Games Can Be Positive in Ways You Can't See | Games for Change 2026

The life nobody could see

Mats Steen grew up in Oslo with muscular dystrophy. He spent most of his life indoors, and to his parents he looked like a young man whose world had narrowed to a room. When he died, hundreds of people contacted his family to say they had known him for years. He had been at the centre of a rich social life inside World of Warcraft, under an avatar named Ibelin. His parents had no idea.

The story became national news in Norway, reached the prime minister, spread across Europe, and became the Netflix documentary The Remarkable Life of Ibelin. A feature film is now in development. His father Robert Steen spoke at Games for Change this year, because he wants his son's story to make an argument the industry has never managed to make on its own.

Twenty years on a single claim

Games for Change is a nonprofit, which is the first thing Pollack wants understood about it. It has grown alongside the industry for more than two decades on one argument: that games carry significant power and purpose beyond entertainment. What it has built is less an event than a membership, running from AAA studios and independent developers out into academia, policy, healthcare and education.

This year's theme was Reimagining Play, and the festival was rebuilt to match it. A new venue on a Manhattan rooftop, hands-on workshops instead of another panel, and a Playtest Lab where developers put impact games that are still in production in front of real players and take feedback live. Pollack resists calling that a focus group. It is playtesting and iteration, happening inside the energy of a festival.

The argument the industry keeps failing to make

Ask Pollack what the industry could do better and the answer is not about design. It is about communication. Developers already know games are one of the only media forms where a player builds a relationship with the content and with other people at the same time. Almost nobody outside the industry sees it that way.

Her case starts where most impact organisations will not go, with commercial games. A game does not need a mission statement to do something real. It brings joy. It takes the edge off a bad day. It opens a path to connection across countries and disciplines. And it is genuinely democratizing, because inside it your appearance, gender, age and location stop deciding anything about you.

Then the part she says nobody counts. A game is a system, and learning to move through it is critical thinking. Getting good enough to level up means failing repeatedly, and games are one of very few activities where failure is acceptable and repeatable. You get another chance, you try again, you get better. Collaboration and communication sit on top of that. All of it happens inside an activity most people still file under distraction.

The education spine

The academic presence at the festival is not a recent pivot. Games for Change runs three tracks, games and learning, health and wellness, and civic and social issues, and the learning track has existed for roughly eight years. Its own program, the Games for Change Student Challenge, is past its tenth year: game design taken into classrooms and into the hands of kids in underserved communities, who learn to think like a designer first and then build on Scratch, Unity or Godot around social issues they choose. Participants have come from 92 countries.

Why the bad news travels further

The second half of this episode is the research. Dr. Rachel Kowert is a research psychologist who has spent about fifteen years studying the uses and effects of games, and she wrote the white paper Games for Change released at the festival. The underlying analysis, run by FTI Consulting, swept roughly 200,000 media articles and social posts across seven languages and fifteen countries over a year.

The finding is not that the coverage is negative. It is that the coverage is mostly positive and the negative pieces travel anyway. Humans carry a negativity bias, an evolutionary artifact that makes threat information stick harder than reassurance, so what gets shared and forwarded skews dark even when the reporting does not. Kowert's phrase for the result is a biased information ecosystem.

The concerns themselves have barely moved in fifty years: overuse, over-dependence, overexposure. The paper does not dismiss them, and Kowert includes herself among worried parents. It re-poses them. Instead of counting hours, ask what purpose the play is serving. Her own rule is unglamorous: her kids play plenty on weekends and if they are getting along she leaves them to it, and on a school night they go to bed.

Games are the only active thing in the pile

Arana Shapiro, who runs programs at Games for Change and leads Raising Good Gamers, makes the structural case. Almost everything else children consume is passive, they watch it. Games are the exception: kids are making choices, negotiating, collaborating, problem solving and reasoning about systems. Those are the high-level skills every parent says they want their child to carry into adulthood, and games are, in her words, a perfect practice space for them.

SPACE, and the five moves

The framework at the centre of the white paper distils the research into five things a family can do. Show up with curiosity. Play together. Adjust for context. Cultivate digital citizenship, which Kowert argues most parents overlook, because a game is a better place to start a conversation about online safety than a lecture is. And establish boundaries together, which carries the weight, because rules issued from the top down do not survive a child who had no say in them.

The stated goal is moving games from a source of conflict to a source of conversation. Or, as Kowert puts it more bluntly, from panic to partnership. There is a statistic that reframes the whole standoff: ESA research found that 60% of kids want their parents to play more with them. What stops most parents is not disapproval but embarrassment, the assumption that they will be bad at it. Kowert's answer is that being bad is the point, because it is funnier that way.

What carries back out of the game

Self-determination theory holds that people are motivated by autonomy, relatedness and competence, and games are unusually good at delivering all three at once. Kowert's favourite illustration is Animal Crossing, where the villagers are not real and you are not really playing with them, and the sense of relatedness lands anyway. The research suggests those needs, once met in a game, do not stay there. People rehearse social skills inside multiplayer games and carry them into school. The Proteus effect, first described by Nick Yee, goes further: behave generously toward other avatars and you tend to behave more generously once you log off.

Where to get it

Raising Good Gamers (https://www.raisinggoodgamers.com/) is free. There is a site holding the white paper, a conversation guide, and a template for a family gaming code of conduct that a household writes together rather than has handed down. A webinar series with Kowert and Shapiro follows, and the workshops are being distributed through organisations that already sit in front of parents: the PTA, the Boys and Girls Club, and libraries.

Disclosure: the FTI Consulting media analysis underpinning the white paper was commissioned by Tencent.