Background / Purpose:
In transitional care, patients inhabit a liminal space between hospital and home, often caught within institutional narratives of recovery that assume linear progress and measurable outcomes. Our arts-based work at Providence Transitional Care Centre reframes this period not as suspended or stalled, but as a fertile site of present-tense meaning-making. We explore how gamifying legacy-making—designing a “Legacy Game” rooted in music, movement, and improvisation—can re-situate patients and caregivers as co-authors of their evolving identities. Rather than aiming for completion or cure, the project privileges iteration, uncertainty, improvisation, and play.

Methods:
Building on research on gamification for older adults in health care settings (see Koivisto 2021), we employ a research creation methodology that draws on participatory dramaturgies (Horner & Stephenson 2024) and principles of meaningful play (Isbister 2016; Sicart 2014; Tekinbas & Zimmerman 2003). Our game structure engages dyads engage in multiple sessions of improvised gesture-, sound-, and story-making. Each session alters the materials, rules, and artefacts of the game, generating a cumulative but non-linear record of relational creativity. Data collection includes video recordings, interviews, questionnaires concerning mental wellbeing and experience with art-making, facilitator notes, and the evolving “legacy artefacts” produced through play.

Preliminary Results:
Early participants have responded with positivity and commitment to the offering of alternative ways to not only feel –but also to shape—time, identity, and agency. Care partners note increased connection with the patients and revitalization, even as outcomes remain indeterminate.

Discussion:
By gamifying legacy work, this project resists teleological models of care and recovery that equate healing with forward motion. Instead, it locates value in recursive and playful modes of being-with—an approach that reclaims liminality as a site of possibility rather than lack. The “Legacy Game” offers a model for arts-in-health practices that foreground co-creation, presentness, and the beauty of unfinished work.

Dr. Colleen Renihan joined the DAN School of Drama and Music as Assistant Professor and Queen’s National Scholar in 2016. She earned a B. Mus. in Vocal Performance from the University of Manitoba, an Artist Diploma in Opera Performance from the Vancouver Academy of Music, and an MA and PhD in Musicology at the University of Toronto. Dr. Renihan is an interdisciplinary arts humanities researcher, trained in musicology, with multiple intersecting research foci on issues of voice, gesture transmission, memory, temporality, and the role of the arts in healthy aging. Her work has been published in a variety of journals, including, most recently, the journals twentieth century music; The Journal of the Society for American Music; Music, Sound, and the Moving Image; Journal of Singing; University of Toronto Quarterly, The Journal of Music, Health, and Wellbeing; and Wellbeing, Space, and Society. She has also authored chapters in several edited collections, including those forthcoming in Opera in Flux; Music Theatre and Politics; and Childhood and the Operatic Imaginary Since 1900. Renihan is part of several transdisciplinary research teams, and is co-founder of the International Musicological Society’s Temporality in Music Theatre Study Group. Her monograph, The Operatic Archive: American Opera as History was published by Routledge in 2020, and her co-edited book Sound Pedagogy: Radical Care in Music with Dr. John Spilker (Nebraska-Wesleyan University) and Dr. Trudi Wright (Regis University) is forthcoming in 2024. She is an active member of MusCan, SAM, AMS, IMS, and IFTR.

COI Disclosure: I do not have an affiliation (financial or otherwise) with any for-profit or not-for-profit organizations