Games for Change announced its 2025 special award winners, including Rachel Kowert as the winner of the gaming nonprofit’s Vanguard Award. We interviewed her and the transcript is below the announcement part of the story here.

These awards, part of the Games for Change Festival happening June 26-27 in New York, recognize the exceptional contributions of individuals and organizations in the gaming industry who have made significant strides in driving positive change through their work.

The G4C Vanguard Award is given annually to a notable individual who has made extraordinary contributions to the gaming community. In our conversation, Kowert passed on some wisdom to me about how we do not think about all of our gaming choices as binary choices. She said, “We all have the power to choose a third path.”

These honorees, plus the G4C Game Award winners, will be showcased at this year’s Games for Change Award Ceremony at 3:30 PM PT on June 26, hosted by Spawn on Me’s Kahlief Adams and streamed live on Twitch for a global audience.

In addition, Preloaded received the Industry Leadership Award; Amir Satvat is honored with the Giving Award, and past G4C Chairman/President Asi Burak is recognized with the Hall of Change Award.

“For over 20 years, Games for Change has been convening the most passionate and innovative minds in the industry, who understand that our medium has a unique power to connect people around the world and inspire them to take action in their communities,” said Susanna Pollack, president of Games for Change, in a statement. “This year’s honorees show the many ways that games and immersive experiences can create impact, from groundbreaking research to community leadership to decades of work proving games can heal, teach, and unite us.”

This year, Games for Change recognizes Kowert for her pioneering work at the intersection of psychology, gaming, and mental health. Through her research, writing, and public advocacy, she has helped reshape the narrative around games as tools for healing, empathy, and emotional growth. Her work with organizations like Take This, Discord, and others, combined with her commitment to science communication, has sparked critical conversations, opened doors for inclusive community building, and inspired countless others to think differently about the role games play in their lives. She is currently a strategic adviser on policy at Discord.

The G4C Industry Leadership Award recognizes companies doing exemplary social impact work within the games industry. Over the past 25 years, Preloaded has left an indelible mark on the industry, becoming a leading example of the power and impact of independent game studios. Their innovative approach to creating meaningful, interactive experiences that blend education, culture, and social good, grounded in the principle of playing with purpose, has set a high standard for how games can be both entertaining and transformative. Through partnerships and collaborations, Preloaded challenges others to expand the ways people connect, play, and engage with everything from historical sites to beloved virtual worlds.

The G4C Giving Award recognizes companies, organizations, and individuals who make significant contributions through community initiatives, fundraising efforts, scholarships, and donations. Amir Satvat has been recognized for his transformative leadership in supporting the gaming community, particularly those affected by industry layoffs. His tireless commitment to connecting talented professionals with new opportunities has not only changed countless individual careers but has strengthened the entire gaming ecosystem during challenging times. Through resources, mentorship initiatives, inclusive community-building efforts, and advocacy, Satvat has demonstrated how the gaming industry can come together to be a force for economic resilience and positive social change.

The G4C Hall of Change Award celebrates an outstanding individual who has dedicated their career to advancing the field of impact games. Asi Burak has been recognized for his remarkable achievements and unwavering dedication to the field over the past two decades. As a past president of Games for Change and a longtime board member, Burak has empowered a global community of changemakers to grow and thrive. From his pioneering work on PeaceMaker—one of the earliest and most influential games to address complex global issues—to his leadership in transforming G4C into an internationally recognized movement, his impact is immeasurable. As an author, speaker, and mentor, he has been instrumental in ensuring that games are embraced as powerful tools for education, empathy, and social change.

The G4C Indie Breakout Award celebrates a studio’s first game that demonstrates outstanding innovation in bridging entertainment and commercial success with real-world impact. This year’s recipient is 1000xRESIST and sunset visitor 斜陽過客 for its profound exploration of diasporas, intergenerational trauma, and human connection, offering a personal examination of how memory and identity shape our understanding of belonging. Through innovative storytelling and thoughtful gameplay, 1000xRESIST exemplifies the power of games to bridge understanding across different lived experiences.

I interviewed Kowert ahead of the announcement about her focus on gaming. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview

When I saw the email I thought it was a mistake, because Games for Change gives awards to games. “I didn’t make a game. Why me?” But I opened it and read it and it was so nice.

I have. I’ve been to the last four or five, I think.

My whole career has been about advocacy for the game player in one way or another. When I did my PhD, it was about pushing back against stereotypes of gamers. After that I did a postdoc about the positive mental health impacts of games. At Take This it was about taking that knowledge and bringing it to the industry, bridging the gap between research and player and industry. Now I do a lot of independent consulting with different organizations. I’m doing a bit of it all – advocating for players, providing information for industry – in more diffuse ways.

