News

The Center for Transformational Play is now accepting applications for volunteers to help with the Meaningful Play 2024 conference.

Learn More

Meaningful Play 2024 is a conference about theory, research, and game design innovations, principles, and practices. It brings scholars, industry professionals and games practitioners together to understand and improve upon games to entertain, inform, educate, and persuade.

The conference is looking for volunteers to help run the Full Papers track. It welcomes contributions from researchers and practitioners in industry and academia who advance the understanding of meaningful play.

The purpose of the track is to present the community’s understanding of the current state of the art, practice, science, and/or discipline of meaningful play. Submissions should present original, unpublished research or design work that is not currently under review by any other venue.

Game exhibition and competition

The Meaningful Play Game Exhibition and Competition invites academic, independent, experimental, serious, transformational, and/or student game developers to showcase and gain recognition for their innovative work in game design and development. Analog and digital games are welcome.

The purpose of the games and prototypes track is to highlight the things that the community has built and allow attendees to play with each other’s work. Games and prototypes at Meaningful Play will be showcased in an exhibition during the conference. Attendees will have opportunities to play them.

Microtalks

The microtalks track encourages individuals to submit proposals to discuss any of the subtopics related to the conference. Its aim is to present perspective or pose challenges to the community toward energizing new or ongoing work. Content that is insightful, speculative, or creative is encouraged.

Hosted sessions

The hosted sessions track invites submissions of engaging interactive sessions to be organized by members of the community. Its purpose is to provide opportunities for community building and community engagement around topics of interest to the broader community.

These sessions could take the form of a panel or roundtable discussion among community members, a game play session, or an interactive workshop to get people working together.

More Details

Those interested in participating should fill out a volunteer form. For more information, visit Meaningful Play’s website or email meaningfulplay@andrew.cmu.edu. 

The submission deadline is June 5. The conference will take place from Oct. 16 to 18 at Carnegie Mellon University.