TL;DR July 2026

How are we almost through summer? Here are some of the things you may have missed while you were out on your holidays (which I hope you were taking!).

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

• 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.