Chapter 7: Research in Transformative Game Design

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.

Josephine Baird is a lecturer at the Uppsala University’s Game Design Department and a Ph.D. candidate at Tampere University. She is a game designer and game design consultant, as well as a writer and visual artist. Her work often relates the intersection between games, identity, gender, and sexualities. Her research and recent publications present the theoretical and methodological basis for her thesis that role-playing games might provide a potent opportunity for people to explore their gender subjectivity in safer environments. Her current research will conclude with the design of a live action role-playing game that puts this theoretical work into practice. She is also an actor, public speaker, and co-host of the podcast It Is Complicated. More information can be found at https://josephinebaird.com/.

Taisto Suominen is an Associate Professor at the School of Information and Communications Technology of Turku University of Applied Sciences in Game and Interactive Technologies. He holds a Master of Engineering degree and has worked for 20 years in TUAS. He is a cofounder of Turku Game Lab and its predecessor Game Tech Arts Lab. He has been an active and key person on the TUAS game development curriculum design and Turku Game Scene activities. He was a board member of Neogames Finland 2018-2021 and continued in 2022 and 2023 as an observer member of the board. Neogames is a nonprofit association for the game industry to coordinate and support the growth and development of the Finnish game industry. His research interests include utilization of game and interactive technologies on various domains, serious and entertainment games, extended reality, game graphics and content creation.