Announcing the Transformative Play Initiative

We are delighted to announce an exciting new development at the Department of Game Design at Uppsala University Campus Gotland! The Transformative Play Initiative will create events, archives, research, and graduate programmes with an emphasis on analog role-playing games. We are specifically interested in games designed and implemented by people in helping professions who wish to use play as a vehicle for personal and social transformation.

Each month we will host 1-2 lectures, roundtables, or town hall meetings. These events take place on Tuesday evenings live on Zoom in webinar format. Lectures are one hour long on a variety of cutting edge topics from researchers and practitioners, with thirty minutes for questions at the end. Roundtables gather the lecturers together for a structured conversation. We also have Town Hall meetings as a more public discussion space, where community members can request slots for 5-10 minute lightning talks on related topics, followed by short breakout rooms for discussion.

Everything is archived on YouTube to encourage sharing and open access. Although the series focuses on analog role-playing games, the topics are broad enough to be useful to students focusing on digital games and other forms of play as well.

This fall, we have the following events planned:

We are finalizing the Spring event schedule and are looking forward to see you all at future events!

My First Jam 2021

8 hours, 80+ participants, 13 games delivered!

Winner Best Interpretation: ‘Froggo Poggo’ by Team SuperAwesomeDynamitePlatinumPowers
Winner Best Execution:  ‘The Frogmament’ by Team Superawesome
Winner Most Fun: ‘Lick Lick!’ by Team Nick Nick

Game Devs of Color Expo, 23-27th

Coming to your screen September 23–27, 2021, the 6th annual Game Devs of Color Expo is dedicated to amplifying the creative power held by people of color in games
Kayode Ceiriog Shonibare-Lewis (he/him)

Our own Kayode “K” Shonibare-Lewis is giving a talk on the 25th, titled “Racial Bias, Reverse Heredity and the Parents of Custom Avatars”

Tickets to participate in the whole conference, September 23-27, 2021, are available here.

Students from the Department of Game Design can apply for partial funding, which is paid retroactively. Contact gamedesign@speldesign.uu.se for the application.