What is playfulness?
I have been thinking a lot recently about why my research has shifted from focussing on play (an activity) to focussing on playfulness (a mindset or trait that preempts or leads the activity). Part of the reason for this shift has been that during the process of my research I realised that what I was interested what not so much the theories or histories of play, but the experience itself, and what drives that experience. This is what I understand playfulness, at its core, to be: a way of approaching things - consciously or subconsciously. Miguel Sicart agrees, writing that playfulness allows us to take “the attitude of play without the activity…[it] is a way of engaging with particular contexts and objects that is similar to play but respects the purposes and goals of the object or context” (Sicart 2014). De Koven reads this as central to “the art of playfulness: respecting the people you're with, the things and ideas and worries and beliefs that are not for play, but for real. But doing it playfully” (De Koven 2017). Is playfulness, then, more about how we do something rather than what we’re doing?
Masek and Senros’ qualitative meta-synthesis of the literature on playfulness (2021) comprehensively compiles the work of theorists such as Lester and Russel (2010), Sutton-Smith (1997), Lierberman (1965, 1977), Salen and Zimmerman (2003) and many more in order to establish a cross-disclipine analysis of definitions of playfulness. Their first observation is that ‘playful’ and ‘playfulness’ are effectively synonymous. This is in contrast to ‘play’ and ‘playfulness’, which although are occasionally presented as synonymous (e.g. Márquez Segura et al., 2016) and more often desicribed as two distinct phenomena (Proyer 2017b, p3). This observation is particularly useful, as it solidifies an idea that I have previously mentioned - that my research (and practices) are less focussed on play, and more focussed on the phenomenon of playfulness, an attitude or an approach to the world.
Masel and Senros then identify six thematic categories of how playfulness is said to operate: Focused, Openness, Framing, Non-consequential, Non-real reality and the Unconventional. All of these themes synthesise a wealth of research which demostrates the ways in which playfulness manifests: playfulness as a personality trait, personality as curiosity, personality as inventiveness, creativity and engaging with contexts and activites in new and different ways. But for me at least, the key takeaway here really is that they found that definitions of play focussed more on “how it operates than what it is” (Masek and Senros 2021, p15). Playfulness, they conclude:
“…prioritizes engagement over external consequence, realness or convention” (ibid. p23).
If, they suggest, an object or activity is designed to prioritise engagement over outcome, then it is playful in its design. And if a person does the same - intentionally or unintentionally - they are behaving playfully. In essence, this study supports the idea that any activity can become a play activity when approached with an attitude that puts the experience of engaging with the activity at the centre and shifts focus away from outcome - a playful, ludic attitude (Bogost 2017; Zimmerman 2008).
Masek and Senros’ meta-synthesis collects a great deal of writing on playfulness and presents us with a foundation that brings us back to Sicart’s suggestion at the beginning of this post - that playfulness, beyond anything else, is - subconciously or conciously - about engagement. This is interesting for plork, as it means prioritising the experience of engaging with work whilst simultaneously understanding that the work must have an output. Or rather, it is about engaging in work within which you prioritise your own engagement with that work. Playful work - plork - is focussed on a single activity (a project) with an openness to engage and explore subject matter, possible in unconventional ways.
What I particularly like about this is that unlike some studies that characterise playfulness as a character trait, thinking about playfulness as a way of engaging, a mode, an attitude, implies to me that playfulness is a choice. Just as some people are kinder than others, we can still choose to be kind. Some people may have a stronger tendancy towards playfulness than others, but we can still choose to be playful, to approach a situation with a playful attitude.
Thinking about what playful engagament feels like, I turn to Costello’s Pleasure Framework (2007). Costello focusses on the experiential quality of pleasure - “a source of joy and amusement” (Caillois 1961, p6) - developing a framework of 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. When engaging in an activity playfully, any number of these - and more, for the list is non-exclusive - may be experienced. Costello uses the framework as a methodology for developing her own work and for formal participant evaluation. Essentially Costello uses her framework to formally engage with De Koven’s belief that instead of defining playfulness, we instead must “describe experiences, instances, moments in our lives that appear, in retrospect, at least, to have proven themselves unquestionably, undeniably, overwhelmingly playful” (De Koven 2017). Perhaps, then, Costello’s framework can be used as a reflective tool for understanding an animator’s playful engagement with their own work.
Playfulness, like play, is confusing, broad, “too diverse, too idiosyncratic, personal, profound to allow itself to be confined into anything satisfyingly definition-like” (ibid). However, by understanding that playfulness is an attitude that prioritises engagement - and, in the specific case I’m interested in, pleasure - there feels like fertile territory to be exploring the experience of making animated work.
References
BARNETT, L. 1990. Playfulness: Definition, Design and Measurement. Play & Culture, 3**,** 319-336.
BOGOST, I. 2017. Play Anything. Chicago Humanities Festival. Chicago Humanities Festival.
CAILLOIS, R. 1961. Man, play, and games, New York, Free Press of Glencoe.
COSTELLO, B. 2007. A Pleasure Framework. Leonardo, 40**,** 370-371.
DE KOVEN, B. L. 2017. Defining Playfulness Or Not. Psychology Today [Online]. Available from: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/having-fun/201708/defining-playfulness [Accessed 31-01-2022 2022].
LIEBERMAN, J. N. 1965. Playfulness and divergent thinking: An investigation of their relationship at the kindergarten level. Journal of Genetic Psychology, 107**,** 219-224.
LIEBERMAN, J. N. 1977. Playfulness : its relationship to imagination and creativity, New York, Academic Press.
MÁRQUEZ SEGURA, E., TURMO VIDAL, L., ROSTAMI, A. & WAERN, A. Embodied Sketching. 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2016. 6014-6027.
MASEK, L. & SENROS, J. 2021. The Meaning of Playfulness: A Review of the Contemporary Definitions of the Concept across Disciplines. Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, 12**,** 13-37.
PROYER, R. T. 2017. A New Structural Model for the Study of Adult Playfulness: Assessment and Exploration of an Understudied Individual Differences Variable. Personality and Individual Differences, 108**,** 113-122.
SALEN, K. & ZIMMERMAN, E. 2003. Rules of play : game design fundamentals, Cambridge, Mass. ; London, MIT.
SICART, M. 2014. Play matters, Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press.
SUTTON-SMITH, B. 1997. The ambiguity of play, Cambridge, Mass. ; London, Harvard University Press.
XIANGYOU, S. S., CHICK, G. & ZINN, H. 2014. Playfulness in Adulthood as a Personality Trait. Journal of Leisure Research, 46**,** 58-83.
ZIMMERMAN, E. 2008. Gaming LIteracy: Game Design as a Model for Literacy in the Twenty-First Century. In: PERRON, B. & WOLF, M. J. P. (eds.) The Video Game Theory Reader 2. New York: Routledge.