Building Connection
A Video Game Build Experience with Dead Pixel & Pop CoLab
Dead Pixel brings the game development expertise. Pop CoLab brings the play. Together, they've built a collaborative experience in which your team creates a real, playable video game powered by their play personalities.
Playful Approach, Serious Results
At a Glance
Co-op Mode isn't about who knows how to code — that's what Dead Pixel is for. It's about what happens when every person on a team contributes from their strengths, and those pieces come together into something none of them could have built alone.
Build it Together
Every person contributes something different.
Because the tasks are designed around play personalities, not job titles or technical skills, the person who usually hangs back often becomes one of the most essential contributors. That shift in dynamic is part of the point.
The Goals
Discover Your Play Style
Learn how you naturally engage with creativity, curiosity, and collaboration.
Using Dr. Stuart Brown's 8 Play Personalities, participants uncover how they think, create, and connect, giving the whole team a shared language before the build even begins.
Co-Create Something Real
Create an actual, playable video game, together.
This isn't a simulation or a metaphor. By the end of the session, the group has a real web-based game they built themselves, and can play and share with others.
Play to Your Strengths
Every personality type has a role that fits them naturally.
Tasks are designed around how people actually engage, not their job title or technical background. No coding experience needed. Just show up as yourself.
Leave More Connected
Walk away knowing your team in a whole new way.
When people build something together, they see each other differently. Co-op Mode creates the kind of shared experience that actually changes team dynamics, not just describes them.
Setting the Stage
Inspire creativity and connection
Co-op Mode is hosted at Pop CoLab and powered by Dead Pixel. The space is set up to spark creativity from the moment participants walk in - screens, making materials, and a room that feels nothing like a boardroom.
No one is handed a laptop and told to code. Instead, the session eases into the experience through play personality discovery, so by the time the build starts, everyone already knows their role and why it matters.
What We Do
Play Personalities & Self-Discovery
Welcome + Introductions - A quick orientation to the space, the facilitators, and what participants are about to build together
Play Personality Discovery - Participants explore Dr. Stuart Brown's 8 Play Personalities to understand how they naturally engage with curiosity, creativity, and collaboration
Team Mapping - The group sees how their personalities complement each other and where their collective strengths sit
Theme Selection - The whole team chooses a shared theme for their game, creating immediate collective ownership of the build
The Build
Role Assignment - Each play personality is matched to a unique creative task that produces a real component of the game.
The Collaborative Build - Teams work on their individual pieces, supported by Dead Pixel's and Pop CoLab's expertise and facilitation.
Assembly - All the pieces come together into a simple, playable web-based game that is entirely unique to the group that made it.
Play It Together - The session closes with the whole team playing the game they just built.
For our team there was the genius of moving back and forth between work-based concerns and goals to just plain fun, and I saw the result of that technique come out in the final brainstorm that produced some really great things for our team projects.
James Kornelsen
Manitoba Council for International Cooperation
