Play Matters

by Miguel Sicart

Why play is a productive, expressive way of being, a form of understanding, and a fundamental part of our well-being.

What do we think about when we think about play? A pastime? Games? Childish activities? The opposite of work? Think again: If we are happy and well rested, we may approach even our daily tasks in a playful way, taking the attitude of play without the activity of play. So what, then, is play? In Play Matters, Miguel Sicart argues that to play is to be in the world; playing is a form of understanding what surrounds us and a way of engaging with others. Play goes beyond games; it is a mode of being human.

We play games, but we also play with toys, on playgrounds, with technologies and design. Sicart proposes a theory of play that doesn't derive from a particular object or activity but is a portable tool for being—not tied to objects but brought by people to the complex interactions that form their daily lives. It is not separated from reality; it is part of it. It is pleasurable, but not necessarily fun. Play can be dangerous, addictive, and destructive.

Along the way, Sicart considers playfulness, the capacity to use play outside the context of play; toys, the materialization of play--instruments but also play pals; playgrounds, play spaces that enable all kinds of play; beauty, the aesthetics of play through action; political play--from Maradona's goal against England in the 1986 World Cup to the hactivist activities of Anonymous; the political, aesthetic, and moral activity of game design; and why play and computers get along so well.

Genres: Nonfiction, Games, Game Design, Philosophy, Plays, Video Games, Psychology

158 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Miguel Sicart is Associate Professor at the Center for Computer Game Research at IT University Copenhagen. He is the author of The Ethics of Computer Games and Beyond Choices: The Design of Ethical Gameplay, both published by the MIT Press.

Reviews

[Cee · Rating 2 out of 5]

The low rating is largely caused by the absolutely horrifying reading experience of this book. Whereas many journals caution their authors to make as few footnotes as possible, Play Matters takes the opposite approach. About a third of the book is footnotes. All of the actual scholarship is hidden in the back, while the main text reads like a strangely ungrounded manifesto about how everything is play. It's a jarring and annoying reading experience to have to go back and forth between the text and footnotes, especially when reading it as ebook. The word "play" and derivatives are mentioned a completely staggering 1018 times in this 158 page book. To me it has lost all meaning by now.

[Shawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

The account of play in Play Matters is quite interesting, though too unsystematic and too rooted in postmodern ideas. The account also suffers somewhat from “Huizinga-Syndrome”— that is, finding “play under nearly every rock in the social landscape” (Suits, “Words on Play”). One of the central aspects of Sicart’s account is that play is appropriative: it takes over other parts of our lives and experiences. This tends to assimilate everything as play. Seeing play as carnivalesque, as Sicart presents it, also tends to bring too much under the concept: everything from vandalism to political activism gets swept into play.

I liked his conception of play as a way of experiencing and being in the world and that it is not mere frivolity or childish. Sicart discusses play as a way of expressing and experience ourselves in the world. It is a way of seeing the world and a way of relating to the things and people around us. In these ways, play can, importantly, be productive of certain kinds of values, experiences, and community.

Another really interesting part of the book is Sicart’s distinction between play and playfulness. Playfulness is the application of aspects of play to contexts that are not play. So one might be playful in a book review or wedding ceremony without subverting the actual ends of those activities and subsuming them into play itself. Play as such has a logic all its own and wouldn’t be appropriate for all contexts. But one could still be playful in those contexts. Some of my criticism of his Huizinga-Syndrome might be resolved if instead of seeing all the things he presents as play, these are just a certain kind of playfulness.

The first two chapters, where Sicart discusses his account of play and then playfulness, are the most philosophically worthwhile parts of the book. As Sicart extends his account into other areas, the postmodern roots show themselves more and the philosophical content dips. The discussion becomes overly broad, ambiguous, and sweeping as postmodern influenced writing characteristically gets. But, then, maybe Sicart is just being playful.

[Artur · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author seemed very sure and proud of himself, but the overall effect was mediocre. Bold statements, not grounded well enough. Also putting 1/3 of a book into indexes should be a crime of some sort.

[Ezgi T · Rating 1 out of 5]

dnf

[Iskander · Rating 5 out of 5]

A compact but deep analysis on play and design making clear what important role play has in our current computated world.

