Susanna Pollack, President of Games for Change, Pushes the Video Game Industry Toward a More ‘Hopeful and Optimistic Future’

Our organization's called Games for Change. We like to think of ourselves as part of a playful community. We wanted to approach our festival this year with more of that kind of sentiment.—Susanna Pollack

This year’s G4C festival was held at The Glasshouse in New York City in July. I got a chance to sit down there with G4C’s President, Susanna Pollack. Our discussion was brief but wide-ranging, and we’ll recap and update our chat below. Player Driven’s founder, Greg Posner recorded the exchange, which was posted as a podcast in late July.

Let’s get to it!

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On G4C 2026, the Org’s Broader Mission, and Sustained ‘Impact’

Our festivals are about bringing people together and elevating this idea that games can have positive impact.—Susanna Pollack

“Games for Change” I said to Susanna Pollack, President of G4C, after we’d settled in backstage at The Glasshouse, is “in its 23rd year now. It’s a very impressive event…I know the awards were last night…[and that] the game of the year was Compulsion Games’ South of Midnight, right?”

“South of Midnight,” she confirmed, nodding. “What a remarkable game. That one really stood out, and the team is incredible.”

South of Midnight is a single-player, third-person action-adventure game for PCs and consoles. It’s set in a fantastical variant of the Deep South in the U.S. (Compulsion Games, interestingly, is based in Montreal, Canada.)

Hazel, the game’s protagonist, is a young woman who discovers that she’s a “Weaver,” meaning that she can see and repair broken bonds and spirits in the world.

“Another game that did very well is Consume Me,” continued Pollack. “We had some of the creators” of the game at the awards ceremony.

Hexecutable published Consume Me, a single-player PC game. The semi-autobiographical life sim explores the pressures, anxieties, and overwhelming expectations felt by the game’s adolescent protagonist, Jenny.

“The thing about the Games for Change awards ceremony, and the event overall, is the warmth and the depth of caring that people involved in this part of the industry have,” Pollack continued. Most people in the G4C community “believe that games can be a driver for social impact, and really move people. It has to start with the creators.”

“Then, of course, we had the Vanguard Award, which went to Jenn Panattoni, formerly from Xbox. She's done some amazing things over there” at Aizle Impact.

Aizle Impact builds cause and social impact partnerships across gaming and entertainment; Panattoni is the agency’s CEO and founder. (GamesBeat interviewed her in June if you’d like more color.)

“SpecialEffect, which is a company that not many people know about here in the U.S.,” Pollack added, is “a UK-based organization, [and] they received the Giving Award. In addition to recognizing games, we also recognize organizations and people that have done great things. They [SpecialEffect] build adaptive controllers for people in need, and they really have changed lives for hundreds of people,” especially children.

A full run-down of G4C 2026’s award winners was laid out in a GamesIndustry.biz article in late July.

“Amazing stuff,” I confirmed.

“Can I back up a little bit and just talk about the mission? Can you describe what the organization tries to do…and is there anything particularly at Games for Change 2026 that emphasized some part of the mission to you?”

“Oh sure,” responded Pollack. “The first thing that people need to know about us is that we are a nonprofit…that has grown alongside the video game industry over the past twenty-plus years. And we've had a singular mission and vision, which is that games can have significant power and purpose beyond entertainment.”

“We've been building a community of leaders who are working, not only in the games industry—from triple-A studios to the independent developers—but also people across academia, policy, healthcare, education. For us, it's a large community of people who are making the games, supporting the games, and using the games within their communities.”

“This community,” she emphasized, is what “has been built over the past twenty years. And the Games for Change festival, which we've had since the very beginning, is the opportunity for us to bring all of these people together.”

Got it.

This year, Pollack continued, “we proposed the theme of ‘reimagining play’ to all of our speakers, whether they came to us through an open call—because we want to gather as many diverse voices from around the world and have them participate that way—or whether we curated them ourselves.”

