Curated Games Catalog

iThrive’s Curated Games Catalog highlights compelling games that feature mechanics, narratives, and other elements identified by players, professional game developers, game scholars, educators, and scientists as supportive of habits for thriving such as empathy, curiosity, growth mindset, and kindness.

Each game listed provides an age rating, a link to the game’s developer, and our rationale for featuring it.  

Explore the catalog and play the games to find ones you find compelling. Use these games as inspiration for new designs. Play these games with teens to spark conversations about their strengths. And, nominate games that you believe deserve a spot on the list by contacting us. We love adding games and categories to our catalog and welcome your contributions!  

EMPATHY

Video games might support the practice of empathy when they allow players to see the same situation from many perspectives; appreciate diversity of personalities, backgrounds, and skills; inhabit difficult circumstances to understand what it might be like to face those particular challenges; be immersed in a historical event from an unexpected point of view; discover another culture; and make choices that impact other characters or real players.

CURIOSITY

Video games might support the practice of curiosity when they provide opportunities for players to explore and create in intriguing worlds, experiment with combining found objects to make new and useful things, solve mysteries or discover meaning gradually through deep exploration, and try out different identities and interactions just to see what happens.

GROWTH MINDSET

Video games might support the practice of growth mindset when they reward small actions and give immediate feedback that helps players to learn and improve performance. Video games also may allow players to level up and to grow kingdoms, armies, or empires through sustained effort; visualize the growth they are headed for through progress maps and ability trees; train and evolve characters into more masterful beings; and gamify real-life progress towards goals like physical and emotional fitness.

KINDNESS

Video games might support the practice of kindness (being friendly, generous, and considerate towards others) when they feature themes of self-sacrifice, prompt players to care for the well-being of other characters, introduce opportunities to gift items or otherwise help other players progress, make a helpful or kind act a primary mechanic (like hugging! That game really exists!), and when developers or players build and maintain supportive and helpful communities around the game.