Cultivating Safer Transformational Communities

Sarah Lynne Bowman is a scholar, game designer, and event organizer. She received her B.A. and M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin in Radio-Television- Film and her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Dallas in Arts and Humanities. Bowman has taught in the Humanities, English, and Communication. Currently, she is an Associate Professor in Game Design at Uppsala University Campus Gotland. She formerly served as Coordinator for the Peace & Conflict Studies program at Austin Community College, where she teaches Humanities. Bowman is a founding member of the Transformative Play Initiative, who research analog role-playing games as vehicles for personal and social change. She co-edited The Wyrd Con Companion Book (2012-2015) and currently edits for the International Journal of Role-Playing and Nordiclarp.org. Bowman has co-organized several conferences, including Living Games (2014, 2016, 2018), Role-playing and Simulation and Education (2016, 2018), and the Transformative Play Initiative Seminar (2022). More information at sarahlynnebowman.com.

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. For 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. He works as a project assistant on EDGE, the Erasmus+ Cooperation Partnership ROCKET, and the Horizon Europe Larpocracy project through LARPifiers. Hugaas 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, including for the Erasmus+ Dystolarp project

Nikola Sekulić is a career athlete, martial artist, stuntman, HEMA scholar, and instructor, as well as a larp and game designer. Throughout his athletic career he has achieved numerous medals and recognitions through various sports such as Judo, Gymnastics, Parkour, HEMA, etc. He specializes in biomechanics, kinesiology, kinetics, locomotion and sports psychology. He has worked in several Erasmus+ projects and is a member of the LARPifiers non-profit organization. Sekulić has been a larper since 2016 and has attended a great number of larps as well as helping establish, edit, and run several game settings and rulesets throughout Balkan larp communities. He likes to focus on bodily self expression, body positivity, self-improvement, nurture, and growth through body movement. He hopes to spread positive athletic values in a friendly way to others through nonformal education.