Why Parents Are Still Afraid of Video Games After 50 Years and How a Gaming Nonprofit’s New Workshops Are Trying to Help
It’s been nearly six decades since the first mainstream video games came out and parents in 2026 are just as worried about the potential impact gaming is...
Key points
- It’s been nearly six decades since the first mainstream video games came out and parents in 2026 are just as worried about the potential impact gaming is having on their children today as their counterparts were in the 70s, according to new research from the nonprofit Games for Change.
- In her paper “Raising Good Gamers: What Families Need to Know About Video Games and Well-Being,” which was released in July by Games for Change, research director Rachel Kowert drew on analysis of nearly 200,000 media articles and social posts across 15 countries and seven languages to reveal on social media, negative sentiment about gaming outweighs positive sentiment by more than five to one (34% to 6%).
- “So the fact that they have the same concerns tells me as a researcher that we’ve done a very poor job at getting the information out that we have in the research community to parents about what we know about what games are and what they aren’t.” Kowert notes that while society has repeated the pattern of being afraid of the effects of new types of media and entertainment throughout the centuries (including books, films and TV), the fears about gaming have persisted for longer.
- We have concerns about social media, but gaming is kind of different.
What happened
It’s been nearly six decades since the first mainstream video games came out and parents in 2026 are just as worried about the potential impact gaming is having on their children today as their counterparts were in the 70s, according to new research from the nonprofit Games for Change. In her paper “Raising Good Gamers: What Families Need to Know About Video Games and Well-Being,” which was released in July by Games for Change, research director Rachel Kowert drew on analysis of nearly 200,000 media articles and social posts across 15 countries and seven languages to reveal on social media, negative sentiment about gaming outweighs positive sentiment by more than five to one (34% to 6%). “So the fact that they have the same concerns tells me as a researcher that we’ve done a very poor job at getting the information out that we have in the research community to parents about what we know about what games are and what they aren’t.” Kowert notes that while society has repeated the pattern of being afraid of the effects of new types of media and entertainment throughout the centuries (including books, films and TV), the fears about gaming have persisted for longer. We have concerns...
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