This conversation is with Dr. Kelly Boudreau, Associate Professor of Interactive Media, Theory and Design at Harrisburg University, Pennsylvania, living between her native Canada and the US, and Dr. Michael Straeubig, artist, theorist and play designer based in Berlin. Gaming is a huge field which has seen phenomenal growth in activity and commerce through networked computer technology, but game studies has been less focused on transgressive play in gaming, including how game systems can be programmed to subvert or transgress. Our speakers’ shared interests and practice includes the dynamics of power and play in human–computer interactions and in the sociology of place settings and behaviours, online and off. They both explore play beyond the realm of the benign, decoupled from its usual association with fun and have written on or made work that pokes the hornet’s nest of deviance and subversion in the player and the game.