For the Counterplay 2019 (http://www.counterplay.org) – a conference focusing on creating conditions for playful learning, playful organizations and a more playful life in general – that took place April 4-6 in Aarhus a proposal was submitted for students to set up a game exhibition around the theme and CFP of the 2019 conference: ‘Playing at the edge’ (http://www.counterplay.org/call-for-proposals/). The proposal was successful, and so during the conference MA students from Aarhus University, high school students from GameIT College and volunteers from the IT-creative organization Coding Pirates Aarhus worked together during the conference to create games for a conference game exhibition under the common theme ‘gaming at the edge’. The event was an official part of the conference programme (http://www.counterplay.org/timetable/#event-438) and here the students gave short talks on their created games, presented a scholarly argument for how to push digital game experiences to the edge of what is currently possible, and invited the conference participants to try out and discuss the students’ games with them. Feedback from the conference participants were uniformly positive, both in relation to the students capability to make fresh games that pushed the game format as well as the student ability to think scholarly and present strong arguments for their particular takes on ‘gaming at the edge’.
The success of the event – both in relation to the strong conceptual foundation of the games and the capability of students from the Arts and Humanities to express their thinking with technologies and game making without having much prior knowledge – was such that the event will constitute one of the modules in the IGNITE course on Game Design. Both the Counterplay2019 event and the IGNITE Game Design course is developed by Rikke Toft Nørgård, Claus Toft-Nielsen, Mikey Andersen and Jeanette Falk Olesen.