience is designed to facilitate play, trust, and communication between parents and children. In it, players can gather seeds, grow plants, dance, play tag, decorate a hangout, and more. Jacobson received a $15,000 prize for the creation.

While it’s unclear how popular either of these experiences are on Roblox, an online check didn’t paint a particularly rosy picture: an article on Jacobson’s win, for example, simply noted that it had “more than 1,000” plays as of G4C 2026. The moderator and panelists frequently used the word prosocial to describe both projects.

What if I Ran the Game Industry?

Good question, Mathias Nørvig, CEO of SYBO! His keynote answered this question.

SYBO, which is based in Copenhagen, Denmark, is best known for Subway Surfers, a mobile endless runner that came out in 2012. The title has since been downloaded over 4.5 billion times, making it one the most popular games in history. Nørvig said the game still gets downloaded >1 million times a day.

Nørvig and SYBO have been a longtime G4C supporters. They have a particular interest in protecting the environment and fighting climate change.

“I want more CEOs on stage with me,” said Nørvig flatly at one point.

His session was a thought experiment about how a variety of popular games could put a small twist on what they already do well, and pull the gameplay, and their player communities, in the direction of G4C’s mission and program goals.

Nørvig started out by noting that Firaxis Games’/2K’s popular Civilization VI introduced pollution and carbon-based climate change as a vector in the game’s 1Q 2019 expansion, Gathering Storm. If you keep burning more and more fossil fuels in that game, atmospheric CO₂ levels rise, causing coastal flooding, more severe hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, and blizzards, and diplomatic friction. What if other games did things along these lines, or put some other prosocial twist on the player experience?

He started with SYBO’s bread and butter game. You can read some of the fine print below, but the gist was that Subway Surfers could be transformed into an “optimism simulator” by mapping the game’s environments to actual cities and then giving players the chance to improve these “digital twins” a variety of ways as they play…well, surf…through them.

What about King’s Candy Crush Saga, another monster mobile hit? Nørvig’s proposed twist here was that the game’s core match-3 puzzle mechanic could be associated with random act of kindness toward other players. The picture below offers more details, but the idea is that some matches in the game could spontaneously generate “Friend Candies” that are automatically sent to friends or strangers who play the game, giving them a little boost. That twist would create millions of “anonymous moments of generosity every day.”

How about a more hardcore-oriented game like Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto V or the upcoming Grand Theft Auto VI? Here, Nørvig started talking about protecting grandmas. The concept was that players could not only commit crimes and so on, but also contribute to the health of their neighborhoods. Wouldn’t it be more interesting if player actions impacted the overall game state, and if positive and negative actions taken in-game was linked to longer-term story arcs, making the city living character? What if the game rewarded cooperation and random acts of kindness toward your in-game family and friends?

We’ll close out with two last examples: Fortnite and League of Legends. In the former case, Nørvig imagined that whoever wins a battle royale match could throw their weight behind some kind of season-based, island-wide restoration project. Over the course of a season, depending on what winners choose to do, part of the island they’re fighting on could be transformed from a polluted river into a healthy rainforest, or a run-down factory could be converted into a cool new skate park? The idea is that environmental becomes something that every winner begins to think about in terms of personal contributions.

Last but not least, LoL. Here, the idea was that the game’s hidden MMR could be paired with a public Leadership Rating. (Note: MMR is shorthand for Matchmaking Rating, a hidden, constantly recalculated skill-based score that determines who players are matched with in the game’s competitive 5v5 rounds. For a deep dive on Call of Duty’s similar skill-based matchmaking system, our recent podcast with Charlie Olsen has you covered.)

Nørvig’s point was that Riot Games could surface players who “bring out the best in others,” and celebrate “the players everyone hopes to queue with” at their skill level. (He even used the word mentor to describe their leadership style!)

More broadly, the vision was for games to “guide the behavior toward kindness,” as Nørvig put it. Games can be fun “and nutritional.” He wondered if people can be made “more kind” through gameplay? Such changes have to fit into a studio’s broader mission and near-term goals and roadmap, but Nørvig concluded that is possible to not just do this, but to “make goodness a competitive advantage.”

Inspiring stuff!

Like many things at G4C, Nørvig’s talk covered possibilities rather than large-scale realities. Still, it’s impossible to realize the kind of future G4C envisions for everyone without there first being a vision. In this sense, Design Desk wholeheartedly applauds G4C’s mission and programs. A gulf clearly exists between any dream and reality, but G4C is striving to create a common, prosocial, impactful dream and then slowly pull that vision toward the present moment.