Introduction to Digital Thriving

Digital thriving is the ideal outcome of well-designed online spaces intended to make the world better for billions of people. This is a playbook for achieving that outcome.

What is digital thriving?

For us, digital thriving is:

• Project — Produced by Thriving in Games Group (TIGG) and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, supported by the Riot Games Social Impact Fund.
• Playbook — Research-backed, community-driven, online resource for developers with a focus on practical application. Unofficial theme: grok-and-go.  
• Community — A growing collective of organizations focused on helping people thrive online.

Most importantly, for us digital thriving is an outcome: 

• Outcome — What results when developers intentionally design online spaces to foster combined feelings of well-being, accomplishment, belonging, and meaningful relationships in individuals, groups, and communities.

What’s the case for digital thriving?

Imagine an online world where: 

• Digital products help individuals feel good about themselves, their lives, and their ability to get good at something.
• People are able to be their authentic and best selves.
• Every game you play is a respectful, welcoming experience.
• Connecting and engaging with others leads to accomplishments, a full life, and a healthy society.

Doesn’t that sound like a world worth creating? We believe it does; for us, this is the case for digital thriving.

We believe digital thriving is what the World Wide Web was meant to achieve; online games — with all their diverse and rich experiences — can provide us with the knowledge and patterns we need to make that achievement possible.

Founded in games but created for everyone, the Playbook is about how to design online spaces that foster digital thriving and make that better world a reality.

Why do we need a playbook for digital thriving?

There are six big reasons for the Playbook:

1. Go beyond “toxicity” — Removing “toxicity” is not enough. We want to bring players more value than “‘it doesn’t suck.” We want players to thrive and reach their full potential as human beings. 
2. Player dynamics design is hard — Creating something user-friendly is challenging, but creating something social-friendly? Even more so.
3. Lack of practical knowledge — While an abundance of social research already exists, best practices for creating great online social spaces are often difficult to find.
4. Wealth of hidden knowledge — Most of the knowledge to solve these problems is currently tribal, dispersed across niche blogs, or hidden away as trade secrets within the brains of a handful of aging social designers.
5. Avoid repeating old mistakes — Though social system design has become fundamental to many businesses, many practitioners don’t have the tools they need to solve these problems. As a result, we’re simply making the same old mistakes again and again. 
6. Worldwide mix of people — To create successful online communities, we must design with a wide range of social aspects in mind: knowledge, experience, goals, interests, age, gender, culture — and much more!

Through good player dynamics design, we can help billions of players and their communities thrive. The Playbook can make design for good player dynamics easier, practical, and inclusive of all possible audiences.

What does digital thriving mean for developers?

Is digital thriving good for business? Yes! Here are a few ways:

• Better experiences — Spaces designed to help people thrive are more rewarding and worth experiencing repeatedly.
• Greater loyalty — People stay where they thrive. And prosocial behavior is sticky.
• Organic acquisition — Authentically serving real needs also generates word of mouth that reduces acquisition costs. 
• Wider potential audience — Designing spaces that are welcome to all increases your chances of reaching a wider audience. Brands that are socially conscious are also important to Gen Z and Alpha.

The value to designers specifically:

• Do more impactful design work
• Add greater value to players and companies
• Ask better questions to solve more quickly
• Leverage proven patterns + real-life examples
• Give back to the industry

Now what?

Learn about Getting Started with Digital Thriving!

References

• Berners-Lee, T. (2000). Weaving the Web.
• Brown, D. J. et al. (2017). Human thriving: A conceptual debate and literature review.
• Cook, D. et al. (2024). Kind games: Designing for prosocial multiplayer. Polaris Game Design Conference.
• Fair Play Alliance / Joan Ganz Cooney Center. (2023). Digital Thriving Project. 
• Statista. (2024). Number of video game users worldwide from 2019 to 2029.