Building Games Where Connection Counts
Roblox is exploring how game mechanics can reward collaboration, not just competition.
Millions of people don’t just play games — they live in them. They build friendships, test boundaries, and create together.
With 151.5 million people logging on daily as of Q3 2025, Roblox is a massive gaming platform hosting millions of social experiences.
Yet most games are designed to reward one thing: winning. Leaderboards. Solo rewards. Competitive loops. Mechanics that center individual achievement over collaboration. And in a world where online play increasingly replaces in-person hangouts, design choices become social architecture.
While gaming can be social, growing evidence suggests it can also be linked to loneliness — especially when it replaces offline interaction. Two recent meta-analyses shed light on the connection between gaming and loneliness. One, reviewing over 20,000 participants across countries including the U.S., China, Germany, and South Korea, found that increased video game participation was consistently, though weakly, associated with higher levels of loneliness — especially when gaming substituted for offline interaction (Luo, Hancock, & Mark, 2022). A second meta-analysis (Byeon H 2025), drawing from 14 studies across regions including South Korea, China, India, Norway, and the U.S., found a stronger association: more compulsive gaming behavior was linked to higher emotional loneliness, lower-quality relationships, and reduced offline social interaction.
Rethinking the Rewards
So what if game mechanics didn’t just reward you for winning — but for collaborating, helping or connecting?
In 2025, Roblox and the Prosocial Design Network (PDN) hosted a workshop titled “Catalyzing Actionable Research in Prosocial Game Design.” It brought together over 40 researchers, technologists, and platform leaders to tackle a shared challenge: How can games be designed to foster connection — without sacrificing fun or competitive gameplay?
Their goal wasn’t just to generate feature ideas. It was also to test a better way for academics and developers to iterate effectively together. PDN serves as a bridge between research and practice by identifying, translating, and amplifying effective design solutions, making them accessible and actionable for tech practitioners. As noted in the PDN-Roblox workshop report:
“By coming together to host this convening, PDN and Roblox hoped to not only spur creative solutions and research around fostering connection in social gaming, but to also prototype a model for connecting research to practice.”
A Day of Designing Together
The workshop was structured around three core principles:
Shared focus: Fostering connection in social gaming
Collaborative teams: Researchers and Roblox product leads, designers, engineers
Design direction cards: A structured tool to help teams break down ideas into the challenge, feature, intervention, theory of change, and target prosocial behavior
By the end of the day, participants had produced 14 concept ideas, nine of which were developed into full design and research plans.
Here are five standout examples, as described in the report:
🥳 Celebrations
Players signal encouragement and trigger collective avatar celebrations after success — fostering psychological safety, social support, and belonging.
🏅 Recognitions
At the end of play sessions, players can anonymously commend each other for positive participation. Commendations unlock badges or flair, making support visible and valued.
🆘 Call for Help
A cross-game “Help Bulletin Board” lets players request assistance and be visible to other players. Other players can respond via chat or teleport to offer social support.
📊 Positive Contribution Recaps
Like a Spotify Wrapped for prosociality: players get periodic summaries of their helpful actions, based on gameplay signals, serving as positive reinforcement for prosocial engagement (e.g. helping others, positive encouragement).
🤝 Connection Prompts
Players who’ve had positive interactions or shared interests are prompted to connect. These positive connections can build friendships, increase connection to community and drive motivation.
Funding the Future
To bring these ideas to life, Roblox backed the workshop with a dedicated research fund. Six proposals have since received support to be tested in live or simulated environments.
Roblox and the Prosocial Design Network used this workshop as a testbed for a new kind of collaboration — one that bridges research and practice with shared purpose. Designers gained practical tools for fostering connection. Researchers saw how their work could inform real-world design. And both walked away with a model for future partnership.
“We see this convening as a proof of concept model for how platforms and researchers can work together to produce actionable, practice-informed research.” — Prosocial Design Network blog.
As part of its sustained commitment to healthier digital spaces and , Roblox is also an active member of the Inspired Internet Pledge — a coalition of digital platforms, non profit advisors and researchers working to make the internet a safer and healthier place, especially for young people. Not only do signatories commit to ‘tuning for well-being’ but also to sharing best practices, key research findings, and creative solutions to make the internet a healthier place for everyone — especially young people.
This effort shows that it’s not only possible, it’s practical to rethink how games are designed so that connection isn’t a side effect, but a feature.
It’s a reminder for all digital product designers to consider each time they launch a new mechanic: What does this design encourage people to do to each other? What harm is it enabling? What behaviors are we rewarding?
Lena Slachmuijlder is Senior Advisor for digital peacebuilding at Search for Common Ground, a Practitioner Fellow at the USC Neely Center, and Co-chair of the Council on Tech and Social Cohesion.
Curious to explore more about prosocial game design? Join us for a live event on Thursday, January 22 hosted by the Prosocial Design Network and the Council on Tech and Social Cohesion. We’ll hear from Dr. Kimberly Voll, CEO of Brace Yourself Games, and co-founder of Thriving in Games Group which creates the Digital Thriving Playbook. Dr. Voll will share what she sees as the fundamental principles of designing for prosociality and play around with how social media and other digital platforms can learn from social gaming. Join us for thoughtful dialogue, expert insight, and interactive breakout sessions. 👉 Register here.