Research & News

New resources for families and the people building for them

This month, Games for Change launched Raising Good Gamers at the G4C Festival in New York, alongside a new white paper (authored by yours truly) on what families need to know about video games and wellbeing.

The paper is worth a read but if you just want to skip to the end I GOT YOU, because it closes with (and is generally organized around) a memorable and short acronym about how to move games from a subject of conflict to a subject of conversation in the household, and that is making SPACE for engaged paretning:

• Show up with curiosity

• Play together

• Adjust for context

• Cultivate digital citizenship

• Establish boundaries together.

Following this launch, there will be a series of workshops happening across the US and UK in September (which you can learn more about here).

New parent and gaming resources were also released from LEGO Digital Play this month - a parents’ guide to balanced digital play aimed at families with kids 6–12. This includes video-based “Build & Talk” stories, audio adventures for tweens, a co-gaming experiment, and a “This or That” activity, all built around conversation rather than restriction.

Resources for designers are also on the table this month. Amanda Gummer and the Thrive Digital Alliance released the Children’s Digital Wellbeing Framework (CDWF), released a cross-sector, evidence-informed set of criteria for what responsible child-centered design looks like, explicitly positioned beyond safeguarding and beyond compliance, and explicitly not a regulator.

SO MANY RESOURCES!

Libraries can lend games now?

Out of the University of Sydney comes Ludolio, a digital game distribution platform that lets university libraries lend commercial games the way they lend ebooks. Students log in via SSO; instructors get a dashboard showing what students are playing and can trigger learning activities off in-game achievements. It grew out of a problem anyone who teaches games knows intimately: getting students easy, free, legal access to the games on your syllabus. Over 500 users at USYD so far, and they’re opening it to other university libraries on a subscription model similar to Kanopy or JSTOR. The catalogue launches at 20 games (mostly Australian indies), and grows with library demand, so if this would be useful in your teaching, pass it to your liaison librarian or get on the waitlist.

Designing player support that actually works.

A new data snapshot from ECPAT International and GamerSafer, was released this month. Looking at an in-game survey of 1,991 child and youth players in the Minehut community, they examined players’ help-seeking behavior, community perceptions, and gender expression. Rather than treating "player support" as one undifferentiated system, they asked what age-specific and gender-informed design looks like in practice, at a scale platforms can actually implement. This report closes with action pathways and opportunities to enhance game design features and improve trust and safety confidence. You can read the full report here.

2025 UK games workforce survey.

This month, the 2025 UK Games Industry Workforce Demographics Survey was released. They found:

• Job losses are real but not terminal. More than a fifth of respondents were affected

• The workforce is more diverse than the wider UK workforce on several measures

• 81% are proud to be part of the UK games industry, but only 38% would recommend it as a place to work.

You can read the full report here.

Non-Performative Safety is [REDACTED].

This month Matt Soeth sat down with one of my favorite people in Trust and Safety, Cassie Coccaro, Head of Communications at Thorn, for a conversation about why we need to take safety seriously (and how to spot performative safety PR). You can listen to the full episode here.

You didn’t choose all your beliefs

Van Bavel and Packer’s Power of Us newsletter is one of my favorite reads. This month, they published a piece about how our beliefs (as humans) are socially anchored rather than independently reasoned, including the ones we hold precisely because holding them signals something about who we’re with. How does this relate to games you may be asking? Well this is EXACTLY the kind of thing we were postulating with our identity fusion research that we published a few years back - fused group members don’t just identify with a collective, they experience a visceral oneness with it and with its individual members. That’s a useful lens for gaming communities, guilds, fandoms, and the pipeline discourse alike.

Layoffs, layoffs, layoffs…

This really just feels like a permanent part of my monthly newsletter now... Microsoft cut roughly 1,600 Xbox roles in early July, with around 3,200 total planned across FY27, and parted ways with five studios: Compulsion Games and Double Fine returning to independence with their IP and catalogue, Ninja Theory and Undead Labs moving to new ownership with funding to finish Senua and State of Decay 3, and Arkane entering Works Council consultation in France. Since 2023, Xbox has now shed more than 5,000 jobs across four rounds.

NEW RESEARCH: Leave, mute, or retaliate?

A new survey of 602 young adults examining how cumulative exposure to toxicity (as victim and as bystander) plus overall game experience shapes both their responses to hostile behavior and their attitudes toward the moderation tools the industry offers them. We know a fair amount about coping strategies in the abstract; we know much less about how exposure history changes which tools people reach for, or whether they reach for them at all. You can read the full piece here.

NEW RESEARCH: Mothers are players too.

Cue the chock and awe. New research out of Australia is the first Australian study to give a gendered account of mothers’ own gaming practices, drawing on qualitative survey data from 38 Australian mothers. Parents show up in the research literature almost exclusively as mediators of their children’s play or as sources of “technoference,” rarely as players with wellbeing needs of their own. In this paper, they explore the latter, finding how the gaming of mothers is shaped through the everyday negotiation of time, attention, and parental responsibility which provides, as they say, “ a gendered account of how parenting structures access to leisure and wellbeing”. I FEEL SO SEEN. You can read the full piece here.

NEW RESEARCH: Fifty years of masculinity scales, and most of them only measure the damage

Fisher and colleagues at the Movember Institute reviewed 65 masculinities measures published between 1974 and 2024, coding each on five dimensions: whether the approach was deficit- or strengths-based, relational focus, cultural attunement, sample diversity, and psychometric properties. They found:

• 78% of measures took a deficit-based approach; 22% incorporated any strengths-based element. Of the twelve most-cited scales, three.

• 43% had no relational focus at all — no indication of who a respondent should be thinking about when they answer. This matters more than it sounds: a score can mean “I think this norm exists,” “I think this norm is good,” or “this is my personal value,” and most instruments can’t distinguish between them.

• 58% showed no engagement with cultural context, and 66% relied on samples lacking demographic diversity. None of the twelve most-cited measures were coded as culturally attuned.

• Only 9% demonstrated strong evidence of external validity, though internal validity and reliability were generally fine.

The authors are careful not to argue that deficit-based approaches are wrong as the empirical record linking masculine norm adherence to depression, reduced help-seeking, and substance misuse is real and valuable. But when most of your instruments are built to detect harm, the absence of evidence for protective or health-promoting dimensions of masculine identity isn’t a finding, it’s a problem. You can read the full piece here.

ICYMI: Psychgeist

There is a lot to catch up on this month! Let’s start with a DLC Leadership Program update!

First off, we have a new website. AND IT IS SO PRETTY. You can check it out here.

Second, I am happy to report that the pilot cohort of this program (which was a group 84 community managers, digital leaders, games researchers, and academics) have completed their pilot! After weeks of coursework covering self-care, de-escalation strategies, and operational security we have learned 1) that the program works and 2) that the program is wanted/desired/needed.

Going in, most leaders rated themselves unconfident across the very skills the job demands. Coming out, confidence rose significantly across every competency we measured.

Some other top line takeaways:

• 100% — feel better equipped to sustain themselves long-term

• 98% — believe their community will benefit from what they learned in the program

• 85% — of graduates have already changed how they lead their communities

Today, there are 300+ people on the wait list. Let’s do it. You can find the full report here.

This month was also the month of Games for Change where I was VERY EXCITED to be part of the announcement of the relaunch of Raising Good Gamers (press release here!). Part of the re-launch plan was the release of a new white paper (authored by yours truly) called Raising Good Gamers: What Families Need to Know About Video Games and Well-Being. It draws on academic research, policy and safety guidance, industry and parent studies, global participation data, and a new analysis of nearly 200,000 media articles and social posts across 15 countries and seven languages. Did you know that nearly 60% of children say they want their parents more involved in their gaming lives? That makes it all that much more unfortunate that parents are being encouraged to worry before they’re encouraged to understand, and the gap between the public narrative about games and how families actually live with them keeps widening.

Free resources, including a family conversation guide and a family gaming agreement families build together, are live now at RaisingGoodGamers.com. Workshops launch across the US and UK this September, with virtual sessions on September 29 (10am EST), October 20 (6pm EST), and November 19 (3pm EST), and a global expansion planned for 2027.

