Counterplay SI

And So We Play… : Living better lives together through play. A Counterplay Special Issue.

Guest editors: Mathias Poulsen and the Counterplay community 🙂

This special issue emerges from CounterPlay ’26, an international play festival hosted by Lab for Play Design at Kolding School of Design in Denmark. CounterPlay seeks to cultivate rich, diverse landscapes of play, where we can come together as a play community to explore one central question: “How might play help us live better lives together, nurturing both human and more-than-human flourishing?” 

This call acknowledges that in today’s difficult times, play is not going to save us, but we believe that it might be what keeps us going in the face of otherwise insurmountable challenges. Some might say this is no time to play, but we believe it is exactly the time to play, and we hope you will read this call as a deliberate choice to play with our collective futures in full awareness of the mess we are in.

With this call for papers, we aim to extend ongoing conversations beyond the CounterPlay festival. The most important thing about CounterPlay is not the festival itself, but the vibrant play community, the passionate conversations and the possibility of living more playful lives together. We invite submissions from people who attended the festival, as well as those who didn’t make it to Denmark. We imagine that some submissions might want to explore CounterPlay from within, unfolding the affective experiences of encountering each other through play, where others may approach the issues raised by CounterPlay from ’the outside’, from a distance.  

(For inspiration, you can take a look at the ‘call for play’ and programme for CounterPlay ’26).

Some suggested subthemes include (but are not limited to): 

• Radical whimsy
• Power in play
• Rituals and play
• Who has access to play or who gets to play? 
• What are playful ways of living together? 
• Boredom, AI and playfulness 
• The Trickster and play
• Decolonial joy and play
• Intergenerational Play
• Who we are.
• Feathers
• Play as acts of rebellion
• A bit cheeky
• PI (Playful Intelligence instead of AI)
• Creative Play (making something through play e.g. sculptures, printing… ) play as a method to sustain making. 
• What can play hide from us
• watch out…play about 

Instructions for authors:

Authors do not need to have attended the Counterplay festival to submit to this special issue; they only need to be interested in engaging with the questions and themes set out in this call. 

This special issue is open to experimental submissions that are playful within the requirements of the journal’s article formatting submissions and peer-review processes. It may include traditional papers, visual essays, interactive fiction (with commentary), or other formats that fit the template. This special issue seeks to carry playful links across the articles that embodies the spirit of that “because we are together, fun things will happen.” Authors are invited to explore how this might influence their work after submission as the issue comes together. 

Timeline

• Call for papers out: End of October 2026
• Submissions: By end of February 2027
• Publication estimated by September 2027

No Article Processing Charge (APC) will apply to accepted articles, authors keep full copyright of their work with papers published under a CC-BY licence,, and the journal is free to read. 

Details of how to submit, along with more information about the Journal of Play in Adulthood, can be found on our submissions page. When submitting, please let us know it is for this Counterplay Special Issue. Discussions around the special issue are also taking place on the Counterplay discord which is open to all: https://discord.gg/3nGcQf9bpJ