The Meaning of Playfulness: A Review of the Contemporary Definitions of the Concept

This article, published in Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture (Vol. 12, No. 1, 2021) by Leland Masek and Jaakko Stenros, is a qualitative, systematic, interdisciplinary literature review of how the term 'playfulness' is defined in recent scholarship across fields such as game studies, psychology, occupational therapy, and sexuality studies. The authors began with 506 Google Scholar results for documents with 'playfulness' in the title published from 2014 to 2019, included 286 works initially and 60 more through snowballing, and after confirmatory searches reached 429 written works with 184 extracted definitions. They organized the definitions into six themes: focused, openness, framing, non-consequential, non-real reality, and unconventional.

The authors report that playfulness is defined more by how it operates than by what it is, and that the six themes are different forms of framing and prioritizing engagement. They state that 'playful' and 'playfulness' are effectively synonyms, while 'play' and 'playfulness' are more often treated as distinct but related phenomena. Their proposed synthesis is that playfulness prioritizes engagement over external consequence, realness, or convention.

The authors also argue that the 'playfulness vs. gamefulness' distinction can be reframed as two different contexts rather than two different phenomena. They further propose the more neutral term 'emotional reinforcement' over 'enjoyment' or 'fun', noting that critics have questioned the assumption of universal positivity in playful experiences.