I joined in 2019. They wanted to do research. They didn’t have a researcher on staff. I like to say I lovingly bullied my way into being their first research director and establishing their research department. I was there for five years. I did a bunch of research there. I got grants and ran projects and things while I was there.

Right now I’m working as a strategic policy advisor at Discord. I’m working on research and developing resources for content moderators. I guess they just call them moderators, not content moderators. It’s about how to protect their own mental health and well-being while doing work that’s very difficult and challenging at times.

It is. I’m hoping it can be applicable across the industry. At Discord they’re making it for the Discord moderators, but the goal is that it will be freely available for everyone to use.

You can’t get around it. That’s why you have so much burnout and trauma. Now we have AI. That’s one of the really good uses of AI in content moderation. Some things are very obviously awful. Those can be filtered out through AI now. But there’s also–we’ve learned tips and tricks along the way. Put your screen in black and white mode. Different things like that.

Correct. It’s really interesting how we’ve seen content moderation and the role of community managers evolve over the last, I would say, five years. Trust and safety is still seen primarily as a cost center, not a moneymaker. My talk at GDC in 2024 was about the ROI on trust and safety. Trying to bring to light–actually, the work that community managers do is not bringing you money, but it makes your spaces safer, more resilient, more fun to be in, and so on. We’re seeing it come more to the forefront just in the fact that GDC let me have that talk on stage, and that people were listening. But I think that game companies now are coming to understand that those roles are important, not just auxiliary to their mission.

From a research standpoint, games are far more positive than negative across the board. Gaming addiction is still hotly debated in the research community. It’s a real fun buzzword, but it’s not really rooted in our scientific understanding of how games work. Where we are now is still stuck in the moral panic. Games are addictive! Luigi Mangione, when he killed the CEO of UnitedHealth, you had headlines about how he played Among Us. We still see games come up as the scapegoat for society’s problems.

As a research community, though, we’re well beyond that. We focus a lot more on games for mental health, on games as therapeutic tools for mental wellness. DeepWell was at Games for Change a couple of years ago. They’re doing FDA-approved gaming. We’re definitely moving more into a space where games are positive, although the press still loves notions like “Among Us is an assassination simulator.”

That started as just the name of my YouTube channel. I was trying to come up with a clever name. I started the channel during the pandemic because I needed a hobby. I don’t want to give my husband credit, but he came up with it. The psychology of the era and the science of games. I started the channel in 2020 and then it steadily expanded. Now I have a book series, The Psychgeist of Pop Culture, where we talk about pop culture through a psychology lens. I have a newsletter. It kind of just stuck. My husband is clever sometimes.

The books are all edited. I find people who are more clever than me who want to talk about their area of expertise, but through the lens of pop culture. In The Witcher, for instance, I did write a chapter with Kelli Dunlap about Geralt as a beacon of non-toxic masculinity. He’s very up front about his failures. He doesn’t feel the need to kill just to kill. That’s one example. There was another chapter in there about Ciri and resilience, how she demonstrates resilience and a growth mindset through the way that she continues to pursue challenges throughout the series. The idea is that it’s fun to read for people who are fans of whatever fandom it is, but it has enough scientific weight that you’re learning something about Psych 101 when you read them.

Geralt is one of my kind. He’s my fave. I was writing some words to say after I get the award, and I will give you a spoiler that the first thing I say is, “In The Witcher…” I quote Geralt, because he’s just special. “Evil is evil. Lesser, greater, middling, it’s all the same. If I’m to choose between one evil and another I’d rather not choose at all.” I frame it as saying that games have been either purely entertainment or purely serious. We either defend them or they have to be a problem that we solve. But like Geralt, we refuse that binary choice. We chose another path, which is games for good, games for learning and connection.

We all have the power to choose a third path. The world may tell us that there’s only binary choices to be had, but that’s only until someone carves a third path.

I think so. When I started working in games, it was a bit selfish. I was studying to be a therapist. I was seeing a lot of parents who were concerned about their kids. Games were making them antisocial, lazy, whatever. I was playing so much World of Warcraft, and I thought, “Am I damning myself to a future of what these parents are afraid of?”

There wasn’t any research. This was 2008. There wasn’t anything. I remember doing my interview for my PhD. I said, “I want to do this project. I want to look at the impact of games.” At the very end of the interview, they said, “You keep saying this is important. Why is it important? What are you going to do with this information?” I said, “We’ll give it to therapists. They need to inform parents.” They said that was a good answer. It never crossed their mind why anyone would care. They just assumed that it was negative.

