Playful Experiences with Games: Empirical Findings from the Playful Life Project

This extended abstract, presented at DiGRA 2022, investigates whether games are naturally experienced as playful across diverse cultures, addressing a gap in empirical player-experience research that has been criticized for Western cultural bias. The authors analyzed 114 self-identified "playful" memories gathered from 75 English-speaking participants spanning six continents and 40 nationalities, using an open-ended phenomenological approach that deliberately avoided supplying a definition of playfulness.

Games were among the most frequently described playful experiences, accounting for 52 of the 114 memories (46%), with 13 (11.5%) involving digital games specifically. Playful gaming appeared across all six continents and 29 of the 40 represented nationalities, though digital game memories came exclusively from European and Asian backgrounds, indicating a notable geographic narrowness in that subset.

The study identifies two criteria beyond the game itself that shape playful gaming experiences: playful relationships, in which games are played with friends or other playfully engaged people, and playful motivation, a commitment to play that remains independent of outcomes. The authors note that digital games often functioned as social "third places" where established relationships gathered, and that indifference to winning supports conceptualizations of playfulness as autotelic, paratelic, and intrinsically motivated. The strong overlap between playfulness and games is presented as a challenge to theoretical dichotomies separating playfulness from gamefulness.

The authors describe the work as ongoing and call for further research into cultural differences in gaming and playfulness, as well as into how interpersonal relationships between players shape these experiences.