What Is It Like to Play like a Dog?

Mathias Fuchs's paper, presented at DiGRA 2024 in Guadalajara, describes an artistic installation that recreates dog playgrounds at human scale. The project aims to prompt critical reflection on the design of pet toys, spatial constraints, naming stereotypes, and the purposes behind training equipment such as ladders, hurdles, and balancing beams. Visitors are invited to climb, jump, and play with oversized versions of these objects, experiencing firsthand the assumptions embedded in how humans build spaces for animals. The installation is framed as a statement about human-animal relationships and communication, drawing on the philosophical question raised by Thomas Nagel in his 1974 essay on what it is like to be a bat.

The central argument is that subjective experience cannot be fully accessed across species, so an installation like this cannot allow visitors to know what it is like to be a dog. Instead, it encourages reflection on what humans assume a dog might perceive through its sensory and motor capabilities. The paper further suggests that objective consciousness is elusive even among humans, and more so between humans and dogs or among dogs of different breeds. The work is presented as a conceptual intervention rather than an empirical study, so it reports no survey data, sample sizes, or quantitative findings.

The paper also raises three questions for game studies: whether the field can validly make claims about animal play when those claims involve inner experience; whether Karl Groos's 1898 nine-category taxonomy of animal play remains adequate when applied to observed animal playgrounds; and whether playfulness as a conscious state can meaningfully be attributed to non-human animals. The scope is focused on dog playgrounds in cities such as Berlin, and its theoretical grounding draws on philosophy, play theory, and cultural criticism.