That’s an example of finding a new path. I was in a very traditional PhD department, and I was definitely the weird one studying games. But now, at that same university, they have an entire department studying games. It’s an interdisciplinary thing. It has all this funding. I saw that and thought, “Really?” I wish I had that when I was there. These things don’t exist until they exist.

The greatest result we’ve seen is in–there’s a lot of advocates out there in organizations. I think of Child’s Play. They bring games into hospitals for sick kids, because they can now demonstrate that games are healthy escapism. They help with pain relief. This kind of advocacy work opened the door for those things to exist. Not that they didn’t exist before my work, but I think that there being more advocacy, being more loud and vocal, has allowed for more opportunities to highlight games for good.

I also think about game development and research. Like I said, when I was doing my PhD in 2008, there was one game studies program in Denmark. Now there are 250-some across the globe. The more people have been banging on about it, the more people realize that there is some importance to it, and that there is potential for games to actively change the world for the better, which ties in really well with Games for Change. That’s what they’re actively doing. They’re highlighting games that are changing the world for the better. Twenty years I don’t think that would have been a topic of discussion. We certainly wouldn’t have been talking about it.

There is. But humans are cognitive misers. We are lazy thinkers. We want the easiest path forward anytime, anywhere. That’s how we end up in these all good or all bad conclusions about everything. Games are no exception to that issue. I’d like to think there’s room to grow, and that’s what I try to do with my work, my YouTube channel and all of that. Maybe shed light on it and provide more nuance. It’s not necessarily that games are all fantastic. There are of course challenges and things we have to work on to make games better, a lot of them. But it’s not all bad, which seems to be the prevailing thought.

That would be amazing, because–I saw the TikTok hearings, where they were asking if phones could scan your retina and see if your pupils dilated when certain commercials come on. Having a basic level of knowledge around technology would be really helpful. When we talk about regulation, which is really in the zeitgeist right now around games, we have a real challenge here. Games are either not included in the conversation or they’re lumped in with social media. Games are not social media, but they are social platforms. There are nuances there. There’s no basic level of understanding of technology among lawmakers. That would be awesome. But I don’t know if I’ll hold my breath for that.

Kowert: We’re in a pretty low time. We’re in a pretty dystopian timeline. A lot of people are struggling financially, which then has an impact on their mental health. The Surgeon General–there’s been some controversy on his piece about the loneliness epidemic. But I think there’s some validity to the fact that–you ask people and they say they’re lonely. Games are fantastic spaces to commune and meet and be social. In the place we are now, games are such a valuable tool for making our individual lives better, but also making society better. They’re constantly discredited despite that.

What I didn’t like about the Surgeon General’s piece – I remember reaching through my network asking, “Who knows the Surgeon General?” – is that he could have mentioned games as a solution. Not the end-all be-all only solution, but the things he was saying–people say they don’t have close relationships, or they don’t go places and do things together. Games provide all of that. We’re still so caught up in this idea that games are all bad that we’re not even seeing the value that these tools can bring to our everyday lives, particularly around loneliness.

I will interject on that–during COVID games prevented my son from being lonely. He was connected. They were playing games without even talking about the game. They were just chatting. They were places to be. It was very helpful. My neighbor, who is my best friend, has a 14-year-old son. During COVID he was playing Minecraft with people he knew. Every day she complained about it. “He’s inside and he’s playing games.” I said, “Neighbor, he can’t go outside! What else do you want him to do? This is the best-case scenario.”

That’s the weird dichotomy. This is super valuable and great, but there’s still this idea that it must be bad, because it’s a game on a screen.

GamesBeat: I wonder how much this holds true, in that–everybody can be lonely. But when you’re playing a game, you don’t think about that, because you have to think about the game. You have to focus on the game. You have to focus on getting things done in the game. You’re distracted. Are games obviously some kind of way to escape from that feeling that you’re lonely?

Kowert: Yes. On the one hand, for sure. People like to think escapism is bad, but they talk in the research now about healthy escapism. An escape for a distraction can be a great thing we do all the time, when we read books or watch Netflix. Also, there’s this phenomenon of being alone together, which was something that came out in the early research around MMOs. Even if you’re not actively talking with someone, being in an online game and seeing that there are other people there makes you feel less lonely. You’re alone, but together.

GamesBeat: You feel like you belong to a group. You have your guild.

Kowert: That’s it. Even if you don’t know anyone, you’re part of it.

GamesBeat: I think I remember discussing this with Ed Fries before, that guild leaders tend to wind up being good managers, good businesspeople.