The games industry is changing, and the way we are all connected to each other around the world is rapidly changing. Like, where does play fit in? How can you reimagine play in the world we are in today? And, as ever, Games for Change always wants to work towards a more hopeful and optimistic future. So, we're framing it from that perspective.

A pic I took of G4C President, Susanna Pollack, kicking off the 2026 festival on July 21 in NYC.

“Yeah,” I agreed, there have “been a lot of talks that I’ve been able to step into and out of, conversations that get at that. It’s an interesting and well fleshed-out theme” that I’ve seen reflected in the content.

“We’re in The Glasshouse this year,” I said, gesturing around us. Would you care “to talk about the venue, or any content changes, as well, versus last year?”

“There are so many conferences that our industry attends,” Pollack said. “It's talks, it's panels, it's keynotes, and networking. That's the foundation. That's a draw. But we added some things this year—and that was part of the reason why we wanted to change venues—and start shaking it up. Reimagining what the Games for Change Festival can be today…we wanted to have things a bit more interactive.”

“One of the things that we host a lot of here, which I think is different from other games conferences, is a workshop. There's a lot of hands-on opportunity to either make games together, to learn skills, or do demos. A lot of hands-on activity because we want our community to interact with one another.”

“Another feature that we started was Playtest Lab. That's an opportunity for game developers to have their game—that's either in production or in development, or they're looking at making changes, all within the impact space—to actually have time for people to play their games and give feedback in real time.”

“They can have conversations about their game, so that was a really wonderful feature.”

The G4C Playtest Lab pairs creators of early-stage video games with curated review panels.

“It's more about this concept of playtesting and iteration,” clarified Pollack. “It's live, and it's happening here, in the energy of a festival. So that's really fun.”

“We also invited people into New York to enjoy the city. If we're here in New York, there's so much to offer. And if people are going to spend their time and their resources to come all the way here, we want to celebrate that, which is one of the reasons for this venue.”

It had rained hard the previous day. Glancing out the window at the blue sky, I confirmed it should be easier to enjoy the city today.

“No storms today!” she grinned. “We're on a rooftop overlooking Manhattan and we want to celebrate the city. So that's another fun feature.”

I switched gears.

Some people, I pointed out, view games as “mindless entertainment,” and, I posited, “Games for Change tries to…dispel those perceptions…From your perspective, what are the main things that video games teach people?”

“The industry knows how games are one of the only forms of media that allows this kind of interactivity,” she replied. “With that kind of interactivity, players are developing a different relationship with the content, and with others, if they're doing it in a multiplayer setting.”

“People out in the world aren't looking at it that way. So, if there's a question of what we can do better, a lot of it is messaging and communication, and drawing attention to the positive impacts of gaming.”

“There's also this other thing: The cognitive and mental health benefits that people don't really think about. When you are playing a game, which is basically a system, you're developing skills in order to navigate through that system. So, you're exercising critical thinking. You're mastering skills to level up, which is also building resilience because games are one of the few activities where it's okay to fail. You get another chance, you try again, and you get better.”

“Then you think about collaboration, playing with a team, or communication. All of that's happening within games. But nobody's thinking about that.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I played a lot of basketball before I got older, and you lose a game, and you can still be friends with the people you played against.”

Pollack could relate.

“Good sportsmanship. It's the same thing in gaming, absolutely. You can laugh, you can joke, you can tease, but at the end of the day, it's about the game. The game brings us together.”

“The speakers who are here, a lot of them are from colleges and universities,” I noted. “They come from a variety of disciplines…”

“Is there a particular part of the connection between education or training, or the onboarding process and video games, where you’ve seen a connection, and you’re seeking to stress that at this festival?” I asked.

“You're definitely acknowledging what is happening,” Pollack answered, tactfully. “But it's not new. We've had a games and learning track at the festival for about eight years now.”

“We have three tracks at the festival. We have games and learning, health and wellness, and civic and social issues.”

“The games and learning track has been here for a long time. It is important, not only to the ecosystem, but for each other as a community, to understand what the best practices are, what the research is that demonstrates how games can effectively be used in the classroom, and how we can leverage game design as a skill-based, or…project-based activity, where kids learn skills from actually making games.”

