Chapter 4: Practice: Transformative Role-playing Game Design and Research

Kjell Hedgard Hugaas is a Northern Norwegian game designer, organizer, writer, theorist, and trained actor. In particular, he is engaged within the Nordic larp tradition, where he has been active for a bit over two decades. The last few years he has explored the transformative potential of games, and has proposed specific intentional game design practices that facilitate transformative effects. As well as being a founding
member of the Transformative Play Initiative, Hugaas has theorized how ideas impact players through the processes of memetic bleed, procedural bleed, and identity bleed. His work on bleed has so far culminated in his 2022 Master’s thesis in Game Design at Uppsala University, and he is planning to expand on this theoretical work in the future. In 2023, he completed a second thesis for UU on the impacts of larp on participants’ attitudes and anxieties around death. In addition to his project assistant work on EDGE and the Erasmus+ Cooperation Partnership ROCKET, he is the co-founder and CEO of the game studio and research company Evocative Games AB, where he currently works as a consultant, researcher, narrative designer, and writer.

Alessandro Giovannucci is an award-winning game designer and theorist working in the field of larp and immersive experience. He co-founded the larp collective Chaos League in 1992 and wrote the manifesto “Southern Way – New Italian Larp.” His work focuses on political and social topics, experienced through the participatory nature of larp. He has worked on different formats and styles of games, going from small ones (First They Came) to some of the bigger and most successful international larps (Sahara Expedition, Miskatonic University). Very active in the field of online larp, he designed games and organised several online festivals in the last years including the International Larp Festival. Alessandro is also regularly invited to host talks, larp design workshops and seminars all over Europe and their games are hosted in some of the most important festivals. Has already participated, both as a partner and leader, in European funded projects related to larp, civil rights and education. Alessandro is also a music teacher at the University of Teramo and University of Chieti, researching the relationship between materialism and storytelling in the arts.

Josefin Westborg is one of the world’s leading designers in edu-larps. She has a background in game design and pedagogy and is one of the founders of Lajvbyrån (previously LajvVerkstaden Väst). Josefin has worked as a research assistant and teacher at Uppsala University’s Department of Game Design where she was a founding member of the Transformative Play Initiative with focus on analog role-playing games. Westborg codesigned curriculum for Uppsala’s Master’s in Transformative Game Design and has worked as a teacher in its introductory courses, upon which EDGE is based. She has also been a teacher in game design at both Chalmers University of Technology and the University of Gothenburg. She recently published an article for the International Journal of Role-playing entitled “The Educational Role-Playing Game Design Matrix: Mapping Design Components onto Types of Education.” In addition to EDGE, she also works as a project assistant in the Erasmus+ Cooperation Partnership ROCKET. Throughout her career Josefin has met thousands of students of all ages, and run and designed larps for them. She is passionate about designing for interaction, storytelling and learning. When she is not involved with games you will probably find her at the dance studio doing ballroom dance.