And because Games for Change is VERY QUICK with their post production, you can already watch my talk here:

I also shared the stage with some legends talking about how to build a healthier future for play. That one is also up and here:

Following the launch, I joined Jude Ower MBE on the Good Game Club podcast to talk it through! This podcast has quickly become one of my favorites and my episode in particular will forever hold a special place in my heart because the shirt I’m wearing in the interview got RUINED in the wash after this trip… at least it lives here forever. You can find the podcast here.

The day before Games for Change I took part in Play Story Fest at the Cooney Center, where we brought together a small group of friends and colleagues to talk about meaningful play. The thing we kept circling back to was the value of having shared spaces that feel like “a couple hours of conference hallway conversation.” We all know that’s the best part of any conference. Building a room that is only that turns out to be worth doing on purpose. If you aren’t familiar with Play Story Press, they are an open community publishing consortium led by the one and only Drew Davidson (and also the publisher that brings all of the Psychgeist books to life).

I had a couple pieces of research finally make it out of peer review this month and FAIR WARNING: I am in my acronym era.

NEW RESEARCH: The EFFECT framework for community codes of conduct. This month, I finally published something I have been working on for a while, which is a framework for creating effective community codes of conduct. The paper is centered on a lit review and ends with rules/recommendations for how to optimize this key, front-facing governance document distilled into the EFFECT framework:

• Easy to find and understand

• Fact-based content

• From the community

• Everyone influences everyone

• Context matters

• Trust through transparency

You can read the full article here.

NEW RESEARCH: CHEER, a measure of community health in games. Digital games have long since stopped being isolated entertainment products and become social platforms where millions of people form real communities and real relationships but our ability to assess the health of those communities hasn’t kept pace with that shift.

This month, I published a new paper focused on the transition from reactive problem-solving to proactive ecosystem stewardship, with the CHEER Framework aiming to enable teams to identify early warning signs of community decline, deploy targeted interventions, and track long-term impact of community development initiatives. This approach transforms community health assessment from subjective evaluation to objective, data-driven decision-making, providing the foundation necessary for sustainable digital community building in an increasingly connected gaming landscape. You can read the full paper here.

BONUS NEWSLETTER: Why can no one agree on what harms in games is?? Last but certainly not least, I had a BONUS newsletter this month talking about something that has really been bothering me… for a while - the lack of consistency in reporting categories across games and platforms. If you are also type A and love symmetry in your life, you’ll love this one. You can read it here.

Joi Podgorny drafted a response to this piece a few days later with her own thoughts and ideas which did as she promised - make me feel more hopeful about the state of it all.

What I’m Reading: Why your kid has watched Moana forty times (NY Times). Yes yes, this isn’t about games but it IS ABOUT MY LIVED EXPERIENCE (she said as a mom of three). The New York Times took on a question a lot of parents have: what is it about this one film? Moana is the most-streamed movie on Disney+ ever, north of 1.5 billion hours. The answer researchers offered is essentially about predictive processing - young children have less experience to draw on, so a layered narrative becomes correctly-pitched only once it's familiar. What looks mind-numbing to an adult sits at exactly the right level of challenge for a three-year-old, who extracts something new each pass: first the plot outline, later the jokes, the motives, the vocabulary, the relationships between events. Running the same experiment repeatedly is the point. (The catchy songs don't hurt, but we are more of an Encanto family these days). You can read the full piece here.

I have also started book 1 of Dungeon Crawler Carl. I have reached the point where enough people have told me to read this that continuing to not read it has become its own kind of statement, and I am not prepared to defend that position. Report back next month.

What I’m Watching: Norway at the World Cup. Just like the rest of the world. Going out to England 2–1 in extra time in Miami with the Bellingham goal three minutes into ET did pain me …but his name is Jude and my son’s name is Jude SO I GUESS I HAVE TO LET HIM HAVE IT. I have no particular claim on Norway …other than my whole family being in love with Haaland… but I was FULLY fully invested. (Also that France/England game?? WHAT??)

What I’m Playing: Satisfactory (Coffee Stain Studios). A factory simulator. Don’t judge me, it’s AWESOME and you can listen to the sweet beats from Goat Simulator 3 while you play it.

Other places you can find my musings…

• Psychgeist, my YouTube channel dedicated to the science of digital games. Subscribing is FREE and is the easiest way to support my work by increasing engagement and making the algorithm happy.

• Socials: BlueSky, for those who have migrated over, LinkedIn, if that is more your style, I am also on TikTok (apparently)

• Personal Website, for more about my research and upcoming events. Which I recently updated! Take a look if you haven’t been there in a while

• Did you know I published a series of children’s books? Tales from Cloud Canyon was successfully kickstarted (as Pragmatic Princess) in 2019, raising $25,000 in 30 days. I have since expanded the universe, added new stories and characters, and made them all free to download as e-books and audio books. You can read/listen/learn about them all here.

In one game, you struggle to find a reporting category that fits what you want to report. You read the list twice, looking for the thing that actually happened. It isn’t there. You close the menu.

In another it’s there, technically, but first you have to say whether this happened in text chat or voice, and then choose between “offensive language” and “offensive content” and you honestly don’t know, because a person said a thing to you and neither of those phrases describes that.

In a third, you are met with a flurry of options. Too many, in a way. Was that hate speech? Harassment? A threat? It was arguably all three. You pick one and hope somebody downstream sorts it out.

Three games. The same words said to you. Three different answers about what just happened (and in one of them, the answer is that apparently nothing worth reporting happened at all).

The obvious read on my kind-of-but-not-really-hypothetical scenario is that the industry hasn’t standardized their reporting tools. Which is true, but kind of lets everyone off the hook as “no shared taxonomy” sounds like a coordination problem nobody in particular is responsible for. But the longer I’ve spent thinking about this, the more I think this is not that because before you get to whether two companies agree with each other, there’s a stranger question sitting there:

Does even any single company agree with itself?

Open a studio’s code of conduct. Then open that same studio’s report menu. Read them side by side. In every case I’ve looked at, those two documents do not align.

Policy names more harms than a menu can express

Nearly every studio and platform (that I have observed) has a community code of conduct more detailed than its report menu. That is, their policy routinely names harms the reporting menu can’t express, either because there’s no button at all or because one button is holding several categories.

Three examples:
(do note that these systems get updated constantly, so treat this as a snapshot rather than a permanent record and the pattern is the point, not any one company)

Rockstar’s community guidelines name violent extremism explicitly, under its own heading: glorification or promotion of real-world terrorist, extremist, or criminal organizations and their ideologies. But Red Dead Online’s in-game report menu offers four options: Cheating, Abusive Chat, Disruptive Behavior, Offensive Content. There is no way to report the thing the policy specifically prohibits. Unless it is offensive content? Or maybe it is disruptive behavior? You see the problem here. The commitment exists in the document and nowhere in the pipeline that would let anyone act on it.

2K’s code of conduct prohibits content that’s illegal, offensive, lewd, or otherwise harmful, and then names eight things: nudity, profanity, racism, hate speech, misogyny, self-harm, exploitation, abuse. NBA 2K’s report menu has four buttons: Offensive Language, Offensive Content, Boosting, Cheating/Exploiting. You pick a category, pick a name off a list of everyone in proximity, and the report fires. No confirmation step, no detail field. Also, it is notable that every one of those eight harms listed in their policy is a social harm but their menu only has two buttons that could plausibly hold them.

Blizzard’s in-game code of conduct names hate speech and discriminatory language as inappropriate, and says threatening or harassing another player is never acceptable regardless of the words used. Four distinct things, plainly separated. Overwatch 2’s report flow offers a handful of categories, each with subcategories underneath: Inappropriate Communication, Inappropriate Name, Cheating, and Gameplay Sabotage (other sources also indicate they have an Emergency category but I have not been able to confirm that is new or old information?).

Cheating separates hacking from boosting. Behavior separates going AFK, intentionally feeding, blocking team progress, and griefing. There are four named ways to be a bad teammate. However, Inappropriate Communication separates text chat, voice chat, and spam. Two of those three are not behaviors. They’re channels. Hate speech, a threat, and sustained harassment (three things the policy explicitly distinguishes) arrive as the same object, sorted only by whether they were typed or spoken.

