TIGG Summit Recap Blog

In Trust & Safety, we are often asked to prove the business value of work we already know matters deeply to players and communities. The harder question is why that value can be so much more difficult to demonstrate than the value of other game systems.

That question follow me to Helsinki for the inaugural Thriving in Games Group (TIGG) Digital Thriving Summit where game developers, researchers, nonprofits and trust and safety leaders, spent two days discussing what welcoming, healthy, safe game communities look like and what it takes to build them.

The Summit was held under the Chatham House Rule, so I won't attribute what was said in the room to specific people or companies. What follows are my own takeaways, and how I'm thinking about them for our work at GamerSafer and Minehut.

It became clear to me over those two days that our challenge and, at the same time our opportunity, is not to prove the outcomes we care deeply about, including safer experiences, better social interactions and a stronger sense of belonging, are valuable. The point is to make the path to that value much more visible. When that connection is hard to see, it becomes easier to prioritize what is easy to measure, and sometimes not the things we believe matter most.

Hello, Safety. Digital Thriving has Joined the Room.

The fact that this value can be harder to make visible does not make safety any less essential or foundational. In fact, nobody at the Summit was talking about moving away from harm prevention, moderation, reporting or response.

My takeaway is that the next stage of Trust & Safety is expanding our ambition and our sense of responsibility is as product builders, game designers and developers. That means moving beyond a false dichotomy between safety and growth. Safety is increasingly recognized as a condition for sustainable growth, while digital thriving asks us to go further, beyond addressing disruptions and severe harms. It asks us to shape the spaces and conditions in which healthier behavior, connection and belonging can happen.

Another important consideration is that harmful or unwanted outcomes are not driven only by bad actors. Player behavior also responds to the environments we create: the incentives we set, the norms we enforce, the interactions we encourage, overall the design choices we make. As game builders, we help shape what is normalized, acceptable and rewarded in our communities.

Game design creates the conditions for belonging, but trust and safety protects it. Healthy player communities need both.

A speaker at the Summit

Taken together, this isn't a shift from safety to prosocial design. We need both. The question stops being only “How do we make our games safer?” and expands to include “What kinds of behaviors and interactions do we want our games to encourage alongside safety?”

Why this work is so hard to prioritize

Naturally, the discussion turned to why this work can be so difficult to prioritize. Leadership teams rarely ask for a precise ROI to decide if a leaderboard or a clear onboarding flow should exist and have the needed resources.  Do we ask what is the dollar figure for good onboarding? We tend to understand the underlying logic: players who don't understand the game bounce before they reach the good part, and players who bounce don't stay or spend.

Safety, wellbeing and prosocial design don't get that benefit of the doubt. As reflected in one of the presentations and in informal conversations, there several structural reasons why:

• We don't share the same language just yet. Safety, wellbeing, digital thriving, healthy communities, prosocial behavior, positive play. Related ideas, different meanings. If we can't agree on what we're trying to change, we can't agree on what success looks like. Achieving that alignment is still work in progress.
• The costs are usually easier to quantify, while the benefits can be hard to trace
  The value of healthier interactions or stronger community health can be harder to trace directly. That can leave Trust and Safety framed as a cost center, or as corporate social responsibility, rather than part of the product.
• The causal chain can be long. A design change influences behavior, which  then affects player experience, resulting in different community dynamics, that may eventually show up in belonging, retention or engagement.
• We're up against assumptions that feel like facts. "That's just the internet." "Players are just like that." "Moderation is enough." "Competitive games are toxic.". These assumptions can shape decisions even when we have not actually tested them.

We will not change assumptions like these by arguing harder. We change them by testing, measuring and showing what actually happens, building evidence over time. 

That’s where clear hypotheses, strong signals, and a solid view of the value chain can be useful.

Map the Value Chain Before You Try To Prove the Value

One framework gave me a much clearer way to think about the ROI question: map the “value chain” before trying to prove the value.

Teams often jump straight from a feature to a business outcome. "Make feature, make money." The problem lies in everything in the middle. A value chain helps identifying the sequence of changes we expect an intervention to create and makes each step explicit:

Design intervention → Player participation → Behavior change → Player experience → Community health → Business outcome

One illustrative example presented at the Summit captured this well. The overall path can look solid, while a single weak assumption can still break the connection to the expected outcome.

To make that concrete, let’s look at how the chain can break in practice. A cozy game adds a feature that lets players visit each other's villages. The logic from intervention to outcome sounds right: hosts feel appreciated, visitors feel inspired, players share more, engagement goes up. It ships. Players try it once and never again.

Normally, that's when a feature gets deprioritized. But tracing the chain made the weak point visible: the social experience was not actually creating value for either side. Visitors could enter a more advanced village, but there was too little for them to do there. The comparison could even leave them feeling worse about their own progress. Hosts, meanwhile, never found out anyone had visited. Players were technically connected, but it didn’t create the intended value. The fix wasn't a completely new feature. It was addressing the broken assumptions in the chain: giving visitors something interesting to take home, like seeds from a garden they loved, and letting hosts know their work had been and appreciated.

