This blog post is co-written with Heidi Vogel Brockmann and Ronald Brockmann from GuardianGamer.
Millions of families face a common challenge: how to keep children safe in online gaming without sacrificing the joy and social connection these games provide.
In this post, we share how GuardianGamer—a member of the AWS Activate startup community—has built a cloud gaming platform that helps parents better understand and engage with their children’s gaming experiences using AWS services. Built specifically for families with children under 13, GuardianGamer uses AWS services including Amazon Nova and Amazon Bedrock to deliver a scalable and efficient supervision platform. The team uses Amazon Nova for intelligent narrative generation to provide parents with meaningful insights into their children’s gaming activities and social interactions, while maintaining a non-intrusive approach to monitoring.
The challenge: Monitoring children’s online gaming experiences
Monitoring children’s online gaming activities has been overwhelming for parents, offering little visibility and limited control. GuardianGamer fills a significant void in the market for parents to effectively monitor their children’s gaming activities without being intrusive.
Traditional parental controls were primarily focused on blocking content rather than providing valuable data related to their children’s gaming experiences and social interactions. This led GuardianGamer’s founders to develop a better solution—one that uses AI to summarize gameplay and chat interactions, helping parents better understand and engage with their children’s gaming activities in a non-intrusive way, by using short video reels, while also helping identify potential safety concerns.
Creating connected experiences for parent and child
GuardianGamer is a cloud gaming platform built specifically for families with pre-teen children under 13, combining seamless gaming experiences with comprehensive parental insights. Built on AWS and using Amazon Nova for intelligent narrative generation, the platform streams popular games while providing parents with much-desired visibility into their children’s gaming activities and social interactions. The service prioritizes both safety and social connection through integrated private voice chat, delivering a positive gaming environment that keeps parents informed in a non-invasive way.
There are two connected experiences offered in the platform: one for parents to stay informed and one for kids to play in a highly trusted and safe GuardianGamer space.
For parents, GuardianGamer offers a comprehensive suite of parental engagement tools and insights, empowering them to stay informed and involved in their children’s online activities. Insights are generated from gaming and video understanding, and texted to parents to foster positive conversations between parents and kids. Through these tools, parents can actively manage their child’s gaming experience, enjoying a safe and balanced approach to online entertainment.
For kids, GuardianGamer offers uninterrupted gameplay with minimal latency, all while engaging in social interactions. The platform makes it possible for children to connect and play exclusively within a trusted circle of friends—each vetted and approved by parents—creating a secure digital extension of their real-world relationships. This transforms gaming sessions into natural extensions of friendships formed through school, sports, and community activities, all enhanced by advanced parental AI insights.
By seamlessly blending technology, community, and family, GuardianGamer creates a safer and enriching digital space, called “The Trusted Way for Kids to Play.”
Solution overview
When the GuardianGamer team set out to build a platform that would help parents supervise their children’s gaming experiences across Minecraft, Roblox, and beyond, they knew they needed a cloud infrastructure partner with global reach and proven scalability. Having worked with AWS on previous projects, the team found it to be the natural choice for their ambitious vision.
“Our goal was to build a solution that could scale from zero to millions of users worldwide while maintaining low latency and high reliability—all with a small, nimble engineering team. AWS serverless architecture gave us exactly what we needed without requiring a massive DevOps investment.”
– Heidi Vogel Brockmann, founder and CEO of GuardianGamer.
The following diagram illustrates the backend’s AWS architecture.
GuardianGamer’s backend uses a fully serverless stack built on AWS Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Cognito, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), making it possible to expand the platform effortlessly as user adoption grows while keeping operational overhead minimal. This architecture enables the team to focus on their core innovation: AI-powered game supervision for parents, rather than infrastructure management.
The cloud gaming component presented unique challenges, requiring low-latency GPU resources positioned close to users around the world.
“Gaming is an inherently global activity, and latency can make or break the user experience. The extensive Regional presence and diverse Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance types give us the flexibility to deploy gaming servers where our users are.”
– Heidi Vogel Brockmann.
The team uses Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) for efficient game state storage within each AWS Region and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) for streamlined cluster management.
For the AI analysis capabilities that form the heart of GuardianGamer’s parental supervision features, the team relies on AWS Batch to coordinate analysis jobs, and Amazon Bedrock provides access to powerful large language models (LLMs).
“We’re currently using Amazon Nova Lite for summary generation and highlight video selection, which helps parents quickly understand what’s happening in their children’s gameplay without watching hours of content, just a few minutes a day to keep up to date and start informed conversations with their child,”
– Heidi Vogel Brockmann.
Results
Together, AWS and GuardianGamer have successfully scaled GuardianGamer’s cloud gaming platform to handle thousands of concurrent users across multiple game environments. The company’s recent expansion to support Roblox—in addition to its existing Minecraft capabilities—has broadened its serviceable addressable market to 160 million children and their families.
“What makes our implementation special is how we use Amazon Nova to maintain a continuous record of each child’s gaming activities across sessions. When a parent opens our app, they see a comprehensive view of their child’s digital journey, not just isolated moments.”
– Ronald Brockmann, CTO of GuardianGamer.
Conclusion
GuardianGamer demonstrates how a small, agile team can use AWS services to build a sophisticated, AI-powered gaming platform that prioritizes both child safety and parent engagement. By combining cloud gaming infrastructure across multiple Regions with the capabilities of Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Nova, GuardianGamer is pioneering a new approach to family-friendly gaming. Through continuous parent feedback and responsible AI practices, the platform delivers safer, more transparent gaming experiences while maintaining rapid innovation.
“AWS has been exceptional at bringing together diverse teams and technologies across the company to support our vision. Our state-of-the-art architecture leverages several specialized AI components, including speech analysis, video processing, and game metadata collection. We’re particularly excited about incorporating Amazon Nova, which helps us transform complex gaming data into coherent narratives for parents. With AWS as our scaling partner, we’re confident we can deliver our service to millions of families worldwide.”
– Heidi Vogel Brockmann.
Learn more about building family-safe gaming experiences on AWS. And for further reading, check out The psychology behind why children are hooked on Minecraft and Keep kids off Roblox if you’re worried, its CEO tells parents.
About the Authors
Heidi Vogel Brockmann is the CEO & Founder at GuardianGamer AI. Heidi is an engineer and a proactive mom of four with a mission to transform digital parenting in the gaming space. Frustrated by the lack of tools available for parents with gaming kids, Heidi built the platform to enable fun for kids and peace of mind for parents.
Ronald Brockmann is the CTO of GuardianGamer AI. With extensive expertise in cloud technology and video streaming, Ronald brings decades of experience in building scalable, secure systems. A named inventor on dozens of patents, he excels at building high-performance teams and deploying products at scale. His leadership combines innovative thinking with precise execution to drive GuardianGamer’s technical vision.
Raechel Frick is a Sr Product Marketing Manager at AWS. With over 20 years of experience in the tech industry, she brings a customer-first approach and growth mindset to building integrated marketing programs. Based in the greater Seattle area, Raechel balances her professional life with being a soccer mom and after-school carpool manager, demonstrating her ability to excel both in the corporate world and family life.
John D’Eufemia is an Account Manager at AWS supporting customers within Media, Entertainment, Games, and Sports. With an MBA from Clark University, where he graduated Summa Cum Laude, John brings entrepreneurial spirit to his work, having co-founded multiple ventures at Femia Holdings. His background includes significant leadership experience through his 8-year involvement with DECA Inc., where he served as both an advisor and co-founder of Clark University’s DECA chapter.
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