The Meaning of Playfulness: A Review of the Contemporary Definitions of the Concept across Disciplines.

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Playfulness as an Organization of Experience: Prioritizing Engagement over Realness, Relevance, or Consequence

This thesis designs and conducts a multidisciplinary, phenomenological, systematic literature review upon playfulness based upon extending previous theoretical work by Jaakko Stenros. One hundred and sixty-four written works from twenty-one academic disciplines were read and analyzed for their definition of playfulness, resulting in a final list of sixty-five identified definitions used in the last five years. The methodologies used to construct these definitions were analyzed using three contextual analytical tools: theoretical direction, scope of definition, and ludicism. Using the theoretical framework of phenomenology, these sixty-five definitions were reframed in order to identify connections in modern viewpoints on the internal experience of play. In the analysis, nine major methodologies, and six themes of phenomenological experience of playfulness are identified. In conclusion they present a unique and valuable definition of playfulness: Playfulness is an organization of experience that prioritizes engagement over realness, relevance, and consequence. Engagement is further defined as coming from attentional fullness, emotional reinforcement, recognizing and manipulating patterns, and sharing perspective. In the discussion some of the far reaching theoretical, ethical, and practical considerations of this new definition are discussed. This thesis also offers two surprising contributions. It discovers an urgent need for scholarship to expand the commonly used binary of discussing playfulness as either a personality trait or state of mind. Scholars should also consider playfulness from the perspective of a context likely to enable play and as an artifact organized playfully. The thesis also identifies an ambiguity between two separate concepts both frequently called spontaneity and argues why modern scholars should adopt an updated vocabulary

Playfulness as an Organization of Experience: Prioritizing Engagement over Realness, Relevance, or Consequence

This thesis designs and conducts a multidisciplinary, phenomenological, systematic literature review upon playfulness based upon extending previous theoretical work by Jaakko Stenros. One hundred and sixty-four written works from twenty-one academic disciplines were read and analyzed for their definition of playfulness, resulting in a final list of sixty-five identified definitions used in the last five years. The methodologies used to construct these definitions were analyzed using three contextual analytical tools: theoretical direction, scope of definition, and ludicism. Using the theoretical framework of phenomenology, these sixty-five definitions were reframed in order to identify connections in modern viewpoints on the internal experience of play. In the analysis, nine major methodologies, and six themes of phenomenological experience of playfulness are identified. In conclusion they present a unique and valuable definition of playfulness: Playfulness is an organization of experience that prioritizes engagement over realness, relevance, and consequence. Engagement is further defined as coming from attentional fullness, emotional reinforcement, recognizing and manipulating patterns, and sharing perspective. In the discussion some of the far reaching theoretical, ethical, and practical considerations of this new definition are discussed. This thesis also offers two surprising contributions. It discovers an urgent need for scholarship to expand the commonly used binary of discussing playfulness as either a personality trait or state of mind. Scholars should also consider playfulness from the perspective of a context likely to enable play and as an artifact organized playfully. The thesis also identifies an ambiguity between two separate concepts both frequently called spontaneity and argues why modern scholars should adopt an updated vocabulary

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

‘Playfulness’ is a concept used in various disciplines. In this article, we conduct a qualitative, systematic, and interdisciplinary literature review on the term ‘playfulness’ as used in recent scholarship. The article aims to overcome the ambiguity relating to ‘playfulness’ in order to create opportunities for growth in all related fields of study. Based on 429 written works and the 184 extracted definitions of ‘playfulness’ across disciplines, we find six clusters of meaning all of which emphasise engagement. Three themes describe different methods for how engagement is structured to become a higher priority than its context. The other three themes discuss structural characteristics of contexts that are playfully engaged in. A new synthetic conceptualization is offered: Playfulness prioritizes engagement over external consequence, realness, or convention. Furthermore, the study argues that playfulness is not a ‘what’ or a ‘why,’ but a ‘how,’ a priority organizing principle