How do we measure playfulness?
I realised that I made a mistake recently, which I must go back and correct - but in the spirit of reflecting on work, I wanted to highlight it here. I Initially attributed the PLEX framework - a framework that measures and categorises playful experiences - to Andrès Lucero et al. In fact, the PLEX framework was actually developed by Hannu Korhonen, Markus Montola and Juha Arrasvuori and presented at conference in 2009 (Korhonen et al. 2009). Lucero et al. took the PLEX framework and proposed its use as an evaluative tool, suggesting that the “framework categories can be used as a checklist to assess different attributes of playfulness of a product or service” (Lucero et al. [1] 2013). This got me thinking about the ways we measure, assess or evaluate adult playfulness, and how frameworks like PLEX can be useful to anyone wanting to design around playfulness or measure a design’s playful impact.
Shen, Chick and Zinn highlight three existing measurements of adult playfulness: The Playfulness Scale for Adults (Schaefer & Greenberg, 1997); the Adult Playfulness Scale (Glynn & Webster, 1992); and the Playfulness Scale (O’Connell et al. 2000). They establish that existing playfulness measurements “share a weak theoretical basis” (Shen, Chick and Zinn 2014, p68) before repositioning playfulness as a personality trait, and proposing their own Adult Playfulness Trait Scale (2014). The trait of playfulness consists of three qualities that drive motivation: fun-seeking motivation; uninhibitedness; and spontaneity. These three qualities, the researchers propose, “intertwine and interact with each other to form a relatively stable network that defines the individual’s level of playfulness” (ibid).
Whilst this positioning of playfulness as a personality trait supports my understanding and experience of playfulness - and indeed, will be a consideration going forward - something that I find a little reductive is attemps to measure - e.g. quantify - a “level of playfulness”. Shen, Chick and Zinn’s engaging and englightening methodology certainly provides a window into an individual’s playfuless - I’m just not sure it’s the right window. The same is true for the other measurements of playfulness, all of which define themselves as scales, as though the key measurement of playfulness is a number on a chart. These aren’t the only studies, but they are indicative of a trend; Proyer’s short measure for adult playfulness or SMAP (Proyer, 2012) follows the same methodology, using a very analytical, quantitative approach to measuring playfulness.
Much like attempting to universally define play, this discounts the potentially indescribable act of play - and the attitude of being playful - itself. Does saying “my spontaneity was at a 7” really engage in an understanding of playfulness? Or does it quanitfy the unquantifiable? Obvious this is simplistic thinking on my part here, but I do think this bears some merit. What would Bernard De Koven say, if we told him we sought to understand playfulness in numerical terms? He’d probably tell us to get out and play more.
Costello and Edmonds’ Pleasure Framework
Instead of scales, then, I turn to frameworks that help us describe our experiences. I have written previously on this blog about Costello and Edmonds’ Pleasure Framework (see: ”What is Playfulness?”). This framework was designed as a method of the researchers being able to design more engaging, playful interactive art experiences. Costello discusses wanting to shift audiences from a place of “explorative unfamiliarity” to “playful familiarity”, ultimately driving towards works where “the oscillation between play and exploration may drive audiences to experiences deep levels of engagement” with interactive works (Costello, 2007).
Costello considered thirteen categories of pleasure that could arise during a playful experience: Creation, Exploration, Discovery, Difficult, Competition, Danger, Captivation, Sensation, Sympathy, Simulation, Fantasy, Camaraderie, and Subversion. To test the framework, Costello applied the framework to the development of new interactive works, using it to make decisions as to what kind of pleasure she wanted to evoke from a work. Decisions made in the design were repeatedly tested against these categories - does this decision help elicit X? etc. This was tested against participant evaluations, explicitly asking participants what they experienced.
Interestingly, the answers provided by participants closely matched the experiences Costello had designed for. For Costello, this proved the framework to be a valuable tool for developing interactive works. However, Costello highlights that it is only a tool, and not a one-size-fits-all solution:
“[The framework] is not a formula for making interactive art but rather a practice method that encourages detailed contemplation of an artwork's experiential pleasures….the framework was most effective when used right from the beginning of an artwork's conceptual development. It was also a very effective tool for participant evaluations of prototype works.” (Costello 2007, p371)
The framework, then, supports both the reflection-in-action practice of making artistic works, and the reflective evaluation of prototypes (although Costello notes it wasn’t as effective on pre-existing works). This supports the use of a framework such as this as a viable method to support decision-making when designing playful or pleasureable experiences. In the context of my research, this opens up the possibility of using such a methodology for decision-making not only when making films, but when designing or deciding on the process of making films as well. However, Costello’s work primarily focusses on pleasure as a means to engage with play. While it’s true that “experiences can be regarded playful only if using the product brings pleasure (fun and enjoyment) to the user” (Arrasvuori et al 2011 p7), as I will discuss in a moment, pleasure does not always manifest itself in the moment. What we need is a framework that allows for reflective evaluation of playful experience.
