In June, Malaysia joined Turkey and Australia as the latest country to place age restrictions on games and social media for children. Similar legislative efforts are underway across Europe, in Greece, India, Indonesia, and China, pointing to a global policy wave requiring stricter age assurance systems and controlled digital environments for minors.
In the United States, legislative efforts, such as the Kids Online Safety Act and state-level age-verification laws, are similarly intensifying scrutiny on young people’s digital lives and placing increasing limits on where, when, and with whom they can play.
These policies move to restrict access to online spaces to shield young people from harm. Yet, access to safe enough online spaces can be beneficial to young people.
Research strongly supports the value of safe online spaces for youth wellbeing because in these spaces youth can explore, take positive risks, and learn from mistakes.
Safety is relative, negotiated, and imperfect, so having guardrails in place is critical.
For example, Autcraft, a semi-public Minecraft server for autistic children, provides players with a safe, moderated, and supportive environment for taking positive social risks. One young Autcraft player who had experienced bullying on other servers slowly went from building alone on the edge of the world to inviting others into their house and helping new players get around.
This experience stands in sharp contrast to the harassment and absence of positive mentorship that many young people encounter on large, unmoderated game servers.
Having said that, safety is relative, negotiated, and imperfect, so having guardrails in place is critical.
Consider the death of a beloved parrot. In 2024, on a Minecraft server my nonprofit created for grieving youth, a young player accidentally killed another player’s pet parrot. While some adults argued this event could be traumatic and harmful, the player embraced her mistake. She built an elaborate cemetery and buried the bird as an act of apology and repair.
The cemetery soon became integral to the comings and goings of both pets and players on the server.
In turning a mistake into an act of care, the young player demonstrated the kind of resilience and social learning that safe enough online play spaces can support.
As a game designer, I’ve been exploring new ways to give youth the power and permission to resolve conflicts themselves when they arise in our Minecraft communities. Rather than policing the server and banning players who mess up (and they do), our community moderators support youth in seeing each other’s perspectives and generating their own solutions.
Not all online play experiences are beneficial, especially in platforms built for adults without considering young people’s developmental needs.
A special area in Minecraft called The Resort serves as the main base for these conflict resolution conversations. If players are too upset to talk, they are given time and space to cool down by chopping wood, mining diamonds, or blowing things up, all from a safe distance.
In well-designed play environments, whether on a playground or in a digital world, safety is not achieved by eliminating risk but by designing for it. Designing for risk means putting constraints on manipulative design practices linked to youth-specific harms, like loot boxes and unmoderated interaction.
It also means creating spaces and activities where young people can test their limits, make mistakes, and recover with support.
Research on platforms like Roblox shows that safety is often produced through a mix of platform-level moderation systems and player-created community norms. Platform-level moderation includes filters for slurs, reporting tools, content flags, and age-gating, which creates a baseline layer of protection and removes the worst harms.
On top of this are player-created norms for play, which define what counts as fair, spell out what happens when someone breaks a rule, and express the values the community holds most dear.
When both layers are present, young people aren’t just passively kept safe. They actually practice navigating risk by learning how to recognize trouble, set boundaries, resolve conflict, and build community.
When online games and platforms are designed with young people’s developmental needs in mind, they can help build the social and emotional skills needed to flourish.
Research across youth development and education consistently shows that young people learn best when they feel safe enough to express vulnerability, take interpersonal risks, and recover from mistakes without fear of humiliation or exclusion. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child’s General Comment No. 25 reminds us that the best interests of the child includes the right to engage in digital play and social interaction as a means of development.
Yet not all online play experiences are beneficial, especially in platforms built for adults without considering young people’s developmental needs. In these settings, young people can be exposed to harassment, sexualized or violent content, and manipulative design practices that ignore their developmental needs and leave them vulnerable rather than supported.
But when online games and platforms are designed with young people’s developmental needs in mind, they can help build the social and emotional skills needed to flourish.
Defining “safe enough” requires collaboration among developmental scientists, researchers, designers, and young people themselves. It also requires a broader public imagination for what youth online safety can mean: not just shielding young people from harm, but creating conditions where they develop confidence, empathy, and resilience through play.