This is a studio that builds precise categories when it decides a harm warrants them. It did it six times over for different ways of playing badly. But the one place it didn’t is the harm players encounter most.

In every case the policy is more sophisticated than the instrument that is meant to implement it.

It’s not just what gets expressed. It’s what always gets left out.

So far I’ve been describing what gets left out - the policy names more harms than the menu can hold, and things fall off in the translation. If that were the whole story, the fix would be easy… just add more options.

But this is not the whole story. The harms that fall off aren’t a random selection and the ones that survive don’t all survive equally intact.

Jiang and colleagues (2026) ran an automated analysis of codes of conduct across 9,500+ multiplayer titles on Steam. Only about 350 (roughly 4%) had a retrievable, valid code of conduct at all, with availability concentrated among high-profile, well-resourced titles averaging ten times more player reviews than the typical multiplayer game. And among the codes that did exist, gameplay-mechanic violations showed the highest levels of specificity, while interpersonal harms (harassment, hate, discrimination) showed the lowest.

This means there are actually two mismatches running at once:

A vertical mismatch (breadth): This is the loss between layers. That is, the code of conduct names more harms than the menu can express. Eight becomes four. Resolution lost in translation from document to instrument.

A horizontal mismatch (depth). This is the loss inside each layer. That is, gameplay violations get described more precisely than interpersonal ones. That’s true of the policies and also true of the reporting menus.

Put them together and you get the shape of the problem. Interpersonal harm starts with less detail in the policy, and then loses more of it in the compression to the menu. It gets degraded twice. Gameplay harm arrives largely intact, because it had more detail to begin with and because the menu was built to hold it.

Using NBA 2K as an example again. Half of their four-button reporting menu is competitive integrity, and the eight social harms named in the policy collapse into the two buttons left over.

This unevenness isn’t just about being untidy. Romhanyi, Wells and Steinkuehler (2026) surveyed 602 young adult players (across games) and found that almost everyone had seen harm in games — 98.3% reported witnessing toxicity in online games, and 93.9% reported being targeted by it. The most frequent items, for bystanders and victims alike, were trolling and griefing, offensive names, purposeful embarrassment, harassment. So the everyday stuff is not the long tail. It is the distribution (while doxing, stalking, and swatting sat near the floor of the scale). And it’s precisely the material that arrives at the menu already thin in the policy and then gets compressed into “Offensive Language” and “Offensive Content” — two buttons carrying the highest-volume harm category in the game, while competitive integrity gets half the menu to itself.

That’s the volume argument. But it is the norms argument that worries me more.

Social harm isn’t just the most common thing that happens in your game. It’s the thing that teaches everyone what your game is. And the same study found something uncomfortable about how that teaching works: bystander exposure was associated with only one of the four responses the study measured — social withdrawal. Not confronting. Not reporting. Not leaving. Just going quiet. Witnessing toxicity didn’t push people toward doing something about it; it pushed them out of the conversation while the game carried on around them. The authors are careful (this work is cross-sectional, so read it as a pattern rather than a causal chain) but their reading is that repeated witnessing may reinforce the bystander effect rather than erode it. Watching it happen teaches you to stay quiet the next time it happens.

Now put the report menu into that picture. The bystander who goes quiet is a bystander who found no other available move. They witnessed something, and the two channels available to them were confront the person themselves (which the data says most people won’t) or file it. And filing it means opening a menu that either doesn’t name what they saw or offers a bucket so vague it reads as a shrug.

The menu is the low-cost, low-risk action available to a witness. It’s the one form of bystander intervention that doesn’t require standing up in voice chat and taking the heat. When it can’t express what happened, the only remaining option is the one we already know people default to.

Which means a menu that compresses social harm isn’t just under-measuring it. It’s removing the cheapest available alternative to silence, in the exact category where silence does the most damage to the culture of the space.

The report menu is the code of conduct

Community codes of conduct are effective proactive interventions for harms in games (we will talk about that more in a minute). And, louder for those in the back, your report menu is your code of conduct (or at least, it is supposed to be).

A community code of conduct is a policy document; the report menu is the enacted version of that code. Every option in that dropdown is a behavior your company has decided is worth naming, worth routing, worth acting on. Every harm your policy names that isn’t in the dropdown is a sentence that didn’t survive. It exists in the document and nowhere in the machinery.

Why reporting flows are critical governance documents

Codes of conduct get studied as governance - norm-setting devices, enforcement scaffolding, public statements of values. Reporting flows almost never make it into that conversation. They should, because the flow is where the code of conduct actually gets implemented.

Three reasons that reporting flows may be the most consequential governance surface a studio owns.

1. It’s the most read governance document you have

This year I published a paper that outlines the EFFECT Framework, which are guidelines for developing effective codes of conduct. In this framework I put accessibility (Easy to find and understand) first, because nothing else in a code of conduct matters if nobody reads it. Accessibility fails in two independent ways: cognitively, if people can’t understand it once they find it, and physically, if they can’t find it at all.

Codes of conduct tend to fail the physical test…. pretty badly. Böhme and Köpsell (2010) tracked more than 80,000 users and found people spend about eight seconds on EULAs before clicking through. Grace and colleagues (2022) found that of 60 popular multiplayer games, 22% had no code of conduct on their website and another 32% buried theirs inside EULAs and terms of service. And unlike privacy policies, which reliably sit in a header or footer, codes of conduct have no standard placement at all.

But nobody skims a report menu. You open it at the exact moment something has happened, you’re motivated, and you read every line because you need one of them to fit. It’s the one governance surface players navigate to deliberately, unprompted, at the moment they care most. You cannot buy that kind of attention. We already have it and we’re not using it as effectively as we could be.

2. It teaches players what counts

The menu is an injunctive norm — a statement of what this community holds should not happen, delivered in one of the few formats players actually read. When it offers five named subtypes of cheating and one vague bucket for everything social, it communicates something quite precise: we take this seriously, and we’re vague about that.

The absence teaches too. A player who opens the menu and finds nothing that fits learns that what happened to them isn’t the kind of thing this place recognizes. That lesson sticks, and it generalizes to the next game and the one after that.

3. Norms do more work than enforcement

Two findings that should change how studios budget. In work on Minecraft servers, community codes of conduct predicted toxicity rates better than top-down moderation alone, even across different communities on the same platform. And Fang and colleagues (2023) expected more rules to suppress participation and found the opposite: values-centered rules were associated with a 79% increase in user interaction, content-restriction rules with 57%, and comprehensive rules with no drop at all. Restrictions get read as clarifying rather than constraining. People contribute more when they know where the edges are.

Which makes a menu that names harm clearly a behavioral intervention, not just a measurement instrument. Low lift, proactive, reaches everyone.

The other thing we need to keep in mind is that somebody is already absorbing the gap between your community codes of conduct and reporting tools… the digital leadership.

This is the piece that got me here in the first place.

Community managers and moderators are the frontline stewards of everything above. Earlier this year, I published a paper called The CHEER Framework: A New Approach to Assessing Digital Community Health in Games (apparently, this year is the year of the acronym for me). In this paper, I argued that digital leadership maps onto all three pillars of community health and should be treated as co-interpreters of the data rather than just collectors of it. In the DLC Leadership Program, we’ve been building training for this group on the premise that community and safety leaders are the undertrained third pillar of the trust and safety stack.

What that work keeps surfacing is when the menu doesn’t match the policy, digital leaders absorb the contradiction. They’re who a player comes to after finding nothing that fits. They’re the one who has to say “I know, there’s nowhere to put that.” Player expectations research bears this out from the other side as players don’t want leaders telling them what to do, but they very much expect them to keep the space safe. Hard mandate to deliver when the reporting instrument silently disagrees with the values you’re upholding.

