UChicago Research Powers New Social Impact Games from Resilient Games Studio

The University of Chicago has licensed three educational games created for young people to Resilient Games Studio, a company that makes games and tools that provide a positive impact on social and health-related issues.

The agreement covers Smokestacks, Hearsay, and Babyburg, which use role-playing, storytelling, and resource management to help young people engage with topics including tobacco use, contraception, and young parenthood. They provide a fun and science-backed way to practice social skills and build resilience in the face of peer pressure and misinformation.

The Polsky Center, which manages the University’s technology portfolio, worked with the company and the University team through the diligence and licensing process. The license gives Resilient Games Studio a path to expand the games’ distribution and move years of University research, design, and testing into broader public use.

The games grew out of a collaboration that began more than a decade ago between Patrick Jagoda, William Rainey Harper Professor, Department of Cinema and Media Studies, whose work includes game studies and design, and Melissa Gilliam, then a UChicago obstetrician-gynecologist and adolescent health researcher.

Jagoda and Gilliam started working together in 2011. The two were looking for a way to use new media and games as tools for public health to STEM pathways.

“We always believed that games were not frivolous, not merely entertainment products or pastimes,” said Jagoda, a cofounder of Resilient Games Studio. “Games can also activate multiple learning styles, allow young people to build motivation and self-efficacy, and provide an environment for safe failure.”

Board and card games allowed the team to move quickly from an idea to something young people could play, critique, and improve. During summer programs and workshops, students examined subjects such as tobacco use, contraception, and young parenthood. They then worked alongside researchers and professional designers to turn those ideas into playable experiences.

“We would select a public health topic, pair high school students with professional designers, and create games that reflected their interests and perspectives,” Jagoda said. “From those workshops, we identified three games that we thought were especially effective, and then we conducted research to understand exactly what they did well and to what degree.”

The workshops were a part of a five-year study funded by the NIH Science Education Partnership Award called Hexacago Health Academy.

In Smokestacks, players assume the role of tobacco company executives. They develop targeted advertising campaigns and try to increase profits, even as customers experience the health consequences of tobacco use and new regulations change the conditions of the game. By asking players to inhabit the role of the industry, the game exposes the strategies companies have used to attract customers and challenges players to confront the consequences of those choices.

A pilot study of 67 teenagers ages 14 to 18 found that participants reported greater perceived knowledge of tobacco’s health effects after playing and were more likely to recognize tactics used by tobacco companies to encourage smoking and minimize health risks.

In the collaborative card game Hearsay players use prompts involving characters, places, and situations to tell the story of a young person’s first year of college. Contraception and sexual health cards must be incorporated into the narrative and into the character’s decisions, allowing players to practice using health information in the context of a larger story.

“If you hit young people over the head with too much information, it may not stay with them,” Jagoda said. “Instead of operating like a traditional quiz or test, a thoughtfully-designed game is engaging, puts knowledge in a broader context, and motivates a player to use that knowledge to progress through the activity.”

Babyburg, a resource-management game previously known as Babytown, asks players to take on the role of young parents balancing school, work, friendships, finances, and the health and happiness of a baby. The game is designed to help players think through the challenges that can accompany young parenthood while questioning common stereotypes about young parents and their abilities.

The games use embedded design techniques, incorporating information and persuasive elements into the structure of play rather than presenting them as a separate lesson. Jagoda said games are particularly suited to that work because they can combine text, images, storytelling, interaction, and immediate feedback.

“No matter what type of learner you are, you can find something in a game that is productive, whether it’s the challenge, the storytelling, or the social interaction,” he said. “Games also include built-in feedback. Unlike many traditional classrooms, games give you feedback at every moment. In that way, they can operate as powerful learning machines.”

The games have already moved beyond their original workshops. Teachers have tested them in Chicago classrooms, and game materials have been distributed to more than 80 Chicago Public Library branches. The new license is intended to create a sustainable path for continued production and wider distribution beyond the life of an individual research project or grant.

Timothy Parsons, director and business lead at Resilient Games Studio, began working with Jagoda and Gilliam in 2020 with a focus on that next step.

“I was encouraged by their goal of taking educational games and getting them distributed,” Parsons said. “One of the questions was how to do that in a way that made economic sense. We believe there is a lot of promise in these games and tools, and this is our first move into physical games.”

Resilient Games Studio has built a portfolio that includes online games and physical educational tools. In 2023, the company licensed a youth-informed contraception counseling tool through the Polsky Center, an earlier agreement that Parsons described as the company’s most successful project to date. The three-game license extends that relationship into physical board and card games.

The agreement also follows the University of Chicago’s 2025–26 Year of Games, a university-wide initiative that explored games and play through scholarship, design, exhibitions, screenings, workshops, and approximately 130 public events. For Jagoda, the scale of the initiative reflected a growing recognition that games can be both cultural forms and practical tools for teaching, research, and social impact.

“The idea was always to take the tools and games we created and move them into classrooms, after-school programs, and libraries where students could engage with them,” Jagoda said. “For us, this was first and foremost about social good — finding ways to get educational tools to young people.”