Playful Animals: An Invitation to Participate

This paper is an exploratory essay that argues for establishing animal-inclusive playful design as a legitimate subfield within games studies. Its author contends that play is voluntary and shared, which makes it a suitable framework for designing interactions with animals, and that a playful design approach can be applied to the artefacts currently created for animals such as pet toys, zoo enrichment, and interactive tablets. The text positions this area as timely given the field's stated interest in diversity and interdisciplinarity, and it frames the goal as consolidating scattered contributions from design research, humanities, human-computer interaction, and game studies into a coherent body of work.

The paper identifies three main theoretical threads in recent publications on playful technologies involving animals. The first concerns the nature of play itself, drawing on Miguel Sicart's argument for forms of play beyond games and his initial skepticism about whether animals can be playful. The second is a multispecies philosophy in which interspecies play is treated as a means of exploring what it means to be a moral person, and posthumanist theories are proposed as tools for challenging anthropocentric worldviews and placing humans and nonhumans on more equal ontological footing. The third is practical, covering ethnographic observation, interface design, the application of animal science research, and participatory methods.

On the methodological side, the author notes that no validated design principles yet exist for specific animal species, which makes user-centred design difficult. The paper therefore advocates explorative, iterative design studies that use subjective understanding and qualitative data, with the aim of developing attentiveness to individual animal players and the complexity of their encounters. The work is presented as a preliminary mapping rather than an empirical study, and its evidence base consists of a review of prior publications rather than new data.