Now at this point if you are still asking “But does the menu really matter that much?”... I have one last objection worth taking seriously. Frumkin and Cahill’s analysis of Call of Duty’s player safety work (devcom 2025) found roughly 79% of players flagged by proactive detection had no associated player report at all, and only about a quarter of player reports contained actionable evidence. Player reporting is a small, noisy channel that misses most violations and offloads the documentation burden onto people who were just harmed. If you want the intervention that catches the most bad behavior, it isn’t the dropdown. But detection yield is the wrong measure. Proactive detection finds what it was built to find. Player reports are how you learn about the harms nobody has built a classifier for yet, and the menu is the label space every downstream system inherits. And it’s the only place in the entire stack where the person harmed says what happened, in their own words. Everything else in trust and safety is inference about players. This is the one input that’s testimony from them, which means what the menu can’t express, they can’t say.

What an aligned version of a reporting flow could look like

If the menu is the enacted code of conduct, then the fix isn’t “add more options.” It’s making the two documents say the same thing. I won’t claim to have all the answers, but I’m happy to give us all a place to start.

(My suggestions here drawn from the conceptual work done by many others in the space, including the Thriving in Games Group (formerly the Fair Play Alliance) Disruption and Harms in Online Gaming Framework)

Please note that these categories are not listed in any particular order and it may make more sense to have them listed in one way or another depending on your game.

A proposal like this can read as a demand for uniformity, and that is NOT what I’m arguing. The goal is not uniformity. What makes this idea workable is a fixed core and a flexible layer.

The core encodes harms that hold regardless of genre. A death threat is a death threat in a farming sim and in a tactical shooter. Grooming is grooming in a racing game and in a sandbox.

The extension layer is where genre reality lives. Gameplay sabotage matters in Dead by Daylight in a way it doesn’t in a co-op crafting game. Intentional feeding is meaningful in a MOBA and meaningless in a battle royale. Studios should absolutely build with this in mind as a taxonomy that can’t express what actually goes wrong in your game is one your players will route around.

What makes it work is that extensions nest underneath core categories. They never replace one and never sit beside it at the top level. “Intentional feeding” is a child of Competitive Integrity. “Taking the game hostage” is another child of Competitive Integrity. The core meaning stays stable no matter how much genre-specific detail you pile underneath.

This is the same principle that runs through everything I’ve argued about codes of conduct: they work best when tailored to the mechanics, demographics, and interaction patterns of a specific community rather than applied as a universal template. Context matters. It’s in the framework for a reason.

But context-specific doesn’t mean everything is negotiable. There is a floor, and we already agree on where it is. Nobody in this industry is arguing that grooming is fine, or that credible threats are fine, or that recruitment for violent extremism is fine. We wrote it into our codes of conduct. We say it out loud at GDC every year but haven’t necessarily wired it into the thing people actually use.

There is one other thing that I would add that is not deliberately not on that list, but rather sitting adjacent to it… that is, a category along the lines of “I’m worried about someone.” A separate, visually distinct, non-punitive path for self-harm and crisis concern. It doesn’t go to enforcement. It goes to a wellbeing workflow. Someone telling another player to kill themselves and someone saying they want to die. The first is abuse. The second is a person in crisis. GTA Online files “Threats of Suicide or Self-Harm” as a sub-type of Abusive Communication, which is a framing in which the taxonomy has quietly decided the person in crisis is a rule-breaker. That decision determines which team sees it, how fast, and whether what comes back is a resource or a sanction.

Roblox shows one way to handle it. Their Community Standards give “Suicide, Self Injury, and Harmful Behavior” its own named category, sitting alongside child exploitation and violent extremism rather than nested under abuse. And since the July redesign, filing a report can immediately surface guidance and helpline links while the report is still in the queue. Support and enforcement run on separate clocks, which is right, because the person who needs the helpline isn’t waiting on a moderation verdict.

A side note on the illegal-harm categories

Two of the categories that I propose above as core categories, Violent Extremism & Terrorism, and Real-World Criminal Activity, may feel out of place to some people. The objection isn’t about design. It’s something like “ Isn’t that a bit much for a game?” or “Do we even need to collect it?” (I’ve heard both said to me).

The short answer is, yes. And also, you are probably already obliged. The DSA requires platforms to give people a way to flag illegal content and act on it. The Online Safety Act sets duties around priority offenses, terrorism among them. Applicability depends on your service and where your players are, but the direction of travel isn’t ambiguous.

There has been plenty of research from groups like the Extremism and Gaming Research Network, the ADL, and various other researchers (including my own work), that supports and justifies why we should have a reporting category for extremism/terrorism in games.

Some platforms address terrorism/extremism explicitly in their policies and have already built in a related type reporting flow into their systems (e.g., “dangerous or illegal activities” category of some kind). So whatever the objection is here, it isn’t practicality.

Also, do notice what the pull-away-this-feels-uncomfortable instinct is telling you. Nobody looks at five named subtypes of cheating and asks whether that’s a bit much for a game. The intuition that aimbot-versus-wallhack granularity is proportionate while a terrorism category is excessive — that intuition is the horizontal mismatch, showing up as a gut feeling rather than a taxonomy. It’s the clearest evidence I can offer that the asymmetry isn’t a resourcing accident. It’s a sense of what we have decided is normal (and/or acceptable) in our gaming spaces. Good news here is we have the power to change that.

I should clarify one thing about how these categories get surfaced. A category labeled “Illegal Content” is not going to be the most effective way forward as it is asking players to assess the law before they can file, and it becomes a dumping ground where harassment, doxing, gambling, drugs, fraud and piracy all land together. But a category that describes observable behavior in plain language (such as someone is recruiting for a violent group) asks nothing of the sort. The system itself can work out what that means legally, in which jurisdiction, and where it goes. A category can be named for a behavior that happens to be illegal but it should not be named for its legal status.

Last but not least (I promise I’ll get off this soapbox in a minute) but extremism earns its own slot rather than sitting under threats, because recruitment isn’t threatening in shape. It’s often warm, welcoming, and patient, which is exactly what makes it work. Filing it under “threats” means the menu is looking for the wrong kind of thing entirely. It’s also the category most likely to be missing.

A label isn’t a category. A category is a label plus a definition.

A shared core isn’t a shared list of words. It’s a shared list of words with definitions attached, because the words alone do far less work than they appear to.

“Harassment” is the obvious case. Two studios can both put it in their menu, both act in good faith, and be counting different behaviors. So the unit that gets standardized isn’t the label. It’s the label plus:

• A one-line definition in plain language (what this covers)

• The boundary (what it doesn’t cover)

• Worked examples on both sides of that line

Xbox has already done this, and it’s among the best I’ve seen. Their Community Standards define harassment against its nearest neighbor (i.e., trash talk is banter about the game that keeps competition healthy; harassment is behavior that’s personalized, disruptive, or likely to make someone feel unwelcome or unsafe). Then they draw the line explicitly (trash talk doesn’t include threats, real-life intimidation, or personal insults based on identity) and show examples of both. Bungie’s expanded Community Standards do something similar throughout.

They’re genuinely good. But again, live in a policy document, on a website, in a section most players will never open. They never make it into the thing people actually read.

Definitions also make the horizontal mismatch I mentioned earlier impossible to ignore. Sit down and write a one-line definition, a boundary, and two examples for every category in your menu. If the cheating definitions come out crisp and the harassment definition comes out as a gesture at a feeling, you’ve found the asymmetry in your game or platform.

Including “Other” is important

In the end, the way we approach our reporting categories and definitions should be living community tools rather than static legal documents. Every taxonomy is a snapshot of the harms we understood when we wrote it, which makes it structurally out of date with respect to whatever is happening right now. The gap between a harm emerging and a category existing for it can be a gap, which could be measured in literal years, because the category gets added after the harm becomes a news story, a regulatory inquiry, or a lawsuit. By then it isn’t emerging. It’s established.

“Other” shortens this window if we treat it as an instrument rather than a sinkhole where things get lost and never come out.

We should be tracking the “other” as a share, not a count. A rising proportion means the taxonomy is drifting away from lived experience, and it rises before anyone can tell you what the new thing is. Also, a spike in Other paired with a dip in an adjacent category often means a new harm is being misfiled into an old label, or a label’s meaning has shifted underneath you.

Also consider clustering the free text on a fixed cadence. Quarterly, minimum. You’re not looking for individual reports; you’re looking for a cluster that didn’t exist last quarter. Also, set a promotion threshold in advance. If a cluster persists two consecutive quarters, it becomes a candidate subcategory. Deciding the rule ahead of time keeps it from becoming a recurring debate about whether the thing is real yet.

