Carnegie Mellon launches center dedicated to ‘transformational’ gaming

Is Pittsburgh on its way to becoming a new hub for gaming innovation? Jessica Hammer thinks it’s possible. 

The Carnegie Mellon University professor will be leading the university’s newly announced Center for Transformational Play, which launches Tuesday.  

The center is dedicated to the study of video games, but not just any video games. It aims to boost innovation in games that educate, change players’ thinking, and spread awareness of important social and environmental causes. 

In short, games that “transform.”

Transformational games can be a lot of things. Some teach kids how to work through math mistakes. Some help players facilitate difficult conversations about mental health or racism. And others aim to inspire social and environmental change. 

“One of the big intellectual thrusts that we’re pursuing is games for climate action,” said Hammer. “Over the next three to five years, we’d like to be the No. 1 place in the world working for climate action through games.”

The center is a noteworthy addition to a city that has become home to numerous gaming innovators in recent years. 

Pittsburgh is already home to Duolingo, one of the most popular educational gaming platforms in the U.S. And Schell Games and Simcoach Games, which both specialize in games that bridge entertainment and education, have headquarters on the South Side. 

Simcoach will be a sponsor of the Center for Transformational Play.  “At Simcoach, we see firsthand how games can change the way people think, behave and act toward others and the environment,” said CEO Brian Kaleida said in a statement. 

Many of the engineers already powering local game companies are CMU graduates. Hammer believes the new center could fuel even more local gaming talent, much in the way CMU centers such as the Robotics Institute have created a wave of high-tech startups in Pittsburgh. 

“Because we’re inside an academic institution, we have certain freedoms to do things that maybe are not immediately profitable, or to be thinking about things on a longer timescale,” she said. And though the center may spin off real-world games sometime in the future, it’s “not meant to be a game company.”

“Our goal is to partner with Simcoach and Schell Games and places like that to make what they do more awesome and more successful, send them our best students and build this community here in Pittsburgh,” she said. 

Centers that research gaming development and design have proliferated in recent years as the industry itself has flourished. But academic institutes dedicated solely to “transformational” games remain rare. Hammer said the Center for Transformational Play will benefit from its “secret sauce” — the university itself and the city of Pittsburgh. 

“These are resources that we can draw on,” she said. “We have Pittsburgh, we have the resources of the city. And it’s a city that’s still relatively livable, so people can afford to come here and try to found something, and build their dream.”