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scottishgames Aug 12, 2025

Abertay’s ‘Play For Good’ To Showcase the Power of Games at RSE Curious Festival

The transformative power of video games to address real-world challenges will be on full display this September, as Abertay University’s Applied Games Lab presents its Play for Good exhibition as part of the prestigious Royal Society of Edinburgh’s Curious festival of knowledge.

This is a significant and welcome inclusion, demonstrating the growing recognition of games as a powerful tool for social and cultural impact. The exhibition is a real-world showcase of the More Than Games philosophy, a core pillar of the work being done to build a more resilient and impactful games ecosystem in Scotland.

This is the second major games-focused event to be included in the festival, joining the ‘Unreal Pasts, Playful Presents’ panel discussion, which also explores the cultural impact of our medium.

The interactive exhibition will feature a range of innovative projects developed by artists, experimental game makers, and experience designers from the Abertay Game Lab. These are not traditional entertainment products, but digital and physical artefacts designed to tackle challenges in health, wellbeing, and social inclusion.

Projects on display at Play For Good, include:

Virtual reality games used in rehabilitation and live performance.
A tabletop game designed to explore themes of social inequality.
Playful engagements with club culture and nature.
A project using game development for digital youth inclusion.
An experience that uses a bike as a game controller.

This is a fantastic opportunity for the wider Scottish games community, policymakers, and the public to see firsthand how the skills and technologies from our industry are being applied to create positive change. It’s a chance to move beyond the conversation and see tangible examples of applied games in action.

The Scottish Games Network strongly encourages everyone to visit this free, drop-in exhibition to support the incredible work being done at Abertay and to see the future of the More Than Games ecosystem.

Event Details:

What: Play for Good (Exhibition)
When: Saturday 6 September – Saturday 14 September 2025
Where: The Royal Society of Edinburgh, 22-26 George Street, Edinburgh
Cost: Free, drop-in (but booking is essential)

For more information on the exhibition and the full ‘Curious’ festival programme, please visit the Royal Society of Edinburgh website.

Photo by lhon karwan on Unsplash

#appliedGames #Curious #edinburgh #games #MoreThanGames #RoyalSocietyOfEdinburgh #RSE #scotland

scottishgames Nov 14, 2024

OUT NOW: Restore From Glitchers & Stirling University

The University of Stirling has teamed up with Edinburgh-based studio Glitchers to launch Restore, a new browser-based video game designed to give players a hands-on experience with environmental restoration while contributing to critical real-world research. The release of Restore highlights how video games can powerfully support real-world tasks and research into global challenges like biodiversity loss and pandemic prevention.

In Restore, players step into the shoes of an agriculturalist or arborist, managing land and forest regeneration while balancing the economic and ecological impacts of their decisions. Players face dynamic choices – such as whether to cultivate land for settlements or regenerate forests.

This creates complex trade-offs. While increased restoration efforts can initially heighten pandemic risk, fully restored landscapes ultimately become resilient to disease, offering insight into the delicate balance between nature and health.

Commissioned as part of the RESTOREID initiative, a European-funded research project led by the University of Stirling, Restore serves both as an educational platform and a data-gathering tool. RESTOREID explores the intersections of ecosystem restoration, biodiversity, and infectious disease risk, generating data to inform policies and practical guidelines for healthier, disease-resistant landscapes.

In Restore, players’ anonymised decisions are gathered to study human priorities in ecological scenarios, providing valuable insights into the choices being made that shape restoration projects on a global scale.

Dr. Brad Duthie, Lecturer in Environmental Modelling at Stirling, explains:

Restore applies ecological knowledge to in-game simulated environments, within which player decisions are made on landscape restoration under different scenarios.

“As well as being fun to play, the game educates players on restoration while giving us a better understanding of the factors driving the restoration process.

“Data generated by the game, which are anonymised during collection, will allow us to learn about how people prioritise different decisions in restoration.

Professor Nils Bunnefeld, a partner in RESTOREID, added:

The RESTOREID project is an exciting opportunity to make the voices of many people heard through their decisions in the game, and collect data on opinions from people that are often hard to reach.

Crafted by Glitchers, Restore stands out as a meaningful gaming experience that challenges players to consider the ecosystem’s complexities, where every choice has consequences.

Maxwell Scott-Slade, Game Director at Glitchers, told the Scottish Games Network:

The game will give users the chance to shape the world they want to create, but the ecosystem is delicate, and every decision has ripple effects, much like in real-world ecosystems. Users must look out for unexpected consequences in this simplified environmental scenario, such as disease which can lead to a cull of livestock.

We hope people will enjoy taking on the roles and cultivating the land in whatever way they choose.

Restore is free to play, with no downloads or registration required, making it an accessible and immediate resource for anyone interested in learning about restoration, biodiversity, and the role of ecosystem health in disease prevention.

Play Restore now and experience the future of games for research and restoration.

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