Prosocial Design in Social Gaming: A Pro-Social Recap
Dr. Voll on social how gaming design can help build more prosocial online spaces.
When we talk about prosocial design, we often default to social media platforms: feeds, comments, moderation, and recommendation systems. But social gaming, even more so than social media, depends on its users not just being engaged but having fulfilling experiences. That's perhaps why social gaming developers and researchers are ahead of the game in thinking about how design can foster positive interactions.
Dr. Kimberly Voll has spent her career thinking about exactly these questions. She is the CEO of Brace Yourself Games, a veteran game designer and researcher with more than a decade of experience, including at Riot Games. She holds a PhD in computer science and has taught at the master’s level, working at the intersection of systems design, player behavior, and research.
We at the Prosocial Design Network first encountered Kim’s work through the Digital Thriving Playbook, developed by the Thriving in Games group, which she co-founded. The playbook stood out for treating social wellbeing as something that can be intentionally designed for, studied, and iterated on within real production environments.
In this Pro-Social conversation, Voll joined us to discuss the core principles of designing for prosociality, and to explore what social media and other digital platforms can learn from social gaming.
Games as Social Systems
In the conversation, Dr. Voll pushed back on the implied divide in the phrase “social gaming.” As she put it, “historically, social gaming has often implied a divide, as if it were a particular type of gaming,” when the thing we’re actually talking about: prosociality in these spaces is “fundamental to all spaces where people gather” and subsequently all digital spaces.
She also widened the frame beyond the obvious multiplayer examples. Prosociality can show up even in experiences that look “single-player” on paper, because interaction often happens asynchronously: through communities, shared language, norms, and the way people learn how to be in a space.
To make this concrete, Kim described her work as being about dynamics: not just individual behavior, but “player dynamics, population dynamics, language dynamics,” the patterns that emerge when lots of people interact inside a designed environment.
Designing for Digital Thriving
Kim anchored prosocial design in outcomes. The goal is what she called digital thriving: “the ideal outcome” of well-designed online spaces, including games.
She defined thriving in a way that’s deliberately not about constant positivity: it’s dynamic, and it can exist “even in the presence of hardship.” It’s about people’s capacities, values, and connections being able to “unfold meaningfully in time.” She also named elements like agency, belonging, having your “inner reality reflected and respected,” and having your concerns “matter in the context in which they exist.”
Prosocial design, as she frames it, is about building the “systems, the norms, the affordances” that make behavior benefiting others or a collective more likely: intentionally or unintentionally.
What Social Media and Other Platforms Can Learn
When we turned to what other digital spaces can learn from social gaming, Kim says that many platforms are “pretty diminished when it comes to our capacity to relate to one another and communicate with one another.”
Voll highlighted that the ease and success of communication play a major role in whether interactions go well overall. Even when an exchange isn’t clearly “successful,” leaving it with a positive mindset matters.
She framed this as a design opportunity: being thoughtful about how systems can increase the likelihood that interactions go successfully, through better communication, play interactions, and social affordances. These considerations, she noted, extend beyond games to digital spaces more broadly, where a lack of such affordances can make interaction feel diminished and dehumanizing.
About the Prosocial Design Network
The Prosocial Design Network researches and promotes prosocial design: evidence-based design practices that bring out the best in human nature online. Learn more at prosocialdesign.org.