“We have our own program called the Games for Change Student Challenge, which we've run for over ten years. It's a program that brings game design into classrooms and into the hands of kids from underserved communities all over the world, where they learn how to make games.”

“First, they learn how to think like a game designer. Then they can make games on different platforms, from Scratch to Unity to Godot. And they make games around social issues. And then there's a whole community and program around it. We've been doing it for over ten years, and we've had kids from 92 countries participate.”

I hadn’t heard of Scratch. It’s indeed a 2D game engine and development platform that’s geared for kids/beginners. The MIT Media Lab, with an assist from Google, have backed it for many years, and the hands-on educational tool today supports 70+ languages.

“We're deeply committed to the next generation of game designers,” continued Pollack. “That's what I think you're seeing…We want to provide the platform for that. And the next generation, that's all we've got.”

I nodded, and switched to a related topic: G4C’s new Raising Good Gamers program. Design Desk readers will be aware that I covered this topic last week, but since I had the proverbial horse’s mouth in front of me, I asked Pollack to describe the new initiative.

I asked for her “ten-thousand-foot view” of Raising Good Gamers, as well as the main “hope that this will become, in terms of the real world, and how it’s going to impact gaming families.”

The effort “actually started before the pandemic, in 2019,” Pollack began. “We are in this process of relaunching it, or giving it its second chapter.”

“It was originally developed with Katie Salen, who is a professor of informatics at UC Irvine. We came together to develop an initiative that brought together cross-sector partnerships, from policy, academia, from industry, to help build more conversations about how we can ensure children have safe, healthy, prosocial experiences within games.”

“What's happening now is that we've decided to refocus our efforts, and relaunch it as a parent-facing initiative. We identified that there's a gap in terms of what resources are available to parents, so they can better help navigate their children's gaming experiences. They were either hard to find, hard to access…[or] hard to digest…This research shows—which we pulled down in our white paper—there's a lot of great research out there, but it doesn't reach parents.”

“Yeah, those are long [academic] papers,” I said, nodding.

“Exactly,” continued Pollack. “Through, initially, this white paper, that was authored by Dr. Rachel Kowert, our research director, it surfaces the research that exists, [and] frames it in a way that's very friendly. I'll say ‘friendly material’ for parents, in that it speaks to them, and meets them where they are.”

“Through this effort we are going to start running workshops,” she added. “We're running workshops for parents, so they can better understand what's happening within these environments where kids game, and also how they can support them with confidence.”

“Those will be online webinars that are going to start this fall. We are working with nonprofit NGOs that are community-based organizations—think, like, the YMCA or the PTA—to bring these workshops” to parents.

Beating the ‘Impact’ Drum

I backtracked to the topic of impact.

“Having come here for the first time last year,” I said, “impact always seemed like a really important topic to me, because that's where the rubber meets the road.”

“If you'd like to highlight something from the [G4C] 2025 impact report, that would be great. There was also an ‘impact’ game, and Roger,” I added, “that won the impact award…last night…”

“Sure,” she responded. “The impact report you're talking about is our annual report that talks about what Games for Change has been doing in a given year, and frames it in terms of the relevancy of the work to the people we're looking to serve.”

“One thing from 2025 on that front is that we are hosting events in multiple countries around the world. And we only can do that by partnering with like-minded organizations. So, we launched in 2025 in Korea for the first time. In Sweden [too], and I think Hong Kong was in its second year.”

“This year, we're launching the Games for Change Festival in London. This year we're launching in India as well. So, there's an appetite for developing these kinds of ‘communities for good’ in different places.”

“We're also hosting events that bring together the games industry with the UN system.”

I’d seen a few people wearing blue UN tees at G4C with something about hunger written on them.

“The food one?” I asked.

“That's one of our partnerships,” Pollack nodded. “We host events at UN headquarter cities. We invite games industry people to come in and talk about, from one side, how games can help the UN Sustainable Development Goals—which are the seventeen-point framework of how the UN system works toward achieving different things that will make our world better—and then on the UN side, for the UN to share their work with the games industry.”