The PLEX Framework
The Playful Experience (’PLEX’) framework was developed by Korhonon, Montola and Arrasvuori. They wanted to take the study conducted by Costello and Edmonds and build on it, and make the framework “more complete and useable outside the interactive art context” (Korhunen et al. 2009, p274).Taking a foundational understanding of play from Sutton-Smith (1997), Burghardt (2005), Caillois (2001), they set the tone of their work as somwhere between the paidia and ludus, play purely for fun and competitive play, play where there is a winner. Utilising Fullerston, Swain and Hoffman’s definition:
“Play [in the sense of encompassing both paidia and ludus] is recognised as a way of achieving innovation and creativity because it helps us see things differently, or achieve unexpected results. A playful approach can be applied to even the most series of difficult subjects because playfulness is a state of mind rather than an action”.
Their hypothesis was that developing a framework that allowed for greater insight into playful experience would allow them to design more playful products:
“…playful experiences emerge from interactive products that allow users to have a playful approach while using them. Thus, it is valuable to gain understanding on how to design products with such properties.” (ibid. p275)
In the context of my own research, this presents an interesting parallel. If instead of ‘interactive products’ with think of ‘methodologies of animation’, knowing what we know about creativity and play - that playfulness encourages divergent thought and creativity - then creating this playful feedback loop through a playful framework would be beneficial for the practicing animator. Not only that, but perhaps they benefit audiences as well - perhaps developing and designing playful approaches to animation allows for a more playful audience experience.
Although I’m not specifically trying to design a system for plork - more highlight its potential to contemporary animators - what this highlights is the value in understanding how to design methodologies for animation ‘with such properties’. Not all processes when making animated work are playful, though; there needs to be organisation at the heart of it in order to set a scaffolding to keep things moving. There is a utilitarian side to these things - filing structures, naming layers, backing things up - that needs to happen - at least in my instance - in order to stay productive and invested in the work. This does not, however, need to rule a project out of play:
In the specific case of the utilitarian product, even though some features enable “getting the job done”, features eliciting a playful approach can lead to using the product for longer period [sic] and the user enjoys getting the job done with that particular product (ibid).
If again we take ‘product’ to mean methodology, acknowledging the utilitarian nature of elements of the methodology - things that help “get the job done” - can remain part of these methods without sucking the fun out of the freer, more playful experiences. In doing so, can you build a set of methods of working that encompass the organisation and playfulness that need to work in tandem in order to produce exciting, playfulness-driven creative work?
Unlike Costello and Edmonds’ Pleasure Framework, the PLEX framework focusses specifically on playful, as opposed to pleasurable, experiences. Playful experiences, suggests Arrasvuori, “take a broader view to different kinds of pleasures and also social aspects of bringing joy” (Arrasvuori et al. 2011, p.2). Rather than focus on pleasure alone, playful experiences potentially widen the lens to give a more nuanced of the spectrum of experience we know as play, or playfulness. This raises an interesting point:
“The overall focus was shifted from pleasure to playfulness to indicate that not all experiences are always perceived as pleasureable” (Arrasvuori et al. 2011, p2)
The use of perception here feels particularly important. It implies that despite the importace of ‘fun-seeking motivation’ and the other aspects of play as a personality trait demonstrated above, playful experiences may not feel pleasureable in the moment. This sets the PLEX framework up as a retrospective, analytical tool - something we can use to reflect on our experience and discuss it - and our - playfulness.
The framework originally consisted of 20 ‘categories’ of playful experience (Table 1), which were expanded on by Arrasvuori et al. (2011) to a non-exhaustive list of 22: Captivation, Challenge, Competition, Completion, Control, Cruelty, Discovery, Eroticism, Exploration, Expression, Fantasy, Fellowship, Humor, Nurture, Relaxation, Sensation, Simulation, Subversion, Suffering Sympathy and Thrill (Table 2). (It is worth noting that alphabetising of these attributes - this removes any sense of heirarchy from the experiences).
Table 1 - Korhonen et al’s original description of the PLEX framework categories (2009)
Table 2 - Arrasvuori et al’s slightly simplified descriptions (2013)
These categories of experience seek to summarise and describe many of the types of playful experience a user might have. The framework was used in
Of course, the framework is not perfect, as Lucero et al. establish:
“…the 22 categories themselves might be too rigid and specific to cover all aspects of playfulness, while, at the same time, confusion may be raised with respect to the overlap of different categories” (Lucero et al. 2013 p 229)
However, this is acknowledged by Arrasvuori et al., acknowledging that the “usually complex” nature of describing playful experiences seldom allow them to be described by one category along. They also make a point of acknowledging that their framework was designed with a specific goal in mind:
“We have not validated the applicability of the PLEX framework in describing all kinds of playful experiences…limiting them to production interaction instead” (Arrasvuori 2011, p8)
I have been thinking about how and where the PLEX framework contributes to my research. What I’m not trying to quantitavely asses, when applying it to my own practice, is (perhaps counter-intuitively), playfulness. As such, quantitative scales of play are of minimal interest. My research is also more concerned with playful engagement in general than it is with the type of playful engagement. However, the PLEX framework provides, as Lucero et al. mention, a checklist, a language that enables greater depth when it comes to - as Bernard De Koven champions - reflecting on and describing experiences that are playful (De Koven 2017). In fact, it allows us to explain in what way they were playful.
