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The Designed Classroom

Re-framing Planning and Teaching as a Design Challenge

Homo Ludens

The Playful and the Serious

An approximation to Huizinga’s Homo Ludens

by Hector Rodriguez

Roger Caillois (1962)

Guy Debord; Situationist International

Player Experience

games

  • To describe play is to describe its “meaningfulness” for the players => aesthetics
  • MDA play is “free”
  • the fundamental motive of play is the experience that it affords; not to fulfil a practical task; for the sake of the lived quality that attaches itself to the act of playing

The consciousness of risk, for instance, presupposes that the player cannot confidently anticipate the result of an action; this unpredictability largely determines the intensity of many games, particularly those involving chance and competition; to become invested in an outcome that has not yet been settled; The intensity of our investment in many games essentially depends on our consciousness that their outcome is not fixed in advance.

  • The lived quality of play depends in part on the organization of the player’s actions around a cluster of rules and equipment.
  • Every ludic experience is characterized and individuated with reference to the various rules and resources available to the person; game rules normally determine what counts as victory or defeat.
  • The player must respond to some event, in the context of a structured situation. Playing consists in a trans-individual process of action and reaction, which often takes on a to-and-fro quality reminiscent of dance.

Hans-Georg Gadamer - “the purpose of the game is not really the solution of the task, but the ordering and shaping of the movement of the game itself” (Gadamer, 1989, p. 97)[1]

Methodology playing is a medium where lived experience is organized as a structured situation

  • it resists quantitative measurement and mechanical explanation
  • y / n ?

research method is historical and qualitative rather than quantitative; the intensity of play from the standpoint of the player

Sutton-Smith (1997) - Play exists, it would seem, because it is good for us.

Function-centred theories describe play as a tool for the satisfaction of a biological or social need; extrinsic ; implies that playing could in theory have been replaced by some other behavioural technique capable of fulfilling the same function; any function-centred theory necessarily fails to explain why people play

Play is not characteristically undertaken to acquire some extrinsic benefit; People who play do so mainly because they treasure the experience of intense immersion that it uniquely affords; the ludic experience of tension, uncertainty or release is its own justification, not a means to some subsequent end

  • Learning is characteristically undertaken to acquire some extrinsic benefit; needs to change

There is a difference between describing the functions that playing performs and describing the reasons why people play.

  • … why people learn It is only because play is engrossing and absorbing that it can arguably enhance the player’s physiological health, ego integration and social identity; players derive satisfaction from it.

Treated as a mechanism of social engineering, play is subordinated to such functional goals as … the socialization of the child

Play and Human Nature Players are typically motivated by the quality of experience that playing affords, not by the expectation of some future utility.

  • quality of experience (motivations for part of team - young athletes)
    4. To “get” a punch line is not to carry out a rule-based derivation from a set of premises. It is more like grasping a gestalt. The person who understands the joke is able to see a holistic web of relations between the elements of the joke.

More famously, the well-known surrealist technique known as “The Exquisite Corpse” was inspired by an old parlour game, sometimes called “Consequence”, in which players would take turns writing on a sheet of paper, then folding it to hide all or part of the words, and finally handing it to the next player. This game exemplifies the surrealist idea of “automatic” creation, where the outcome emerges spontaneously, without a prior blueprint or plan.

Play and Culture Most human societies treat play as an interruption or a break from the ordinary world of serious daily obligations.

  • The heart of culture is essentially constituted by elements of theatricality, exhibitionism, virtuosity, joyful improvisation, competition and challenge. The display of skill, the pleasure in surpassing oneself or overcoming others, the pursuit of honour or glory or victory for their own sake and other ludic attitudes are pervasive.
  • According to Homo Ludens, the desire to make a public display of skill by defeating an opponent through artful rhetoric lies at the heart of the teachings of the Greek sophists. The essential nature of the sophistic movement exhibits two playful features: exhibitionism and competition. Huizinga explicitly asserts that, when it comes to rhetorical games, the line between the serious and the playful cannot be clearly marked. Philosophical speculation about the origins and fundamental properties of the world is often recorded in the form of enigmas. The etymological roots of the word “problem”, Huizinga reminds us, reveal two closely related meanings: “problemata” were (a) shields used for protection and (b) things thrown for another person to grab hold of.