[Victoria Hawco · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s funny cause it’s about matters of play, but also, ya know, says that play matters…

[Luke Paulsen · Rating 1 out of 5]

The most charitable description I can give of Play Matters is that it would make an awesome "links post". It constantly refers to all sorts of fascinating anecdotes and products of what I'll call avant-garde game design-- everything from exotic LARP scenarios to silly smartphone apps to illegal subversive competitions to frustratingly addictive Flash mini-games. I was itching to explore a lot of the endnote references-- and frustrated by the fact that they were useless URLs in print form.

On the other hand, that list of references was literally the only useful thing I got from the book. Otherwise it's 100 very short pages worth of academic jargon of the most pitiful kind-- a hand-wavey mixture of abstract grandiose proclamations, meaningless progressive platitudes, and references to obscure late-20th-century philosophers, marked by a complete lack of any concrete or practical claims that might provide a foothold to confirm or refute its ideas. I'm not qualified to determine whether the author actually had substantive information he meant to convey or whether he was simply blowing smoke. I only know that I wasn't able to extract any sense from it. As best I could tell, it didn't even rise to a definite thesis statement beyond the two-word title, or any relevant defense of the title itself.

As an academic article-- or, better yet, a series of blog posts-- this would be at least understandable, and maybe even a useful resource for some in the academic field of design. It has no business being a book. Do yourself a favor and don't bother reading it.

[Sandy Morley · Rating 1 out of 5]

I can suffer the excessively academic writing style, and I can put up with nonsensical curveballs like "all computation is play," but the author makes the critical mistake of never presenting anything new, and never presenting anything old with a new or interesting context or perspective.

If you've read one book about academia's version of play, you've definitely read this.

[Sandy Costa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don’t really know that the author had a particular point to make, and if he did, I don’t think he made it. The chapters work as individual essays about different aspects of play in the modern world, but they seem disjointed when read as a whole. Would have worked better as an online article with hyperlinks, because I found myself more interested in the footnotes than the actual content of the book.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

oh i do like reading sicart. i appreciate his direct writing style. this wasn't exaclty revolutionary or anything but it did give me couple of ideas for my paper. good read

[Marina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Super interesting ideas about play, playfulness, games, and toys, but an odd structure (or lack of structure) to this book plus heavy reliance on jargon + references made it hard to read even though I was invested from the outset. I wish this could be reorganized in such a way that definitions were given once for each term ('play,' 'game,' 'toy,' etc.) and followed up with concrete examples, theory, and counterexamples. The most interesting parts for me were about how play subverts power and how carnavalesque projects effectively make a scene and take power back for the performers, ridiculing social norms. I want a whole book just on that, please!

Here are a few favorite quotes:

▪ I am not going to oppose play to reality, to work, to ritual or sports because it exists in all of them. It is a way of being in the world, like languages, thought, faith, reason, and myth.7

▪ Play can be dangerous too:8 it can be addicting and destructive and may lead to different types of harm—physical injuries, lost friendships, emotional breakdowns. Play is a dance between creation and destruction, between creativity and nihilism. Playing is a fragile, tense activity, prone to breakdowns. Individual play is a challenge to oneself, to keep on playing. Collective play is a balancing act of egos and interests, of purposes and intentions. Play is always on the verge of destruction, of itself and of its players, and that is precisely why it matters. Play is a movement between order and chaos.9

▪ Play is carnivalesque too.12 Play appropriates events, structures, and institutions to mock them and trivialize them, or make them deadly serious. The carnival of the Middle Ages, with its capacity to subvert conventions and institutions in a suspension of time and power,13 was a symptom of freedom.14 Carnivalesque play takes control of the world and gives it to the players for them to explore, challenge, or subvert. It exists; it is part of the world it turns upside down. Through carnivalesque play, we express ourselves, taking over the world to laugh at it and make sense of it too.

▪ We need play precisely because we need occasional freedom and distance from our conventional understanding of the moral fabric of society. Play is important because we need to see values and practice them and challenge them so they become more than mindless habits.

▪ Bakhtin’s carnival is more than the time in which the power institutions of the Middle Ages allow the common people to express themselves through satire and humor.45 The carnival foreshadows modernity—the rise of a critical, self-aware individual, a body with a mind not subject to institutions determined from another world, but from rationality itself.46

▪ Carnival lets laughter, not fun, happen. By temporarily dismissing the oppressive forces of the establishment, laughter takes over and allows for a bodily form of knowledge that creates truth, and it’s free. Laughter requires freedom, an opening from the institutional world, but it also creates freedom. Modernity could be a consequence of laughter, of the possibility of expression afforded in the carnival.47 Laughter, critical and hurting and enjoyable and deeply embodied, makes carnivals matter.