Lastly, escalate across titles. The lack of consistency in reporting categories (even core ones) across titles from the same studio is honestly… baffling. The same cluster appearing across multiple titles in a portfolio isn’t a title problem. It’s an ecosystem-level shift, and the highest-value early warning signal in the system (remember ecosystem health is a core component of understanding our spaces).

And when a new harm gets promoted into the menu, it goes into the code of conduct too. That’s the loop. Otherwise you’ve recreated the mismatch in the other direction, a menu catching things your policy never claimed to care about.

Some other design principles to consider

I’m not a designer. But I am a researcher, and researchers are good at noticing patterns. Here are some worth considering when aligning your code of conduct with your reporting categories:

1. Behavior first, surface second. Ask what happened before you ask where. Channel (voice, text, avatar, UGC, DM, gameplay) is metadata the system captures automatically or asks second. Never a gate the player passes through first, and never a substitute for naming the behavior.

2. Players never make legal determinations. The player describes the behavior. The system handles the law.

3. Non-criminal harms are also a priority. Harassment, cheating, and griefing aren’t lesser categories to be swept into “other.” They’re the overwhelming majority of what players actually encounter, and they get top-level positioning.

4. Granularity parity. If you have five named subtypes of cheating and one bucket for everything social, that’s a statement about what you value.

5. Every category on every surface. If you can be harassed in voice, you can report harassment in voice, with the same label you’d use in text.

6. The menu must be able to express the policy. Read your code of conduct. Count the harms it names. Open your report menu and count the options. If the second number is smaller, the difference is the set of commitments you made in public and built no way to act on.

Also, I know that earlier I offered ten top-level categories and that may be more than fits comfortably on your UI. If so, you can consider an adaptive flow that skips irrelevant questions. This way, the average path gets shorter while the underlying framework gets richer.

And remember that none of this is fixed in place. Report menus can be changed, they do get changed, and should be revisited and updated.

One example: Roblox spent a long time with an in-game flow that gated you behind a “Type of Abuse” question offering two options (text chat or avatar) while the reasons listed underneath included things like cheating and username, which are neither. A developer laid it out with screenshots on Roblox’s own developer forum in May. By then the fix was already underway. Roblox had announced a reporting redesign in their February Safety Snapshot , which included simpler language, a step-by-step flow, and improved screenshot submission. Their worked example was replacing “profanity” with “swearing.”

On July 1st their Chief Safety Officer published the next stage. Players may not know which Community Standard was broken, they wrote, “and they shouldn’t have to.” The new flow adapts its questions to the type of report and skips the irrelevant ones, and reports now generate a notification when they result in action. A further update in Q3 will let players follow up on reports they’ve already filed. Notably, the flow’s plain language was pulled from Roblox’s Youth Guide to Community Standards, co-designed with their Teen Council.

A large platform made the instrument speak the policy’s language, in stages, with receipts.

Moving forward

So now that you’ve made it through all of these words, how do you get started?

Open your own code of conduct and your own report menu side by side. Count the harms named in one. Count the options offered in the other. Then write a one-line definition and two examples for each.

(also, while you are there maybe audit your community code of conduct too)

You can do that this afternoon. You don’t need anyone’s permission, you don’t need a budget, and you don’t need the rest of the industry to move first. You just need to be willing to look at the answer.

Then make your portfolio consistent. If a single publisher ships titles in the same year where one has a full child-safety taxonomy, one has none, and one has four buttons and no confirmation dialog, that’s an internal alignment problem and it’s solvable this quarter.

The categories I offer above are just a starting point, not scripture. Argue with them. Tell me where the seams are, tell me what your moderation queue sees that this doesn’t hold, tell me if nine is better than ten.

Just remember that your report menu is your code of conduct. It’s the version with consequences attached, the version players actually read, and the version that quietly teaches everyone what this community thinks is worth caring about.

Most studios are running two documents that disagree. The good news is that’s not a coordination problem, or a standards problem, or somebody else’s problem.

It’s a dropdown.

Research & News

What We’re Getting Wrong About Teens and Tech

When I tell you I’ve been waiting for this TED talk… I’ve been waiting. This new TED talk from Candice Odgers makes the case that the “phones are destroying a generation” narrative doesn’t match the data: violence, alcohol use, and teen pregnancy are all at historic lows, and her own (and others’) longitudinal research doesn’t find social media to be a major driver of mental health problems for most teens. Her pushback on bans: we’ve already pushed teens out of public spaces, and banning them from the online spaces where they socialize (and sometimes escape harm at home) punishes victims rather than fixing the actual problem. Her asks instead: more counselors, more belonging spaces (on- and offline), and less shaming of an actually pretty resilient generation. You can watch it here.

Why are Thin Bodies the Default in Games?

One of the best things I read this month came from Nicole Carpenter over at Teen Vogue digging into the long-running conversation about body diversity (or the lack of it) in mainstream game character design. Worth a read. Actually, worth two. You can check it out here.

Video Game Ratings Icons Aren’t Enough Anymore

This interesting piece came from Crossplay / Patrick Klepek’s Substack this month. It is a guest essay on how ESRB/PEGI ratings are increasingly outmatched by platforms like Roblox, where “Diverse Content: Discretion Advised” is doing a lot of heavy lifting for millions of user-generated games. Argues parents are already turning to direct research (YouTube play throughs, Common Sense Media, etc.) over ratings boards. It is well worth a read, and you can read it here.

The Mayor of London Pledges Free Gaming Access in Youth Clubs

Sadiq Khan’s £30m “Youth Lates” investment (the biggest-ever youth club investment in London) will fund consoles, TVs, and Wi-Fi upgrades so every late-night youth club in the city can offer gaming. Announced alongside a new London–Tokyo indie game accelerator (J-StarX) with JETRO. London is now the third-largest games hub globally, behind only LA and San Francisco. As if I needed another reason to want to live there. You can read about this new initiative, here.

Laughter and Play are Key to Flourishing in Adolescents

A longitudinal study of 22,000 adolescents looking at school-based practices associated with flourishing found playfulness (such as laughing with peers, teachers using humor, regular social interaction with staff ) rose to the top of ~50 practices studied, ahead of more traditional academic interventions. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, play is central to a life worth living (throughout the lifespan).

Three minutes of me sounding like a broken record

“This cannot continue”

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty sent an all-staff email (via Xbox Wire) bluntly laying out the division’s “harsh realities”: $20B spent on studio investments over five years (not counting the $69B Activision Blizzard deal), declining annual revenue, and component costs running 4x higher than last fall (that last one being personally felt by me every time I think it is time to buy a new PC). You can read about it here.

Compulsion Games (Montreal) Reportedly Being Shut Down

Only a few weeks after South of Midnight won seven Canadian Game Awards including Game of the Year. Per Bloomberg, Double Fine and Ninja Theory may be at risk too; all three are reportedly trying to negotiate buyouts to spin out independently. You can read about it here.

…And Bungie Layoffs

This month, it was announced that Bungie has laid off nearly 300 employees. The layoffs never end. I think I’ve had a post about mass layoffs in the gaming industry in every single newsletter for the last… year? Two years? When will it end.

This seems like a good time to re-share the GDC 2026State of the Industry Report where devs share their thoughts and discuss the impact that this never ending cycle of layoffs is causing.

Pokémon Go Scans Quietly Trained the Navigation Tech Now Headed Into Military Drones

So uh… about that Pokemon. An article from DroneXL this month put out a WILD story about how ~30 billion player-submitted environmental scans from Pokémon Go became the training data for Niantic Spatial’s Visual Positioning System are now being fused with defense contractor Vantor’s aerial navigation tech for GPS-denied military drone operations. This is a great case study in “I guess I need to read the Terms of Service” as it turns out players agreed to broad licensing terms years ago with no idea where the data would end up. You can read more about it here.

The rise of LGBTQ+ Censorship in Games (and to do about it)

This month, we got a special piece from Video Games Industry Memo, highlighting a new report mapping how state-level censorship of LGBTQ+ content spreads through platform friction, self-censorship by businesses, and harassment campaigns — with a “contagion effect” rippling out from countries with strict censorship laws to the rest of the global games industry. You can read it here.

