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%).
Kowert’s work found parents’ biggest concerns — screen time, addiction, and violent or age-inappropriate content — are based on common assumptions that are misaligned with the research.
“What I find most interesting is that the concerns that parents have today in 2026 are the same concerns that parents have had for the last 50 years: overexposure to inappropriate content, overuse and overdependence,” Kowert tells Variety. “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.”