▪ Toys seduce us, anchoring us in time and space; they trigger emotional responses, play a role in memory and culture, and help us devise situations so that play can take place. My idea of play is that of an activity full of romantic potential.27 Toys bring these ideals to the material world, to the world of things. They help us locate, touch, feel, express, and share the ideals of play. As technologies of play, toys are the physical presence of play in the world, the tokens of our playful affection. Toys are instruments for letting play loose in the world, making us players. Toys are the tools of play.

▪ The relationship between space and play is marked by the tension between appropriation and resistance: how a space offers itself to be appropriated by play, but how that space resists some forms of play, specifically those not allowed for political, legal, moral, or cultural reasons. Play relates to space through the ways of appropriation and the constant dance between resistance and surrender

▪ Similarly, parkour appropriates and reinterprets urban spaces, making the architecture of the city not only an obstacle but also an expressive instrument.13 Although many cities are now building parkour playgrounds, it is the urban space where the traceurs find the most interesting routes to express themselves. The importance of recording and sharing the different feats is connected to the deeply embodied experience of the space that parkour promotes. Parkour is about the traceurs taking over an urban space together, making it a canvas for bodily expression

▪ The computer game GIRP is a rock-climbing simulator in which each rock the player can grip has a key assigned to it. Players must use a special key to “flex” while simultaneously pressing the key assigned to the rock they are gripping and the rock they want to grip. GIRP is an exercise in reflective masochism, a constant fight with the physical layout of the keyboard and the limits of our own hand flexibility. That is the source of beauty: the painful and abusive input system mimics the very act of rock climbing and its difficulty and teases us to continue playing despite the pain and hardship it puts us through

▪ So what is design? This apparently simple question has been asked in design research for decades,13 and it is by no means my intention to engage in that conversation. So I will keep it simple: design is the science of the artificial, a discipline focused on creating new technological objects in the world for specific uses. It is concerned with the creation of new things in the world. Design is also a mode of knowledge:14 if the natural sciences understand the natural world and the humanities and social sciences try to explain people, design is posed to understand the artificial—or, more precisely, the way the materiality of the artificial interfaces with the world. Designers must know about materiality; they must be familiar with how materials can be bent and manipulated to a purpose. But a designer must also know people: how they interact with objects, how they relate to the future state of affairs encapsulated in a designed object, and how they feel.

▪ Game design has sometimes been compared to architecture: the setting of a place with cues for behavior yet open for the users to modification. If we want this analogy to hold, if we want games that are architectural in spirit, then the idea of meaning needs to be abandoned in favor of collaborative processes of engagement and interaction among all agents in the network of play. Nobody dictates meaning, order, importance, or action; all agents, designers and players, negotiate play. The designer is just a stage setter, inviting others to play through this form that has been created or found. The designer’s role is to open the gates for play in an object and with a purpose.

▪ The designer of games should not act as a provider of anything other than context. A designer is a facilitator, a catalyst, but by no means does she possess the form she has created, for the form of play belongs only to those who engage with it—those who play. A game designer is not an author. Like a prop master or a stage director, the game designer proposes and deploys an object into the world, letting it speak for itself and be spoken through. These props not only do not resist appropriation; they encourage it and frame it as part of what it is to play.

▪ The word designer, then, seems to me inadequate for understanding the craft of creating forms for the activity of play. At the risk of being pedantic, I foolishly propose an alternative. Let us not talk about “game designers.” Let us bury that terminology if what we are doing is not “games.” If we are doing something else, if our purpose and our activity and our focus are to make people play, then let’s become architects of play. Like architects, we create just contexts, and also like architects, we are slave to the ways others appropriate what we carefully create. We give a space for people to explore and express themselves and the right props to do so. We, the architects of play, make people play.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent map of the ecology of play. I like the notion that play is negotiated between all agents, designers and players and that it should be architected through setting a stage with purpose. This book is a welcome inspiration how systemic thinking and pattern creation prevalent in design can be complemented to facilitate playful interactions.

[Mark Poulsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this book, Miguel Sicart essentially argues for an ecology of play that provides the basis for play and playful experiences with anything from video games to dishwashers.
Play is the appropriation of a context for the player's own playful purpose. It is creative, expressive and ultimately personal (though many times shared and engaged with collectively). This influencing, and influenced, context often concerns itself with the people involved (player(s), by-standers), the play location (playground, soccer field, virtual environment), the individual artifacts capable of focusing play (toys, set of rules, a computer) and, of course, society and culture at large to which play is able to disrupt or critically engage with (such as with parkour in the city or political activism).

