Games for Change wants parents to understand and engage with games — not fear them.
At its annual Games for Change Festival conference in New York City today, July 21, Games for Change — a nonprofit organization that supports people using games for positive social change — announced the publication of a new white paper by Games for Change research director Rachel Kowert. Titled “Raising Good Gamers: What Families Need to Know About Video Games and Well-Being,” the paper is intended to provide parents of gamers with a reliable, easy-to-understand framework they can use to ensure their children engage with video games in a healthy and constructive way.
Kowert told GamesBeat that Games for Change’s white paper was inspired by her 2016 book “A Parent’s Guide to Video Games.”
“I wrote the book, and I published the book, and then I had children, and I thought — ‘they do not want a book,’” Kowert said in an interview with GamesBeat. “They don’t have time to read a book.”
The publication of Games for Change’s 32-page white paper is part of the organization’s wider Raising Good Gamers initiative, a Tencent-sponsored effort to spark more balance and evidence-based discussions around video games and their role in young people’s lives. The initiative began in 2020 as a bid to inform stakeholders across the industry about how to build safe spaces for young gamers, but Games for Change has refocused Raising Good Gamers specifically around parents and their role in the space in 2026.
“We realized that there was one stakeholder that we felt was being underserved, and that was parents, and we thought there was an opportunity for us to speak directly to them and help them better understand gaming environments,” said Games for Change president Susanna Pollack in an interview with GamesBeat. “We felt it was really important to start by doing this work with research, so that we could develop research-backed tools and resources. That’s when we embarked on this project.”
Although the Raising Good Gamers white paper is primarily aimed at parents, Kowert and Pollack said it contains actionable advice for stakeholders across the gaming space, including policy makers and game makers. In an interview with GamesBeat, Tencent vice president and head of business operations, strategy, and compliance Yong-yi Zhu said the report validated his company’s goal of building sustainable games that fostered social connections, and that Tencent intended to continue supporting Raising Good Gamers and other initiatives building the next generation of game makers in a thoughtful way.
“It’s going to require a lot of people to understand the implications of the paper and the findings,” said Zhu, who noted that he is also the father of a four-year-old and a six-year-old. “It’s not just parents. It’s the game makers. It’s the content creators. It’s the media. This is a shared responsibility that we have to help our children grow up in a safe environment.”
Gaming is still in its relatively early days as an entertainment medium, and Games for Change’s efforts to educate parents are relatively unprecedented in the history of media. During the nascent years of television or radio, there were few watchdog organizations considering best practices for parents and children engaging with the new media. To help parents easily understand how to engage with games and gamer kids, Kowert coined the SPACE acronym: Show up with curiosity, Play together, Adjust for context, Cultivate digital citizenship and Establish boundaries together.
“I was like, ‘You know what parents need? An acronym,” Kowert said. “Because an acronym they’ll remember, if nothing else. If we can get it just on one page — if they can’t read the other 50 pages of the report — they’ll be set.”