Transformative Play Initiative

Can games transform us in profound, meaningful, and lasting ways? Whether played in leisure time or in professional contexts, play can impact us significantly. Games invite us to shift our perspectives, our behavior, our relationships, and our ways of interacting with the world around us. These shifts in perspective can lead us to feel more empowered, empathetic, aware, engaged, and skilled. At the Games & Society Lab at the Department of Game Design, Uppsala University Campus Gotland, we investigate the potential of games as a means for personal and social transformation. Our Transformative Play Initiative combines these research interests with education. Our goals include: Developing accessible tools for designing and facilitating transformative play experiences; Building online and on campus graduate programs in Transformative Game Design for practitioners in helping professions; Hosting workshops, lectures, roundtables, and seminars featuring experts in the field; Collaborating with international partners on research projects; Maintaining an open-access archive of relevant research, documentation, design tools, and best practices; Securing physical spaces for experimental design, play, and research to take place; and Producing academic and popular source materials on theory, practice, and case studies related to transformative play. Are you involved in designing or implementing transformative play experiences? Do you work with these topics in your research or pedagogy? If so, we are interested in collaborating with local and international partners. Learn more about the Games & Society Lab at the Department of Game Design: https://www.speldesign.uu.se/research/games-and-society-lab/ Like Transformative Play Initiative on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/transformativeplay Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/TransformativePlayInitiative