“The UN systems are looking for new ways to reach people, new funding opportunities. And they're so eager, and so open” to these discussions that the fit is excellent.

The UN’s seventeen-point goal framework, btw, is here.

“Yes, the World Food Programme is here. We're launching a partnership here. We've been working with Playing for the Planet, which comes out of the UN Environment Programme. And then UNESCO has a thing here.”

The 411 on Playing for the Planet, which is indeed backed by the UN, is here.

To close the loop on and Roger, which won G4C 2026’s Best in Impact award: The game was developed by TearyHand Studio, and the “interactive novel” (which is available on Steam, Switch 2, and mobile devices) has a profound twist in it that involves the issue of cognitive decline.

I went back to the ‘impact’ well one last time since I truly believe that this community’s ability to meaningfully change the trajectory of the video game industry —or not—will depend on the fulcrums that it identifies and leverages to effect the changes it’s after.

To my mind, G4C’s goals are consistent with the long-standing goals of the broader liberal tradition.

“Is there a story about an impact that came out of this conference,” I asked, with this unstated assessment in the background of my question, “that you think is the best example of the way Games for Change has worked in the industry to make a clear difference that has positively impacted gamers or their families?”

Pollack pondered the question.

“I’m going to talk about something that’s happening at the festival this year,” she said at last. “So much of what I love about the work we do is not just about our impact, the Games for Change impact, it’s really about the community’s impact.”

I see ourselves as a platform to help celebrate everyone else's efforts.

“There’s a speaker who's going to be here this afternoon named Robert Steen. And Robert Steen is the father of a young man who, unfortunately, passed away, named Mats. He's from Norway, from Oslo. Mats had [Duchenne] muscular dystrophy and was indoors for much of his life. Very solitary. And, unfortunately, the young man passed away” in 2014.

“What ended up happening, upon the news of his death, and the funeral, is that hundreds of people reached out to the parents to say, ‘We loved your son, he was a great kid, a great guy.’ And he had this really rich, rich social life within [Blizzard’s] World of Warcraft. And the parents had no idea.”

“That's crazy,” I said. “They must have known something.”

“They thought he was just an isolated kid,” she said, shaking her head. “The story emerged in Norway. It got picked up. The prime minister of Norway became aware of it. It really became a national Norwegian story. Then a European story. And last year Netflix made a documentary, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin.”

“Ibelin was Mats' avatar in the game,” she explained. “Next is coming a feature film…”

“You're kidding me,” I blurted.

“…by Hollywood.”

“That's amazing,” I added.

“So, that's cool. Robert is here.”

Cool, indeed.

Left: Promo art for Netflix’s 2024 documentary about Mats Steen. Right: Robert Steen, Mats’ dad, speaking at G4C 2026 (photo courtesy of his LinkedIn post).

“We talk to him this afternoon,” Pollack continued. “He wants to use his son's story and experience to inspire others to see, again, to help convey that games can be positive in ways that you just can't see.”

Honestly, it was a touching moment (even though I hadn’t seen the documentary yet—and now that I have, I can confirm it’s an amazingly bittersweet rollercoaster).

“So that's an uplifting story that makes me feel really good about our work.”

Yeah, it does.

I’ll close with an excerpt from Robert Steen’s aforementioned LinkedIn post about his G4C 2026 experience:

We talked about how gaming has become one of humanity’s largest social infrastructures—and how we can recognize and strengthen the people who make space for others and communities more welcoming, inclusive and human...

If Mats and Ibelin taught us anything, it is this:

Behind every avatar is a human being.

Behind every great community is someone who chooses to make others feel they belong.

Mats made the most out of the life he was given and he found the value and joy in helping others.

What we have experienced until now might be only the beginning.

If there’s a better way to sum up what Pollack and the G4C community have been building for 20+ years, I don’t know what it is. I also don’t know if the G4C community has found a fulcrum by which it can change the direction of the global gaming industry, but I know the community’s heart is in the right place and that it’s looking for that fulcrum.