The Center for Transformational Play
From the beginning of my time at Carnegie Mellon University, I have worked to make CMU the global leader for transformational games. In the process, I discovered that we had incredible researchers working on games, but they were often isolated. Additionally, there were lots of people who wanted to work on games, but who didn’t yet have the expertise.
To meet this need, I founded the Center for Transformational Play (CTP). Since 2022, the CTP has served as a hub for work on how games and play can shape how people think, feel, and behave. Sharing resources, tools, and infrastructure means the CTP can advance the work of translating research into real-world applications that impact users in positive ways.
About The CTP
At the Center for Transformational Play (CTP) we use the power of play to tackle educational, industrial, and social challenges, from teaching children about robotics to helping adults with aphasia rehabilitation exercises. Other projects include playful methods to support climate action, games to help with healthy sleep, and leveraging game streaming for interactive learning — to give just a few of our many and diverse interests.
The CTP has the interdisciplinary expertise to connect across the university, including the educational gaming work at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) to the transformational game capstones at the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC). We also collaborate with cutting-edge researchers in computer science, neuroscience, psychology, drama, and art.
To learn more about how we’re advancing our work on transformational play visit the CTP’s website.