Digital Thriving Project
The Digital Thriving Project began as a partnership between the Thriving in Games Group (then the Fair Play Alliance) and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, supported by the Riot Games Social Impact Fund.
As part of our shared mission, we want to make it easy for anyone to design online spaces and games to help individuals, groups, and communities truly thrive in today’s connected world. To do that, we’re working with a growing list of contributors to create and curate a collection of well-founded, promising, and proven approaches while ensuring equitable access to these resources.
Online gaming spaces are part of the very social fabric of our society and play an important role in many people’s lives. With that comes a shared responsibility both to design these spaces thoughtfully and tend them well so that those within can flourish. We believe it is everyone’s responsibility to ensure that gaming spaces are places where we are not just free to be our authentic selves, but also places that enrich our lives and empower us to be our best selves.
To truly thrive, we need to cultivate well-being both online and offline.
Introducing the Digital Thriving Playbook
As our key outcome of this project, we are excited to announce the Digital Thriving Playbook. The Playbook is your hub for accessible, research-backed knowledge and leading industry practices developed by gaming-industry veterans and researchers.
These practices help you cultivate healthy player dynamics, create inclusive online spaces, and design safe and engaging experiences for everyone. Join the growing community of developers using the Playbook and/or contribute your expertise!
If you’re interested in our many other TIGG resources, please check out our Resources page for more!
Why Digital Thriving?
We define digital thriving as the outcome of online spaces intentionally designed to foster well-being, accomplishment, belonging, and meaningful relationships in individuals, groups, and communities. We believe that the rich environments of online games are a great foundation on which to build the Digital Thriving project.
But why digital thriving? We believe the need is fundamental.
First of all, success in nature has always been measurable by whether or not a species is thriving. Thriving with humans, according to Daniel J. Brown, co-author of Human Thriving: A Conceptual Debate and Literature Review, is simply “feeling good about life and yourself and being good at something.” These outcomes are very much in line with our goals for all people.
Secondly, it’s estimated that over 60% of the world’s population is online, most of that 60% is using social media, and these numbers are growing. This means that for most of humanity, the human experience is often a digital experience.
Lastly, we believe that thriving is exactly what the internet and web were meant to achieve. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, said that the web was designed “…to help people work together… to support and improve our weblike existence in the world.” As organizations, the TIGG and the Cooney Center are already helping fulfill that intention and through greater partnership and participation, we believe that together we can help fulfill the promise of the web itself.
We invite you to share in our dream. What if every online game you played was a place where you felt safe, respected, and truly belonged? Where you could connect with others, achieve great things, and contribute to a better world? That’s the future we’re building. Join us.
Get Involved
If you’re doing work in the space of digital thriving, we’d love to hear from you!
