Can Playfulness Be Designed? Understanding Playful Design through Agency in Astroneer (2019)

open access articleThe cultural phenomenon that Minecraft (Mojang 2009) has become over the past decade demonstrates, amongst many other things, a powerful appetite for games where the player is thrown in a virtual playground to do as they please. Aerospace-themed survival-crafting game Astroneer (2019) by System Era Softworks is one of many such video games released since that capitalizes on this trend. The appeal of such games lies in that they can be enjoyed by players with various interests, abilities and backgrounds: the average player can mine, build, and fight whatever and whomever they please, or even create entire games within the game. The design of such games is, in many ways, less constricted than that of other avatar-based genres, such as action-adventures or first-person shooters. Freedom, playfulness, and creative play are often associated with such design, which evoke questions about agency. This article connects these notions and asks: can agency help us better understand how playfulness can be designed? By interrogating the paratexts surrounding the game’s development to see how developers discussed design decisions that facilitate playfulness, this article illustrates how thinking of agency as something afforded by game design can be a productive analytical tool to identify design decisions that facilitate player freedom and creative thinking. This, in turn, sheds light on whether, and if so how, playfulness can be designed

From Pragmatism to Today’s Work Dramas

Is there any reason to advocate for a new momentum in the “practice turn”? This article argues that the practice turn, already much inspired by pragmatist philosophers, namely Dewey and Mead, could be enhanced by drawing even more upon pragmatism. We begin with the view that focal cooperation activities have been an overriding concern among interactionist scholars. We contend this framework can be broadened by following Dewey’s proposal to shift in vision from interaction to transaction. It helps indeed taking into consideration a wide range of neglected but common situations, joint actions, and temporal processes. In particular, we show how the transactional view can foster the understanding both of the most intimate at work – its ethicizing, its moral network and personal styles –, and of the most public at work – its public images and public perspectives. We end up considering the significance of these moves to explore today’s work dramas and to meet the need to renew our images of work

The age of interactivity: An historical analysis of public discourses on interactivity in Ireland 1995 - 2009.

Interactivity is integral to media and communications and yet is a contested concept in the literature. There is little agreement on its meaning not least because of its multidisciplinary nature. Previous research, concerned with finding a single definition of interactivity, has focused narrowly on specific contexts of communication using limited methodologies. This thesis argues that several meanings of interactivity are in circulation and that the search for one bounded definition constrains understanding of its role and fails to recognise its analytical potential. The study makes an original contribution to research by presenting findings from an analysis of public discourses on interactivity, a valuable source of material neglected in research to date. It shows that at least nine thematic representations of interactivity are in circulation representing different aspects of its role in communicative events. These are identified as the Empowering, Commercial, Pedagogical, Aesthetic, Ludological, Futuropia, Hula-hoop, Sceptical and Information Society themes. The results are based on a longitudinal content and discourse analysis of fifteen years of newspaper coverage in Ireland, an original methodological addition to research, reflecting both a unique national perspective on the concept and the flow of influential international discourses within a small state. The content analysis draws a detailed quantitative picture of how and where interactivity arises in news coverage while the discourse analysis examines qualitative aspects of the dominant, overlapping and conflicting discourses around interactivity and the discourse communities operating behind the talk. The analysis illustrates how thematic representations of interactivity coexist both in discourse and in individual communicative events, suggesting the potential for layered interactivities in communication. The ‘age of interactivity’ describes a wide range of discourses from hype and myths around interactivity to its potentially transformative role in communication. Overall this thesis highlights the value of interactivity as a communication concept and analytical tool with rich research potential