[Event news] Games for Change Research Director Dr. Rachel Kowert calls for shift from ‘panic to partnership’ in Good Game Club Podcast

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Good Game Club has released a new episode featuring Games for Change Research Director Dr. Rachel Kowert who discusses why parents, policymakers and the games industry need a more balanced conversation around children’s digital lives.

The episode comes immediately after the public launch of Dr. Kowert’s ground-breaking new white paper, released at the annual Games for Change Festival in New York, “Raising Good Gamers: What Families Need to Know About Video Games and Well-Being,” and marks the next phase of Raising Good Gamers, a Games for Change program supported by Tencent Games. The program provides families with practical tools and resources to help them navigate video gaming at home with more confidence. Workshops will launch across the U.S. and the U.K. this September, with live online webinars also becoming available.

During the conversation with Jude Ower, Dr. Kowert describes how decades-old fears around addiction, violence and mental health continue to dominate parents’ concerns despite extensive research showing video games can support wellbeing, creativity, social connection and emotional resilience.

In the episode, Dr. Kowert explains that the white paper includes new sentiment analysis conducted by FTI Consulting across 200,000 media articles and social media posts about video gaming. What they found was parents seeking information online were five times more likely to encounter negative messages about video gaming than positive ones.

“We are wired for worry,” says Dr. Kowert.  “Humans have a negativity bias, which is just our psychological tendency to put more importance on things that elicit negative emotions.  Fear, for instance, being one.”

Dr. Kowert argues that this amplification effect is shaping public perception and increasingly influencing policy conversations around video games and youth wellbeing. “What is happening in these digital playgrounds does impact the way we see and interact with the world around us,” says Dr. Kowert.  “If we have these narratives that are skewed towards fear, we should acknowledge them – but we also have to acknowledge the other side, which is the beautiful positive things that are coming out of these spaces.”

In the white paper, she calls for a shift “from panic to partnership”, encouraging parents with practical steps to engage more actively with children and their gaming experiences rather than relying on fear-based assumptions.

For Dr. Kowert, it’s all about making space for engaged parenting.  “To go back to the playground analogy,” she says, “we would have conversations with children about how you behave at school, how you behave in the playground, how you go out into the physical world. And we have to be having conversations with them about how to behave in the digital world.  Parents don’t necessarily have the tools, the prompts, the information or the time to do that. So, I’m hoping this whitepaper will help get those conversations started.”

The Raising Good Gamers programme was introduced in an earlier episode of the Good Game Club podcast. ‘A Global Partnership for Healthy Play’ with Susanna Pollack, President of Games for Change, and Danny Marti, Head of Public Affairs at Tencent, explored how the public conversation around games, children and wellbeing can move beyond fear towards understanding.  It was released following the inaugural Games for Change London Summit on April 16^th and can be viewed here.

The new white paper, ‘Raising Good Gamers: What Families Need to Know About Video Games and Well-Being’, can be viewed at raisinggoodgamers.com/white-paper. Games for Change is a nonprofit organisation that empowers game creators and innovators to drive real-world change through games and immersive media.

Good Game Club is hosted by Jude Ower MBE, CSO at PlanetPlay, and Mathias Gredal Nørvig, CEO of SYBO, and is supported by the Dubai Films & Games Commission and Tencent.  It explores the cultural, social and economic impact of games through conversations with industry leaders, researchers, policymakers and creators.

The latest episode of the Good Game Club podcast can be watched here.  For more information, please visit Linktree or contact comms@goodgame.club.