Roblox and Games for Change Challenge Promotes Positive Connection Through Play
Winners to Be Featured at July Games for Change Festival
Roblox’s mission is to connect a billion people every day with optimism and civility. Earlier this year we partnered with Games for Change to bring this mission to life, inviting creators worldwide to design Roblox games that promote positive connection, community, and online safety through play. Today, we’re excited to announce Gather-2-Gether as the winner of this year’s Encouraging Positive Connection and Wellbeing: A Roblox and Games for Change Challenge.
Gather-2-Gether was chosen by a panel of judges from Games for Change and Roblox based on a number of criteria: Storyboarding & Message Quality, Potential Impact, Prosocial Design, Game Based Learning, and Progress & Polish.
Developed by studio Magic The Dog as a capstone project at the University of Miami, Gather-2-Gether is a two-player cooperative game for parents and kids to play together and connect. Players collaborate to solve puzzles and complete quests, and can spend downtime decorating a shared space and growing a lush farm.
By encouraging intergenerational co-play, Gather-2-Gether can provide parents with a fun, active way to bond with their kids in the digital world, which can help strengthen trust and facilitate conversations around safe digital habits. For winning the competition, Magic The Dog will receive the $15,000 USD first prize.
We also want to congratulate Island of Communion, our second-prize winner. In Island of Communion, players assemble a team and explore a fantastical world together, using their unique skills to overcome challenges spread across four distinct island realms, learning well-being skills like communication, resilience, and more.
Island of Communion was first developed as part of a challenge-related game jam for students in Brazil earlier this year and went on to win that event. Created by a pair of students with no prior Roblox experience, it demonstrates how game development can teach important life skills like teamwork and communication, and how Roblox Studio makes it easy for beginners to build prosocial games. Communion Inc., the studio behind Island of Communion, will take home the $10,000 USD second-place prize.
We’re grateful to everyone who participated in this Games for Change challenge, whether on their own or at one of the game jams in Brazil, India, and South Korea earlier this year. Those events demonstrated firsthand the power of games to bring people together and form communities, resulting in more than 25 challenge submissions from over 150 participants worldwide.
As Angad Singh Malik, Chapter Lead for Games for Change India, said, “This Game Jam was the right way to begin our work in India. Games are not just entertainment. They are one of the most powerful mediums through which young people learn, imagine, collaborate, and respond to the world around them.”
The sentiment was shared by Gabriel Recalde, Director of Public Policy, Latin America at Roblox, who said, “Our partnership with Games for Change Latin America, together with the groundbreaking work at Universidade de São Paulo, is more than a collaboration—it is a catalyst. Together, we are helping equip young creators to build meaningful experiences that will help make Roblox an even more vibrant, inclusive, and thriving place for our users.”
Both Gather-2-Gether and Island of Communion will be showcased at the 2026 Games for Change Festival in New York City, running July 21–22. Roblox will participate in panels focusing on the importance of prosocial design, digital civility, and intergenerational co-play.
Thank you to all the creators who submitted games as part of this Games for Change challenge, and congratulations again to the winners.