It matters whether or not you play tag on a playground and as a child, or in a populous shopping street and as an adult - we cannot exclude this context to only focus on the rules and formal properties of a game, we have to incorporate the diversity of constituents for the unique and personal play experience. We find that play is equally apparent when colleagues play hide-and-seek in an office building as when someone interacts with a video game. The activity and experience is in focus rather than the rules and the system (though they certainly provide a baseline for players to appropriate through play), and video games are understood to merely be a dominant cultural form for play; play is not the inherent quality of the game form. All in all, play is concluded to be an overall way of being in the world and often central to our attitude when engaging in it.

Sicart finds that there is a distinction to be made between the activity, play, and the attitude, playfulness. To be playful does not necessitate the result to be play: the enclosed and autotelic activity. You can still be doing things efficiently, such as working or brewing coffee and approaching it playfully. I personally find that this is a great insight to start applying to other domains in life, such as creating or designing art, to find how and why being playful may have had an essential role in characterizing artistic production within a long history of societies and cultures.

This book is a great read for newcomers to play theory (such as myself). It is short (about 100 pages) and well written, it properly introduces the concept while refuting potential misunderstandings of play in relation to video games, and it contains valuable insight going forward for designing anything that can make use of play. Due to its shortness, some of the descriptions end up rather vague on to what extent the wide concept of play can actually account for. Keep that in mind, it is introductory. Nevertheless, the individual chapters are great, broadly cover an ecology of play, and I was especially fond of the chapter dedicated to the beauty of play, which deals with play and aesthetic philosophy.

[Diz · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a short book on play and its place society. As someone who is not a fan of the trend of gamification, there were two particular ideas that I liked from this book. The first is the primacy of play over games. Play is a more expansive concept that is applicable to a wider range of activities. The second is the distinction between play (an activity that has its own goals) and playfulness (an attitude). One may be playful when doing other activities without the distraction of actually playing, which would introduce another set of goals which may distract one from focusing on the goals the original activity one is doing. That gave me a lot of food for thought.

The downside of this book is that the author tries to connect play to almost every aspect of human life. This forces him to make a few stretches that detract from the core idea of the book. For example, there is a chapter that makes the claim that art is a form of play that seems to ignore some of the functions of art that are not related to play. Also, there is a chapter on politics as a form of play, but the examples given there are not that convincing.

Overall, despite the weaker chapters, it is a book worth reading.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full disclosure: I read this text as part of further developing an analytic framework for tabletop role-playing games. Sicart's analysis is incredibly useful in this context, but can also aggravate with a few myopic moments.

The core of the book: that play is where we can find meaning being made and a lot of what we do builds from play, and there are benefits to maintaining an attitude of playfulness. This is an incredibly useful and important palliative against games studies folks who articulate meaning as being made in design, with players as simply the enactors of the designer's meaning. Play appropriates the thing we play with, so it is with games.

I shouldn't expect people to remember TRPGs when discussing these topics - it's a vanishingly small industry - but when he says that computers enabled rich and highly developed worlds for play, I want to send Ed Greenwood a sympathy card.

Despite his occasional protest that games are only a part of play, this book is most likely to appeal to game studies scholars.

[Héctor Iván Patricio Moreno · Rating 3 out of 5]

Es un buen análisis de lo que significa "jugar" y los componentes que tiene o las cosas que lo permiten. Me puso a pensar en la diferencia entre jugar y "juegos", que no son los mismo, y mucho menos "juguetes".

Este librito define el juego con algunas características que nos dan a entender que para ser humanos TENEMOS que jugar ya que es una manera de existir en el mundo y mediante el juego cumplimos muchas de las cosas que necesitamos como personas.

Me gustó le análisis aunque se me hizo un poco difícil de leer, pero lo disfruté. Una grata sorpresa que me llevé, como programador, es que analiza la relación entre los juegos, la era digital en la que vivimos y las computadoras. Habla de las características fundamentales de la computadoras y cómo estas nos han permitido extender la capacidad de juego y jugar de nuevas maneras. Llega a decir que la computación ES JUGAR y eso me puso a pensar bastante.

Voy a seguir pensando en los temas que mencionó por un rato.

[David Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked up the Humble Bundle ebook collection of ebooks about game design and theory ages ago, and am finally getting around to reading them.

