Kristine Jørgensen (University of Bergen), Doris C. Rusch (Uppsala University), Astrid Ensslin (University of Regensburg), Riccardo Fassone (University of Torino)

Like all expressive media throughout the centuries, games have always been a reflection of the human experience and the experiential structures that permeate it. Unlike other expressive media, though, games have come to be more strongly associated with “fun” and “entertainment” purposes rather than communicative depth, due to their interactive capacities that shift the focus away from semantic content to the enactment of engaging structures. When we think about games and transformation, we thus mostly think about their instrumentalization as tools for learning, demonstrated by the long tradition of so-called serious games used for other purposes than entertainment, spanning educational games, games for therapy and training as well as games that raise awareness for social issues, such as news games and critical games.

The serious games movement thus did a big service to our understanding and broader acceptance of the potential of games to be conceptual, expressive, communicative vehicles. This potential, though, is not reserved for serious games alone, which often have an explicit interest in and the declared goal of “changing” players in particular, often measurable, ways. The medium specific properties of games can be used to model salient aspects of the human experience and thus contribute to players’ personal transformations in much more subtle and elusive ways. They also do so in ways that are fundamentally different from traditional storytelling: by engaging players in play through their activity-centered approach that better replicates complex, internal processes and social dynamics.

In the last decade there has also been an emergence of video games outside of the serious games movement that invite ethical reflection and self-critical involvement. Another emerging, but lesser explored approach within a similar tradition is transformative games: games that aim to foster personal capacity building, mindfulness, and spiritual development. Sometimes called existential games (Leino 2010), deep games (Rusch 2017), or described as games for therapeutic purposes (Perram & Ensslin 2022; Wilks et al 2022) or for psychological resonance (Rusch 2020), transformative games challenge the instrumental approaches found in educational games, training simulators, and gamification in their aim to enable players to transgress their own limitations and transform psychologically or existentially. Transformative games explore the rich and evocative space between top down, agenda driven games that seek to “measure” or quantify transformation, and games that aim to ignite transformation through a sense of psychological resonance and kinship.

This special issue explores the transformative potential of games, spanning analogue and digital forms. We acknowledge that games are a powerful medium of communication, with the ability to present human experience in ways that other media cannot grasp. The aim of this special issue is to push the boundaries of serious games and games for change, and illustrate new perspectives on how games and play can be used for personal and existential development through transformative experiences. The current issue includes four articles which all in their own way discuss how games can be transformative. All offer different frameworks and practical solutions of the design or assessment of the transformative potential of games.

Two of the articles deal with analogue role-playing games, a genre that has long been used for serious as well as transformative purposes. Role-play as a pedagogical and therapeutic tool is well established because of their dynamic qualities, including their qualities for the development of social skills, as well as their relative ease of setting up and integrating compared to digital games. In their article “Designing Transformative Analog Role-playing Games”, Sarah Lynne Bowman, Josefin Westborg, Kjell Hedgard Hugaas, Elektra Diakolambrianou and Josephine Baird present a thorough overview of previous research and applicability of role-playing games for transformative purposes, and present a framework for the design of role-playing games with a maximum potential for its transformative impact.

A challenge Bowman and her colleagues identify in the design of transformative role-playing games is inclusivity. Making people from marginalized backgrounds experience that their perspective is relevantly treated and that they are included in the design and implementation process is often challenging and may be framed in an unfavorable way under the guise of “play”. Tackling a related issue, Guiseppe Femia addresses the needs of a specific, marginalized group in his article “Tabletop Roleplaying Game Studies: A Rhetorical Site for Disability Media Analysis”. Rather than providing a framework for how to design such games, he offers an analysis of two tabletop role-playing games that were designed with disability themes in mind: Inspirisles is a game that aims to promote deaf awareness by focusing rhetorical storytelling opportunities for deaf communities through using sign language as a central game mechanic. Responding to Bowman and her colleagues’ challenge, Inspirisles has included members of the deaf community as consultants on the game design in creating a utopian experience for disabled people outside of the deaf community. In contrast, Survival of the Able aims to depict the realities and hardships of disabled life through emulating the life of disabled characters during a Bubonic plague and zombie apocalypse. Femia argues that although they use very different rhetorical means to do so, both games challenge the use of traditional narratives in their ability to represent disabled life, and calls for a rise of ethnographic work within disability game studies.

Moving away from role-playing games, Leonard Jerrett investigates the design process of the semi-autobiographical pervasive game What We Take With Us (WWTWU) in the article “Discovering What We Take With Us from Ideation to Reportage in the Research-through-Design of a Transformative Personal Game”. The game utilizes a combination of physical and digital space in its aim to enhance wellbeing by engaging players in a series of reflective activities. In the article, Jerrett discusses challenges relating to the design process, and argues for robust support systems for developers alongside a focus on player-centric design principles to ensure community engagement and relevance when designing transformative games.

The last contribution in this issue offers a different approach on transformative games. Rather than discussing the potential for games to be transformative on a personal level, Holger Pötzsch problematizes the role of videogames in the ecological crisis in “Playing in and with Ecological Crises: Ecocritical videogames between attitudes and performance effects”. Through an ecocritical perspective, Pötzsch sees games as potentially transformative when they invite collective conscientization and politicization rather than only constituting spaces for seclusion and individual healing. Building upon Aarseth and Calleja’s cybermedia model (2015) in combination with Gach and Paglen’s approach to political art (2003), Pötzsch doffers a template for the critical assessment of the potentially transformative effects of games on society and the environment. Through short analyses of the two digital games Horizon Zero Dawn and Survive the Century, he demonstrates the applicability of his framework.

Editing this special issue has brought it home to us that the field of transformative game design and play is alive and kicking and promises to evolve at a considerable pace although it still lacks a systematic scholarly approach. The articles published here can only provide a snapshot of the field’s potential for diversification, emotional depth and therapeutic benefit, and we hereby issue a call for action for the systematic study of transformation in and through game design across platforms, cultures and areas of social and psychological application. Our hope is that this issue will become a starting point and inspiration for many game scholars and designers to help advance human and more-than-human transformation as well as its scholarly understanding going forward.

Acknowledgements 

The work involved in this special issue was partially supported by the Center for Digital Narrative at University of Bergen, a Centre of Excellence funded by the Research Council of Norway funded (project number 332643).

References

Aarseth, E. & G. Calleja (2015). The Word Game: The Ontology of an Indefinable Object. Proceedings of the FDG 2014.

Gach, A. & T. Paglen (2003). Tactics Without Tears. The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest 1(2).

Leino, O. (2010). Emotions in play: On the constitution of emotion in solitary computer game play. PhD thesis, IT University of Copenhagen.

Perram, M. and A. Ensslin (2022). “The possibilities of illness narratives in virtual reality for bodies at the margins”. Digital Creativity 33 (2). https://doi.org/10.1080/14626268.2022.2074047

Rusch, D.C. (2017). Making deep games: Designing games with meaning and purpose. Taylor & Francis

Rusch, D.C. (2020). “Existential, Transformative Game Design”. Journal of Games, Self, & Society 2 (1). https://kilthub.cmu.edu/articles/journal_contribution/Journal_of_Games_Self_Society_Vol_2_No_1/12215417

Wilks, C., A. Ensslin, C. Rise, S. Riley, M. Perram, K.A. Bailey, L. Munro and H. Fowlie (2022). “Developing a Choice-Based Digital Fiction for Body Image Bibliotherapy”. Frontiers in Communication 6.  https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2021.786465