Welcome to our growing gallery of play in academia — a space where we collect, share, and celebrate how play shows up in universities.
We’ve gathered examples from across universities and organised them using a play categorisation framework — in other words, different ways that play operates in practice. These snapshots are designed to spark ideas, curiosity, and perhaps a little courage: whether you’re already experimenting with play or just beginning to wonder what it might look like in your work.
Our aim is to build a rich bank of examples that inspires today’s and tomorrow’s play-makers — offering practical ways to bring more playfulness into teaching, research, collaboration, and everyday academic life.
Where do these categories come from?
The play categories are grounded in insights from a series of playshops — interactive, reflective sessions that use playful methods to explore how play is experienced and enacted in professional contexts. These playshops brought together colleagues from the University of Bristol, Cardiff University, and the University of Exeter to investigate how play already shows up in their work. Drawing on these conversations and activities, our team developed a categorisation system focused on the purposes of play — what play is doing, and why.
Types of Play
- Relational Play: Play that helps us connect — building relationships, trust, and a sense of community.
- Exploratory Play: Play that opens up possibilities — experimenting, wondering, trying things out without fixed outcomes and playing around to solve problems.
- Productive Play: Play with a purpose — helping to achieve goals, move projects forward, or spark new directions.
- Manipulative Play: Play that bends the rules — small acts of deception or subversion to achieve personal aims (often with a wink) or play that helps you (your team or institution) to influence others.
- Survival Play: Play as a coping in the workplace strategy — supporting wellbeing, resilience, and self-preservation within institutional life.
- Learning Play: Play that supports understanding — enriching teaching, learning, and intellectual discovery in its broadest sense.
- Play Play: Play for its own sake — joyful, spontaneous, and not tied to any external goal.