The other lesson from that example: the team hadn't defined what to measure before launch, so when it failed, they couldn't tell why.

With that in mind, at each step in the chain, we should ask:

• What's our hypothesis?
• What would we observe if it were true? What can we literally count?
• Where are we making an assumption?
• What has to be true before we move to the next step?

If we can't answer these questions with confidence for a step, then we need to spend more time thinking it through. That is also why starting small matters: it gives us room to test, learn, and grow an intervention in phases rather than all at once.

The important discipline here is staying honest about causality. Some of the common measures we look at can tell us that something is happening without telling us why. For example, feature usage on its own tells only part of the story, and higher retention among players who use a prosocial feature doesn't necessarily prove the feature caused it. That means defining metrics and guardrails up front, using faster leading signals alongside slower lagging ones, and being clear about the level of confidence behind the conclusions we draw.

Start with What Players Already Do

One of the most practical ideas that we are also applying to Minehut, is to stop treating prosocial design as something new that has to be inserted into a game. We can start by observing what players already do naturally. Where do they cooperate, welcome newcomers, teach, share, create together, recognize each other, or step in to de-escalate? Then ask how to make those behaviors easier, more visible or more rewarding.

One public example comes from Call of Duty: Warzone. Rather than starting from an abstract definition of prosocial behavior, the team looked at how positive interactions were already showing up in the game and translated those patterns into something they could observe and measure. Their reporting found that roughly 22% of players studied encountered at least one supportive voice interaction, while about 6% initiated one, and around two thirds of matches containing prosocial voice also included a cooperative action such as reviving or thanking another player.

That understanding then informed the design response. One example was making it easier for players to thank teammates after a revive, reinforcing a prosocial behavior that was already happening.

I see a similar dynamic in Animal Crossing, a game I’ve played myself for a long time. I don't know whether Nintendo frames these features as prosocial design, but communication and social interaction have expanded over time, including the ways players can visit one another, share what they had created, exchange resources and find inspiration in other players' spaces. In New Leaf, for example, Nintendo expanded customization from individual homes to entire towns partly to make visiting other players' worlds more interesting.

Instead of starting with "what prosocial feature should we build?" We can start with "what prosocial behaviors are already happening, under what conditions, and where is the product making it harder or easier?" 

Values Only Matter When They Shape Decisions

What happens when company values point in a different direction from the most obvious business or product choice?

One studio shared how those tensions shape design decisions and, ultimately, the way players experience the game, showing how values move from statements into the game itself.

Their approach was grounded in a few principles around connection, personal meaning, and giving players permission to leave. Those values showed up in concrete design choices, including how the game treats players who step away and return later, and how progression systems are structured, so they do not unnecessarily pressure people to keep playing.

When someone asked whether those design decisionswere backed by data or simply a values choice, the answer was honest. Some decisions are grounded in what the company believes.

As an entrepreneur, this is not theoretical for me. Values are easy when the business case and the ethical choice point in the same direction. The moment of truth comes when they don't. That is when we see whether our values are simply words on paper or something we are actually willing to build and operate around.

Every company eventually reaches a crossroads like these. The choices made in those moments say a great deal about the kind of company you are building.

Over time, those choices become culture, something you cannot buy or declare, only live.

Another session illustrated what it looks like when those principles become embedded across an organization. Trust and Safety becomes an strategic partner, sharing roadmaps with product teams, pushing for safety through design rather than only through support, and accepting that healthy delivery cycles require some friction.

We know when safety has become part of the culture when a design team discusses safety considerations without anyone from Trust and Safety in the room.

Designing the Path Forward at Minehut

At Minehut, we are already putting many of these concepts into practice. The Summit helped sharpen the language, frameworks, while also challenging us to look closer to our value chain, assumptions and measurement approach.

Minehut gives us something especially valuable: a real environment, with an engaged and open-minded team, where we can test these ideas with players, learn from it happens, and turn assumptions into evidence. From there, our next steps are:

• Define what prosocial behavior means for our UGC ecosystem.
• Identify what prosocial behaviors already exist and test ways to amplify them.
• Bring product, design, data, community, safety and business into the conversation from the start, because each defines success differently.
• Measure player experience and community outcomes, not just feature usage, and document what we learn, including when something doesn't work.

If we do that well, Minehut can help us better understand what supports players and communities to thrive, while also contributing practical evidence the wider industry can learn from.

A Few Questions I'm Taking Forward

• What productive behaviors already exist in our communities that we could amplify?
• What assumptions are we making about our players that we've never tested?
• How do we connect safety, prosocial behavior, community health and business outcomes without overstating causality?

I'd love to hear how other teams are approaching these questions. If you're experimenting with prosocial design or trying to make the case for safety investment inside your own studio, reach out. This is work none of us should be doing alone.

P.S. This wouldn’t feel like me without a huge shout-out to the team members, industry colleagues, and dear friends who have been sharing this journey with me and GamerSafer. Building things together warms my heart and helps make games an even better place to be.