Games are Shaping Climate Policy

This month, a new report came out from the European Commission about how games are helping to shape climate policy. I love this story because it is one of the many unexpected ways in which games are catalyzing change in unexpected ways. You can learn more about this project here.

NEW RESEARCH: Measuring “Community Hhealth”

This month, I’m thrilled to be sharing a new publication from yours truly! I’ve been talking about measuring community health for as long as I can remember. Well now, we’ve got a place to start. SO EXCITED to share that this paper with you - The CHEER Framework: A New Approach to Assessing Digital Community Health in Games. You can read it here.

NEW RESEARCH: To CombatToxicity we Need to Consider Game Design, Player Behavior, and Community Norms

New research just confirmed something digital leaders have known for years: the problems aren’t just about what players say to each other. They’re about what the systems around them fail to do.

Researchers analyzed over 1,100 player posts across League of Legends, Marvel Rivals, CS:GO, and Rocket League. Some of what they found was specific to each game (e.g., smurfing, role conflicts, hero bans). But two patterns showed up in every single game studied, regardless of genre, audience, or rating: moderation that didn’t work and the emotional toll of online hostility and misogyny. Not a fluke of one community. A pattern. Real progress means pairing better systems with people trained to support players through the emotional and interpersonal side of harm. The platforms can build better reporting tools. Someone still has to be the person players turn to when those tools aren’t enough. (which just so happens to be the gap the DLC Leadership Program exists to close). You can read the full research article here.

NEW RESEARCH: Gamers are More Inclusive Than the General Public

A new analysis of 77,000+ respondents across the MRI-Simmons national consumer survey (2012, 2016, 2020 — bracketing Gamergate) found gamers, shooter players, and Xbox Live users all skew more inclusive than the general public on gender roles, tolerance, and equality, not less. The authors are careful to note this doesn’t mean hostile pockets of gaming culture don’t exist — just that they’re not representative of gamers as a whole, and the loud minority may be getting outsized attention.

NEW RESEARCH: A Computational Model of Reward Learning and Habits on Social Media

Cambridge and Stanford researchers built a computational model of real Twitter/X posting data from nearly 2,700 users (with a preregistered replication) and found that posting behavior isn’t driven by one single process. It’s a hybrid of reinforcement learning and habit, and the mix differs by who you are, with younger users and women lean more on reinforcement learning (adaptively chasing social rewards), while older users and men are more habitual. Heavier posters showed more habit-driven behavior overall.

What I find interesting here is what this does to the popular “we’re all just reward-driven” story about social media. The usual narrative is pretty techno-deterministic: the platform exploits a dopamine loop, and that loop hooks everyone roughly the same way — differences between people are just noise around one universal mechanism. This study pushes back on that. By modeling the actual cognitive process instead of just measuring time-on-app, the researchers find two qualitatively different mechanisms at work (reinforcement learning vs. habit) and which one dominates tracks with who you are (age, gender, posting frequency), not just how much you use the platform. If social media really “rewired” everyone the same way, you’d expect to see the same mechanism operating at different intensities. Instead you get different mechanisms entirely. That’s much closer to “the technology interacts with whatever cognitive style you bring to it” than “the technology imposes a uniform outcome on whoever uses it” — i.e., evidence against technodeterminism, not for it. (If you want the deeper dive on what technodeterminism actually means and why it matters, the Black Mirror chapter of The Psychgeist of Pop Culture is a great entry point.)

NEW RESEARCH: Researching Forms of Mixed, Unclear and Fluid Extremism: A Practical Toolkit for Researchers

This one is for my extremism researchers… Liverpool’s CUPMFE (Conceptualising, Understanding, and Preventing Mixed Forms of Extremism) project has launched a toolkit for researchers navigating the safety and wellbeing risks of studying extremism, including the added pressure early-career researchers face balancing online visibility with personal safety. Built collaboratively by a team with diverse intersectional identities and lived experience of those risks.

NEW RESEARCH: Trust, Play, and Platforms: Sharing Lessons for Safer Digital Spaces

A new white paper from NYU Stern came out this month drawing on a symposium co-hosted with CDT and American University, comparing Trust & Safety governance across gaming and social media. Key takeaways: play is a human right (per the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child); rehabilitative moderation beats punitive moderation; generative AI is straining existing T&S frameworks in both industries; age verification alone doesn’t protect kids; and the most pressing harms now move fluidly across games, social media, livestreaming, and messaging — so the industries need to be talking to each other. You can read it here.

NEW BOOK ALERT: Restoring Childhood: How to Set Kids Free in the Age of Anxiety.

An announcement for this new upcoming book came across my feed this month, from Peter Gray (coming Sept 15) Gray’s thesis lines up with the Odgers talk above: he argues kids aren’t anxious because of social media, they’re retreating to social media because they’ve lost agency, autonomy, and unsupervised play in the real world. This was an instant pre-order for me… if nothing else a palette cleanser from the endless conversations about the Anxious Generation.

NEW BOOK ALERT: Cultural Game Studies: Critical Approaches.

A new edited collection came out this month from Frans Mäyrä & Raine Koskimaa that takes a comprehensive new edited volume situating games and play as cultural phenomena — covering player identity, game production cultures, preservation, wellbeing and game design, and competitive gaming, among other themes. You can check it out here.

ICYMI: Psychgeist

There have been some exciting things happening over here in the land of Psychgeist.

I attended the Canadian Games Studies Association conference in Montreal this month to talk about all things Psychgeist (joined by a couple of my favorite Psychgeist editors!). We chatted about the publishing pipeline, why I love working with Play Story Press so much, and answered a bunch of questions from the audience about what it is like publishing scientific and scientific-but-for-non-scientific-audience type books.

This month I published a new essay as part of the Center for Democracy & Technology’s new series on trust & safety in gaming. The piece, “How Civil Society Can Better Engage with Online Gaming Communities on Trust and Safety,” makes the case for something I care about deeply: the volunteer moderators, guild leaders, and server admins doing essential safety work every day deserve real training, recognition, and institutional support - and civil society already has the expertise to help provide it. It also gives a shout-out to the work we’re building with the DLC Leadership Program as a first step toward exactly that kind of structured, evidence-based pathway for digital leaders.

The whole collection is worth a read as I’m in great company, with pieces covering everything from prosocial design to privacy-preserving moderation to child safety. Give it a read.

The DLC Leadership Program continues to grow! In case you don’t know, the DLC is the first formal credentialing pathway for digital community leaders, now with international pilot reach and support from Riot Games, Roblox, Keywords Studios, the Christchurch Call, and Arizona State University. Still actively looking for organizational partners to help co-develop curriculum - reach out if that’s you. You can learn more about the program here.

And if you are interested in it’s origin story, I talked about that in the bonus newsletter this month (which you can find here).

Two open calls for The Psychgeist of Pop Culture:

• Animal Crossing, edited by George Farmer and Bethany Thomas

• Cyberpunk 2077, edited by Amelia Herbst

Both are part of the series I edit with Play Story Press, exploring iconic pop culture through a psychological lens — open to academics, practitioners, and fans alike, with a particular welcome for first-time and underrepresented contributors. Check the links above for submission deadlines and topic prompts.

The Psychgeist YouTube channel continues to grow! I’m nearing a subscriber milestone! If you aren’t subscribing yet, it takes two clicks and VIOLA! More brains and games instantly added to your timeline. To give you a sense of what you can expect there, here is one of my latest shorts that is… uh… very relatable (to me that is - haha - and maybe you too?)

…and don’t forget about the new Psychgeist podcast “I Have Thoughts On…”. There will be a new episode in June! You can find the playlist here.

What I’m reading: Power Play by George E. Osborn. To be fully transparent, I had received an advanced digital copy to peruse but this one is worth picking up now that it is officially out in the world. In the book, George argues that video games have become a genuine geopolitical battleground: Saudi Arabia buying up games businesses for reputation-laundering, Russia funding game development to spread disinformation about Ukraine, Steve Bannon borrowing tactics from online gaming communities to help elect Trump.

