Meaningful Play 2026

Welcome to Meaningful Play 2026 

We are pleased to announce that Meaningful Play will be hosted at Carnegie Mellon University for the second time! The Center for Transformational Play at CMU is producing this year's conference in collaboration with the prior organizing team and several of our partners. 

 Meaningful Play 2026 is a conference about theory, research, and game design innovations, principles and practices. Meaningful Play brings scholars,  industry professionals and games practitioners together to understand and improve upon games to entertain, inform, educate, and persuade in meaningful ways.

 Conference Audience and Themes

We invite academics, professionals, and practitioners to join us! Our target audience includes: 

• game researchers

• game designers and developers

• educators who use games and teach about games

• students

• government and NGOs interested in games

The programming tracks at this conference will reflect the themes we want to explore over our three days together.

The questions we are excited to examine with you are:

• What have we done? What do we know? 
   Let's talk about the work we've done and what we've learned. 

• What have we made?
   We want to see your games! If possible, we want to play them. 

• What are we doing? What will we know soon? 
   Games are art and games are media; let's talk about the state of your art practice. Tell us about the things you see on the horizon in your work.

•  What should we be doing? 
   This conference brings together communities who make and do and shape. We want to take the opportunity to look forward at where we're heading and how we can make the most impact. 

• Let's do things together
   How often do you get practitioners, professionals, and academics in the same space to think about games? We want to see workshops, games sessions, experimental programming where we DO things together. Let's make a mess or play a thing. 

Additionally, we are introducing a focus on publishing our conference proceedings. We want the knowledge we share to affect the state of games creation and research in a meaningful way, which means that we need to make our shared knowledge available to our peers. 

We will use this site for event registration, content submission, session scheduling, etc before Meaningful Play 2026 starts and during the event.