Discussion
In the context of building or understanding products or experiences which attempt to elicit playfulness, frameworks such as PLEX can certainly be a useful tools (Costello 2007; Lucero and Arrasvuori 2013). When designing for playfulness, using a framework such as Costello’s Pleasure Framework or the PLEX framework, there is certainly something useful about having a better language to understand and explain playful behaviour. But does this imply that playful behaviour or experience requires explaining? Does playfulness need more words, more frameworks to allow better understanding? Or is it enough to say “that was fun”? Not only that, but looking at the reverse: if something wasn’t fun, is there any point in qualifying the type of not-fun you were having?
The point is, there are a lot of different types of playful fun, some which feel more overt and obvious than others. And that’s the point of a framework such as a PLEX framework - it has the potential to facilitate a deeper discussion of the subject. I see the PLEX framework as an evaluative research tool. For the purposes of my research, I can see how it would be useful to have a better lexicon for discussing playfulness during the process of making animated work. Not only that, but it serves as a reminder that play isn’t easy - it often requires work. And as Arrasvuori points out, it isn’t always pleasurable moment-to-moment. Further, pleasure often comes from experiencing several types of playfulness at once. Plork at its core could be described as a combination of some of the categories of PLEX: Captivation, Challenge, Competition, Completion, Discovery, Exploration and Expression. While these may in some ways seem to be the most obvious categories in relation to the creation of artistic work, they don’t rule out any of the others - they set, for me at least, a broad base line for playful creative work.
Future Use
Costello demonstrates the value of this kind of framework as a tool for artistic creation. This became particularly relevant recently when setting out a plan for the rest of this research project. I have to decide which project I wanted to work on next, out of two potential projects:
Fig. 1 - Concept art for Lovely Lovely
- Lovely Lovely, a character driven narrative film made largely in the same way as UPUP - a film that has no specific narrative, but begins life as a collection of scenes or small animations, and builds from there, becoming and emergent piece of creative practice rather than going through a traditional pre-production development process (Blazer 2016). The major difference between this piece and UPUP is that whilst UPUP was specifically generated as a research film, Lovely Lovely is to be developed more actively as a piece of animated work, that is, I would be making it with a view to sending it to festivals and whatnot. More importantly, Lovely Lovely is a film that has something to say - I would be developing it to sit in my creative portfolio as another demonstration of my storytelling, animation and directorial ability, not for money, but with a view that it would support the acquisition of future work.
- Shapes (working title) is a development of my daily shape-drawing practice. I will write about the development of this project again in greater detail, but the most important aspect of it is that not only is the narrative emergent, but the whole concept and process of the work is also. From drawing shapes came a card-game-cum-prompt; from that came paintings (Fig. 2); from that came the beginnings of an experimental film (Fig. 3). With this project I have been ‘following my nose’; if something has seemed like a good idea, I have followed that instinct and seen what works have come out of it.
Both projects have playful merit; in fact, both projects more or less adopt similar techniques, which is in many ways becoming my own playful methodology for animation, which I will write about separately. So either would support my research. One, however, feels decidedly ‘easier’ than the other: whilst Lovely Lovely adopts relatively new, more consciously playful practices, it is still very much formed around a pre-exiting methodology. Shapes on the other hand, explores very different territory for me: it is much more experimental, covers very different ground, has no immediate narrative. In short, Shapes makes me feel less comfortable. And in many ways, that makes it more exciting.
Fig. 1 - Paintings in progress
Fig. 2 - experiments with ‘animating the paintings’ on 35mm film
While thinking about this, I found myself drifting back to the PLEX framework, but instead of coming at it in reflection, coming at it from a point of desire: what did I want to experience whilst making my next body of work? And while the pulls of Humor, Fantasy, Fellowship are all categories of playfulness I experience in character work, I feel more driven towards the Challenge, Competition (with my self) and Exploration of working in an entirely new way. What possibilities there are! Animating over paintings! Augmented Reality! Physical exhibitions of work! Exploring Challenge and Competition then become key to the project, led by my own curiosity.** In this way, I begin to use the PLEX framework in a similar way to Lucero and Arrasvuori (2013) - as a tool to “design for playfulness”. But what I am designing, is my creative practice.
I don’t know whether this will be a lasting part of my methodology. However, it does prove that there is the possibility to utilise frameworks such as the PLEX framework not only for relfective playful practice, but for design of creative practice. Once again, it comes back to a question I find absolutely integral to my practice and, consequently, my teaching: why are you making this work? What is it you are trying to achieve? In my case, what I’m currently trying to achieve is an exploration of my own curiosity, and my desire to analyse the different ways in which I playfully engage with my work. With that in mind, either project - indeed, both projects - are relevant. And when you can’t go wrong, you’re left to trust yourself to play.
**Indeed, I have wondered if setting myself the explicit rule of ‘if it feels like a good idea, try it’ and exploring quick prototyping and allowing whimsy to drive.
References
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