Kowert: The skills transfer. If you’re a guild leader, you’re herding cats. It’s project management, spreadsheets, scheduling all these things. Those are skills that aren’t magically contained within the world of a game. You take those skills with you.

GamesBeat: Where are we in coming around to realizing that there’s a lot of benefits that come from games?

Kowert: I want to be optimistic and say we are coming around. When COVID happened, Parents magazine posted a piece to the effect of, “Play games with your kids. It’s a great thing to do right now.” I thought I would never live to see the day that there would be a headline encouraging people to play games with their kids. Now, when the COVID lockdowns ended, then we stepped back a bit. We were back to conversations about how much gaming is too much gaming, that sort of thing. But there was public recognition from a big outlet. I take that as a win. I think we’re incrementally moving forward.

GamesBeat: What are some things you would still like to accomplish, even after winning this award and hitting this milestone?

Kowert: I find that my research interests have had a really windy path. Where I am now, I’m really interested in how to best support community leadership in digital communities. We’ve long thought of online and offline as a dichotomy, but that’s a false dichotomy. We’re learning a lot about the role and the power that community leadership can have in developing safe and inclusive and resilient communities, but we’re still failing to prioritize them in the industry. We have not provided the resources and education and information they need in order to thrive in those roles. I’m really interested in continuing on that path and seeing what we can do to better support our digital societies as we continue to grow and evolve within them.

GamesBeat: Are some things that interest you that you observe in the popular games and communities of today, like Roblox and Fortnite and Minecraft? Are we learning different things from these games compared to what we learned from previous generations?

Kowert: Roblox and Minecraft are more of the sandbox type of game. My kids play a lot of Minecraft, and what I anecdotally observe from them is the sheer amount of untethered creativity that they’re able to express. My son makes the most amazing things you can imagine in Minecraft. He’ll watch one video and re-create it. How is that possible? And it’s possible with games. I guess if he had Play-Doh he might be able to mold it. But the fact that he can build it and take it down and work at this huge scale and have his friends come see it–there’s something really special and unique about those sandbox spaces in terms of fostering creativity and personal growth and a sense of achievement and competence. It’s pretty magical to witness.

GamesBeat: One person that I learned a bit from was Heidi Vogel Brockmann, from the GuardianGamer people. They have AI going to capture a five-minute highlight of your kid’s last four hours in Roblox or something like that. It gives you a conversation starter. What did you do in Roblox today? You can see what they were up to and what the highlights were. Maybe if you had to approve a payment, what were you getting? It’s interesting that parents and kids need these conversation starters about games.

Kowert: I was going to say something about that. When I talk to parents–the other group I’ve tried to advocate for is parents. What I often say is that if you can sit through a five-year-old’s soccer game–they don’t know where the ball is going. They’re running in all directions. If you can sit through that, you can sit through five minutes of asking your kid what they did in Minecraft. But parents seem to have this block. “I don’t understand it. I don’t know what to ask.” That’s really cool. With a little highlight reel like that, it gives them a sense of what the kids are doing. But just asking, “What did you do?” can get you pretty far if you start that way.

GamesBeat: Does the type of play among kids seem to be different? They go from one game to another to another in something like Roblox. They’re also chatting. I understand that the chat part is generally a good thing. They’re in either text chat, or through Heidi’s thing they can do protected voice chat with just their friends.

Kowert: It’s important for little kids to only be with their friends. When we talk about the bad in games, my biggest fear in games is the social part. But generally speaking you are correct. Communication is the heart of online gaming. You ask people why they play and most of them will give a social reason. Nobody is playing World of Warcraft for the graphics. That game came a long time ago. They play because their community is there.

GamesBeat: I watched The Remarkable Life of Ibelin on Netflix. Discovering that someone’s main life and world was inside this game world, rather than physical reality, was interesting.

Kowert: And it was valuable and meaningful and important. Most people would say, “That’s just online. It’s just a game. It doesn’t matter.” But that’s obviously not the case.

GamesBeat: Are there other things you plan to talk about when you’re receiving the award that you’d like us to know?

Kowert: Well, I don’t know what I’m going to say when I get the award. I think I’m just going to say thank you. What I’m most excited about is that I get to be part of a community that sees games the same way I’ve always seen games, which is spaces of possibility. When I grew up in small-town Texas, I was the only girl I knew who played games. I’m from before the internet. I’m a geriatric millennial. I didn’t have a chance to find other people like me who liked games. To have gone through my career – which I hope isn’t over yet – to this point and be able to be surrounded by like-minded individuals is really meaningful and powerful. It speaks to a bright future ahead for the rest of the world getting on board and understanding what games can be.