And I’m pretty sure some really cool person described this book as “Essential reading for anyone trying to understand where culture, technology, and power collide.” (yes, it was me)

What I’m watching: The Amazing Digital Circus (Gooseworx, Glitch Productions). This show… is an enigma to me. I first came across it a good five or so years ago when I caught it on YouTube and was… intrigued (I think is the right word). But then it fell off my radar (I think there were only two episodes at the time) and re-emerged recently in full force with a full Netflix season and finale movie (which yes, I did see in the theatres with my kids). This show is strange but as a psychologist it is kind of like one of those things you just can’t look away from. I found it to be unexpectedly psychological and philosophical. I’m not even sure I can recommend it to people (certainly I recommend it to psychologists) but I can say that the show (and the finale in particular) has stuck with me for weeks after it ended.

What I’m playing: Moderator Mayhem (Engine) and Trust and Safety Tycoon (Techdirt). Remember these gems? I have recently rediscovered them. For my trust and safety and community folks out there, highly recommend (though Moderator Mayhem is very stressful… but I think that is the point).

You can find Moderator Mayhem here and Trust and Safety Tycoon here.

Other places you can find my musings…

• Psychgeist, my YouTube channel dedicated to the science of digital games. Subscribing is FREE and is the easiest way to support my work by increasing engagement and making the algorithm happy.

• Socials: BlueSky, for those who have migrated over, LinkedIn, if that is more your style, I am also on TikTok (apparently)

• Personal Website, for more about my research and upcoming events. Which I recently updated! Take a look if you haven’t been there in a while

• Did you know I published a series of children’s books? Tales from Cloud Canyon was successfully kickstarted (as Pragmatic Princess) in 2019, raising $25,000 in 30 days. I have since expanded the universe, added new stories and characters, and made them all free to download as e-books and audio books. You can read/listen/learn about them all here.

For me, these conversations started at GDC 2023. I was hosting a series of roundtables with Dr. Elizabeth Kilmer, one of our groups was made up of digital leaders in games — community managers at studios large and small, heads of communities with 10+ years of experience, brand-new leaders one year in, and everyone in between. We were there to talk about the intersection of games and extremism (I promise I'm fun at parties), but the most alarming thing I took away from those rooms had nothing to do with terrorism. It was the sheer lack of preparation these community leaders had been given for the roles they were expected to fill. Training for the people working at the community level of games (the social level, where players actually spend their time) was wildly inconsistent, and mostly nonexistent. These conversations lit the first spark of what would eventually become the DLC Leadership Program. Right idea, wrong time.

I found myself in these conversations once again in 2025. I was talking it through with a colleague when it hit me that nearly two years had passed and nothing had changed — the gap was exactly where I'd left it. So I did what any researcher would do… I went looking for more data. In September 2025, I surveyed 25 community managers and moderators in games to find out what the job actually demands. The answer? Far more than moderation and far far more than anyone is training them for.

• More than half had already faced a situation in their community they felt unprepared to handle.

• 82% had received no training in finding support for themselves.

• And while they rate their influence on community culture at 4.7 out of 5, they rate how valued they feel by their organizations at just 3.5.

It’s a profession doing critical, complex work (mostly alone) and it’s burning people out.

If you want to dig into the data, the full report is here (charts and all). And I wrote up what it all means, and what we built in response, in a fuller breakdown here.

But here’s the short version of what we did with it.

At some point, documenting a problem stops being enough. You have to try to fix it. So, I did... try (although, am arguably succeeding?).

I’ll be honest about how long it took, because the unglamorous part is worth saying out loud. The DLC Leadership Program was more than three years in the making. Not because the idea was particularly complicated. I mean, “train people to do their job and they’ll be better prepared to be able to do it effectively” is not a new idea. But, because finding the right home, the right partners, and frankly the right moment for something like this was genuinely hard. As you can imagine, finding funding for educational initiatives is, to put it gently, deeply unsexy work. The hard part was finding the people who believed training community leaders was worth investing in before there was a single graduate to point to.

But, I found them. And then I partnered up with Dr. Kelli Dunlap (which if you know her, you know that is always a great idea) and over the last eight months, I’ve had the incredible privilege of co-developing this program with her with the generous support of our founding partner, Shine a Light Gaming. We launched our pilot cohort in May and we’ve just closed it.

The full impact data is coming soon. But I’ll say this much now - every signal we have tells us we got it right. Leaders are learning. The training they’ve been asking for (evidence-based, practical, accessible) finally exists. And we didn't build it alone. Experts like Victoria Tran (Innersloth), Matt Soeth (Thriving in Games Group), Henry Adams (Resolver), Celia Hodent (ethicalgames.org), Ashley Blake (vrCave) and Maria Tamellini (GamerSafer) and partner organizations including Christchurch Call. They all lent their time and expertise to shape and teach it. That's what makes it something rare: training made for this community, by this community.

That’s the part I’m proudest of. Not that we built a program but that we built the one people actually needed - grounded in what they told us (yay science!) and taught by the people doing the work. It is a true community of practice.

If you want to see what we made or you lead a community yourself and want to check out the program and join the community, here’s where to go.

👉 Explore the program and join the waitlist → dlcleadership.org

Research & News

The Noisy Room

This month I came across a fantastic visualization of something we’ve been talking about for years - that the most disruptive/toxic people online (ahem, in games) are a strong but silent minority that significantly and detrimentally impact the rest of the community. I couldn’t summarize it better than my colleague Jan Van Bavel, so I will just reiterate what he said when he shared this resource:

In the context of gaming communities, this loud minority can have catastrophic impacts on engagement and the bottom line. Cue my 2024 GDC talk.

…and my 2026 one.

The GDC 2026 Vault is live (and we can see more talks than normal)!

The 2026 GDC talks have been added to the vault (and not just the ones on the advocacy track) which means it is time to catch up on all the talks I wasn’t able to see in real time. At the top of the list? Fleur Marty of Gearbox gave a GDC 2026 talk on the real cost of enabling toxic high-performers in game development studios, what she calls “brilliant jerks.” The talk covers how to recognize the warning signs, why tolerating this behavior damages culture and outcomes, and what to actually do about it.

Also, ICYMI I’m not going to miss another opportunity to plug my 2026 GDC talk. Yes it is about the ROI on T&S but also it features the official first public announcement of the DLC Leadership Program. This talk is also perhaps my greatest feat in crafting pretty slides.

OKRE & UKIE launch their united games impact framework

Charity firm OKRE and UK trade body Ukie have released a new report calling for the industry, government, and academia to close a significant gap in understanding how games shape everyday life. The framework maps 50+ sub-sectors, traces games-related activities through to social and economic outcomes, and lays groundwork for a full econometric model. If you work in policy or research advocacy, this is a framework worth knowing. You can find the report here.

Looking to build a career in cyberpsychology?

Professor Linda Kaye has a new book coming called Building a Career in Cyberpsychology, which will be covering consumer, health, forensic/investigative, and organizational cyberpsychology as career pathways. Worth flagging for students and early-career folks in this space. You can learn more here.

NEW RESEARCH: Most games do not have a code of conduct

A new preprint from researchers at the University of Edinburgh and NYU introduces CONDUCTIFY, a pipeline for analyzing Codes of Conduct (CoCs) across online multiplayer games at scale. Applied to Steam’s 9,586 multiplayer titles, they found CoCs available for just 350… meaning 96% of multiplayer games operate without one, despite growing regulatory pressure from the EU Digital Services Act and UK Online Safety Act.

Among the games that do have CoCs, harassment and hate speech are consistently addressed, but protections for children are often vague or absent (with only 24% of games even mentioning child-related content) and those that do tend to frame kids as content-exposure risks rather than social ones. The paper has real implications for how we think about safety infrastructure, not just what games say they prohibit, but how specific, enforceable, and audience-aware those policies actually are. You can read the article here.

NEW RESEARCH: Toxic gameplay is bad for self-esteem

New research examines the relationship between performance-contingent self-esteem and toxic communication in adolescent video game play, finding, unsurprisingly but importantly, that it’s a feedback loop. If kids tie their self-worth to how they perform, toxic environments hit harder, and toxic behavior becomes more likely.

