S1 E2: Safe and Thriving Gaming Communities with Carlos Figueiredo

Enduring Play: A Game Development Podcast

Learn about prosocial gaming from a leader in player safety who has been innovating with moderation tools powered by technology and human ingenuity for over 16 years, Carlos Figueiredo. Carlos began his career in the company of hundreds of millions of penguins at Club Penguin, and went on to work on the widely used community moderation tool Community Sift at Two Hat Security before eventually ending up at Mojang Studios as the Director of Player Trust and Safety with the responsibility for ensuring the Minecraft community can thrive at scale. During his career, Carlos’s passion for creating safe spaces for play led him to co-found the organization now known as the Thriving in Games Group. We talk about a concept championed by TiGG – prosocial gaming, or the theory that many negative interactions in games can be prevented with game design decisions that encourage constructive behavior and thus head off disruptive behavior. Hear first-hand about what behaviors Carlos sees in game communities at scale and how he approaches design for varied experiences.

Season 1 of the Enduring Play podcast is an indie podcast drawn from interviews that informed Cheryl Platz's new book The Game Development Strategy Guide: Crafting Modern Video Games That Thrive, which is available for pre-order worldwide in advance of its release on September 16, 2025. Show notes, including a full bio, episode outline, and links are available on the Enduring Play website.