"Games are fun—and sometimes fun can lead to an eye-opening encounter with serious ideas. Trained as a sculptor, Risa Puno took up designing games in order to make installations and experiences that encourage visceral engagement with social commentary and critique. Her art has taken the form of mini-golf courses, arcade games, an escape room, and a tabletop roleplaying game. “Group Hug,” her first solo museum exhibition, opens at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia on March 1. Calum Bowden is one of the organizers of Trust, a workspace in Berlin that incubates various social research initiatives, some of which employ live-action role-playing (LARP) as a methodology. His work is informed by anthropological thinking about embodied knowledge as a form of research. For both Bowden and Puno, play can lead to the kind of gut insights that are hard to achieve through analytical reasoning. The two met over video chat to share their experiences and compare notes. They started by talking about bringing people into games, then shifted to discussing how they define the concepts of “games” and “play” before getting into projects they’ve worked on and the lessons they’ve drawn from them."