Prasad Sandbhor

University of York

Prasad is a serious game designer and researcher. He has designed digital, tabletop and hybrid games in diverse areas such as education, healthcare, entrepreneurship, social safety, accessibility and sustainability. He is a part of the ‘Play in Nature’ initiative that crafts playful experiences to connect people with nature around them. He also teaches game design and user experience design.  

As a multidisciplinary design consultant, Prasad has been involved in conceptualising and creating B2C and B2B digital products for Indian as well as international organisations. His professional experience of 8 years in setting and leading design teams has made him proficient in strategic management of design. Prasad has been able to maintain his secret identity as a freelance author too. He writes short stories and essays in his native language, Marathi.  

A description of Prasad's research:

Prasad’s PhD research explores designing games that facilitate the sensemaking of climate actions among university students. It defines ‘sensemaking’ as a structured process aiding the understanding of alternative pro-environmental actions within complex constraints, involving activities like reflection, brainstorming, and critiquing. The primary objective of his work is to identify game elements that impact players’ ability to make sense of climate actions to articulate design and facilitation guidelines for researchers, designers, and educators from climate change education and communication domains. It also aims to explore the transferability of sensemaking from the game into the real world.   

As a part of his research, Prasad is designing 3 climate change games using user-centred methods and exploratively evaluating them to see how they help players experience and develop sensemaking. He started with ‘Climate Club’, a tabletop role-playing game dealing with climate action-related decision-making challenges within everyday constraints. Its evaluation showed that the use of curated group setup, relatable contexts, problem-solving mechanic, and explicit mention of climate issues enhances sensemaking while group dynamics and asymmetric role-plays may cause hindrance. Combining these with other literature findings, Prasad designed ‘Climate Club 2.0’, a mini-live action role-playing game (LARP) about planning a climate-friendly holiday which is currently under evaluation.