This piece reminds me a lot of the one that came last year from Activision + CalTech looking at the contagion loop around toxicity in games.

NEW RESEARCH: The words you use, matter (…in game studies)

A new research piece makes the case for a more interdisciplinary vocabulary in games research arguing that the field needs shared theoretical language if it's going to build genuine cross-disciplinary knowledge rather than just adjacent silos talking past each other. I mean, PREACH. You can read it here.

NEW RESEARCH: New “Well Played” - Let’s get literary?

Well Played Vol. 15 No. 1 is out, and the theme is "Well Read Games", which really means a stellar collection essays doing close reading of games as texts, from Final Fantasy VII to Stardew Valley (and everything in between, yes even analog games). If you love the intersection of game criticism and literary theory (and if you're reading this, you probably do?), this one's for you. You can check it out here (open access!)

NEW RESEARCH: Let’s talk about (social media) addiction… again

A new preprint from researchers at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge, challenges one of the most popular framings in the digital wellbeing space: that social media use is neurobiologically analogous to substance addiction.

Across two preregistered experiments testing three neurocognitive signatures of addiction ( elevated wanting, wanting-liking dissociation, and devaluation insensitivity) participants showed none of the patterns you’d expect if TikTok were rewiring the brain the way cocaine does. The wanting-liking dissociation they did observe was driven by lower liking of TikTok (not higher wanting), which is essentially the inverse of what incentive sensitization theory would predict. Self-reported addiction scores were unrelated to any neurocognitive marker. The paper doesn’t argue that problematic social media use isn’t real or worth addressing but argues that the addiction lens may be misdirecting both our research and our interventions. You can read the piece here.

It is worth noting that the same arguments have been made about games for as long as I can literally remember… an argument I find so tedious and exacerbating that I made my acting debut to try and explain it

ICYMI: Psychgeist

Cambridge, York, London - oh my!

May meant transatlantic travel (any excuse to go back to the UK) which was wonderful both personally and professionally. I was able to reunite with beloved friends and colleagues, speak at two of the world’s great universities, and spend a lot of time in transit thinking about moral panic (I mean, that last part is my everyday anyway)

Both talks (Cambridge and York) were centered on pushing back against the doom narrative: the case that games make us happier, smarter, kinder, and more legendary and the evidence to back it up. It’s a message I’ve been building toward for a while, and getting to make it in those rooms felt significant.

(If moral panic in games discourse is a topic that’s been on your radar too, this YouTube video is a solid primer worth bookmarking... I’ve been returning to it a lot as I work through these ideas).

The DLC Leadership Program Pilot launch

In May, I was finally able to launch something I’ve been working towards for literal years… the DLC Leadership Program. The program launched May 4th with 84 participants across 20 countries and 6 continents. You can check out our Pre-Assessment Report capturing who these leaders are, what they know, what they’re struggling with, and what they need…. the answers to which are somehow equally surprising and not.

The topline takeaway: The leaders in our pilot cohort collectively manage communities of more than 200,000 people. That’s the incredible and very real reach of just the ‘pilot’ of this program. Training one leader is never just about one leader.

The DLC Leadership Program was not built because there was an obvious blueprint to follow. It was built because there wasn’t one. Digital leadership shapes the safety, culture, and wellbeing of millions of people online every day without any formal degree programs, recognized industry standards, or established credentialing pathways. The leaders doing this work have largely been left to figure it out alone… and the DLC is changing that (SO EXCITING, RIIGHT??!).

Also, we’re now beginning to develop the second round of curriculum and actively looking for organizational partners who want to be part of building it, whether that means co-producing curriculum, adapting existing training, or something we haven’t thought of yet. If any of that catches your eye, reach out.

I have thoughts on…

Last month we launched the new Psychgeist Podcast, “I have thoughts on…”. Hosted by the brilliant Christine Tomlinson, where she hosts a panel of guests as they muse on …well, things they have thoughts on. The inaugural episode was about “History in Games” and this month we have a brand new episodes looking at “Fandom”. You can check it out anywhere you listen to podcasts or, if you prefer the video form, below!

Psychgeist Call for Papers

ICYMI, there are a few open calls for papers in the Psychgeist universe at the moment:

• Psychgeist of Pop Culture: Hades

• Psychgiest of Pop Culture: Sailor Moon

THESE BOTH CLOSE MAY 31. ….and for the new series “Games And”

• Games and Democracy

What I’m Reading: We’ve Never Been Better at Child Safety (Everything in Moderation) I LOVED this month’s Everything in Moderation newsletter that highlighted two recent reports showing genuine, measurable progress in child safety online. It’s a useful corrective to doom-scrolling, while still making clear how much work remains. Recommended if you work anywhere near trust and safety. You can read it here.

What I’m Watching: Airplane movies… a lot of them. With all my travel this month I actually had a chance to catch up on some movies!

Wuthering Heights - 9/10 loved it. One point lost because I found it too incredibly frustrating that she wouldn’t just be with Heathcliff.

Marty Supreme - 5/10. It was only okay for me. Some interesting highlights/scenes but I did pause it and try to watch something else twice because I was bored.

Lady Bird - 10/10. Late to this party. Wonderful coming of age story…and gosh, don’t all teenage girls know that one boy from their teenage years that was just like Timothee Chalamet’s character in that movie.

What I wish I was Playing: Mixtape (Beethoven & Dinosaur). Well, I’m not actually playing it but really really really really really really want to be.

Other places you can find my musings…

• Psychgeist, my YouTube channel dedicated to the science of digital games. Subscribing is FREE and is the easiest way to support my work by increasing engagement and making the algorithm happy.

• Socials: BlueSky, for those who have migrated over, LinkedIn, if that is more your style, I am also on TikTok (apparently)

• Personal Website, for more about my research and upcoming events. Which I recently updated! Take a look if you haven’t been there in a while

• Did you know I published a series of children’s books? Tales from Cloud Canyon was successfully kickstarted (as Pragmatic Princess) in 2019, raising $25,000 in 30 days. I have since expanded the universe, added new stories and characters, and made them all free to download as e-books and audio books. You can read/listen/learn about them all here.

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Research & News

Finji, Tik…

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(Is listening more your jam? Every month on the Most Recent Save Podcast I post an audio version of this newsletter. Here is the one from this month. Go ahead, give it a like. I promise you’ll love it.)

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(Is listening more your jam? Every month on the Most Recent Save Podcast I post an audio version of this newsletter. Here is the one from this month. Go ahead, give it a like. I promise you’ll lo…

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(Is listening more your jam? Every month on the Most Recent Save Podcast I post an audio version of this newsletter. Here is the one from this month. Go ahead, give it a like. I promise you’ll love it.)

Research & News

MIRANDA: A new way to measure games and learning

MIRANDA (Multi…

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(Is listening more your jam? You can listen to this month’s newsletter here.)

Research & News

Meaningful safety is designed not legislated

An interview from WebPurify with Agnes Evrard (one of my many trust and safety heroes) really struck home this week, as she discus…

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(Is listening more your jam? You can listen to this month’s newsletter here.)

Research & News

50 Years of The Oregon Trail

This is one of the best things I read all month - which is why I’m listing it first. Oh, the Oregon Trail. I’ve often …

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Since the Netflix show Adolescence has gotten us all to talk about the power of digital culture, it seems like a good time to return to the ongoing conversations about the impact of digital culture, particularly …

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In the rapidly evolving landscape of online gaming, community health has emerged as more than just a nice-to-have feature, it's become a critical business imperative. As we examine what makes communities thrive, …

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(Is listening more your jam? You can listen to this month’s newsletter here)

Research & News

Moral Panicccccc…. (why are we still here?)

A tragic act of violence unfolded this month, as a gunman in Graz, Austria murdered nine students and one teacher at his f…

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Research & News

GTA 6 is delayed… again

This news did not surprise me but it did come with a collective groan and eye roll from the internet. We have been waiting quite a while for GTA 6 and it looks like we are going t…

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Here are some of the things you may have missed over April 2025.

(Is listening more your jam? You can listen to this month’s newsletter here)

Research & News

GDC 2025 Vault is open!

Remember all those talks I spoke a…

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