Interesting academic look at defining a theory on play, including video games but incorporating all play (from children's games, to professional sports). It was interesting and the large amount of notes will be nice to return to if I want to research more about certain points down the line.

But it felt like it didn't apply it's ideas enough. It felt content to propose a definition of a concept or term, quickly apply it to one example, then move on. The section on playgrounds felt like it really explored some examples and applications of the ideas it raised, but the rest of the book felt a bit light so didn't sink in as well.

It was interesting as an academic theory, but didn't make for a great book.

[Achab_ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book on play. The background idea is the same starting point I'm using in my research: Games "are a manifestation, a form of and for play, just not the only one" (p.4). However, the author's style is very repetitive. It feels like every sentence is reformulated and repeated multiple times without adding anything to the text. It makes the reading a tiresome endeavour. If I read the first chapter with lots of enthusiasm to find many ideas that echoed my own thought I rapidly became bored by the style and have to struggle through the rest of the book. It is a shame because the examples and ideas are important for the field (the only reason i managed to finish it in the end).

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sadly short. An excellent exploration of play but this book really missed a discussion of the physicality of play. The author beautifully discussed playgrounds and toys. But there is this jarring switch into computation in his chapter, "Play in the era of computing machinery". It kind of felt tacked-on and added-to, rather than a continuation of his exploration of play.

A final quibble to an otherwise excellent book; I found a missing discussion of privilege, class and socio-economic status. We can declare this a "ludic era" but it isn't for everyone, is it?

[Avedon Arcadio · Rating 3 out of 5]

I FOUND THIS BOOK IN THE LOBBY WITH NO CLUE AS TO WHAT IT WAS ABOUT. TURNS OUT ITS A STUDY FROM MIT ABOUT HOW PLAYING MAKES US WHO WE ARE, HOW WE UNDERSTAND AN ENVIRONMENT AND HOW WE ALSO FIND BEAUTY AS WELL AS POLITICS WITHIN THE ACTION OF PLAY. ON TOP OF WHICH HOW BEING PLAYFUL CAN CHANGE THE MUNDANE INTO SOMETHING INCLUSIVE. SUPER FASCINATING READ DESPITE BEING REALLY DENSE, SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL.

Apologies for the caps this was grabbed from an Instagram story.

[Duy Nguyen · Rating 1 out of 5]

Painstakingly dry so far. I think the book aspiries to so much but achives so little. Besdides some interesting points on play vs playfulness, the whole account doesn't coherently form or argue for any substantial claims. It's jumble mess of ideas that often contradict one another, i.e play is in everything, yet not everything is play

[Andrew · Rating 1 out of 5]

A verbose collection of navel-gazing that would have been better delivered as an academic paper or a series of blog posts.

This content has little business being a stand-alone book, as it establishes a vocabulary of ideas and then does nothing with them. It neither brings new ideas, nor provides any insight into established ideas.

[Alberto Guerra · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good starting point and interesting thoughts during the first part of the book, and connects concepts through the book with his conclusion and final words. Enjoyed a good part of it!

However: tries a bit too hard to link Play with separated concepts, lots of them, and also a few typos and grammar mistakes that somehow disconnected me.

[Francisco Ferreira · Rating 4 out of 5]

Where technology risks distancing the user from the object, a playful design can reestablish a unique relationship. Playfulness transforms the user-object interaction into a more meaningful experience, encouraging the user to appropriate and reinterpret the object, making it a space for creative and emotional expression​.

[Kate Kosek · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very brief overview if you want a cliffnotes version. Annoyed that the author makes references to something then doesn't elaborate further. Oh wait, if you want the details you need to flip to the footnotes.

[halfmoon · Rating 4 out of 5]

“We are what and how and where and with whom we play, our mark in the world and in time.

Play gives us the world, and through play we make the world ours.”

Good theory, I might come back and sketchnote it. I think coming back a second time might make it make more sense 🙂‍↕️

[Steven Hart · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting and full of good thoughts, but a bit aloof and disorganized.

[Mavrades · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intéressante démarche de réflexion quant à ce qui fait le jeu au sens large (« play » ).

Dommage, toutefois, que l'écriture soit assez répétitive et perde en clarté dans les derniers chapitres.

[Rossana Karunaratna · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book highlights very interesting approaches to what to play means. At the same time it goes thru a very academic and rough discussion so the essence -for me- was lost.

[Martin Sob · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nice book but not my kind of book.