The entire history of philosophy retains ludic features, even as it attempts to pursue gravely serious questions pertaining to the nature of truth and morality. Plato himself favoured the dialogue form, a fictional device that has close connections with play and competition, and which eventually developed into the dialectical method. The process of philosophical reasoning intrinsically contains strongly ludic aspects. Philosophical thought arises in a competitive process. It is in many cases intrinsically polemical. In this context, Homo Ludens singles out Nietszche’s emphasis on competition as a rediscovery of the playful aspects of philosophical competition. Philosophical games are not external adornments but essential aspects of philosophical activity. While philosophy is not mere play, it has nonetheless preserved some ludic characteristics.

Serious Games

The first viewpoint regards games as training or teaching tools whose main purpose is to make the learning process more enjoyable, appealing, or accessible to students. In this case, the teacher intends to achieve a predefined goal, such as the transmission of some piece of knowledge about mathematics, philosophy or some other serious science. The teacher does not consider this subject matter to be essentially playful, and so the process of playing has in her view no intrinsic connection to the core content. Playing is treated solely as a vehicle to maximize the “effectiveness” of teaching. An example is the practice of “edutainment”, or “education through entertainment”. This approach to serious play does not, however, sit well with Huizinga’s general view that the integrity of play is perverted whenever it is made to serve social functions.

  • ICT 2.0 Playing can be part of the learning process because the subject to be learnt is, at least in some respects, essentially playful. The use of serious games in the learning process therefore illuminates the fundamental nature of the subject being taught; the act of playing can become a genuine medium of scholarly inquiry into the roots of philosophical activity.
  • ICT 3.0 The point is not that education would be more “effective”, like some well-oiled machine, if its methods were more playful; games are not mere tools to make learning more attractive.
  • 2.0 the subject matter of education is … already playful; What aspects of the subject matter in question already exhibit ludic features? And how can a game designer exploit and highlight these aspects?

Community Formation and the Magic Circle

the consciousness of play as a separate and self-contained sphere is often reinforced by the pervasive tendency to enclose the players within a spatiotemporal frame, the so-called “magic circle”

literal physical precinct: a chessboard, ring, arena, field, stadium, stage, altar, etc.

  • classroom sharp temporal boundaries, a clear beginning and an end, which clearly mark the game off as a temporary interruption of ordinary life
  • bell schedule While perfect equality may be difficult to achieve in practice, competitive games establish artificial conditions designed to neutralize potential sources of unfairness from the outset.

To play is … to test the player(‘s strength, intelligence, effort, persistence, manual dexterity, spatial reasoning, …)

fair play also suggests - moral evaluation at the heart of many games

the magic circle is a core element in the ideal of an ordered life ruled by agreed-upon conventions, which lies at the heart of human society. reveal the playful features of societal institutions

  • The experimental emergence, sustenance and transformation of a community would thus become the core subject and aim of the game. Students would then write reports, keep research documents or conduct seminars based on their design experience, and perhaps modify their design ideas iteratively on the basis of successive runs of the game, leading to theoretical conclusions about the interpersonal process of community formation.
  • Sceptical uncertainty
  • Epistemological scepticism has no place in this arena. My objection to this conclusion is that sceptical doubt can sometimes become central to the play experiences that I have described as paranoid, and this kind of experience can become a powerful springboard for reflection about the relationship between society and the self.
  • Play and Life

Man, Play and Games - Roger Caillois - the vital importance of the magic circle. The demarcation of games from ordinary life is in his view essential to the definition of play and the safety of the players.

the excessive virulence of human instinct; Whenever the boundaries of the magic circle are destroyed … the instinctual intensity of play (presumably) threatens personal and social integrity; reason => all instincts are “destructive and frantic”, and invariably lead to “disastrous consequences” unless checked by stringent social conventions

  • supplying a system of constraints that all players agree to uphold; provides a safe arena for interactive improvisation that offers discipline and refuge

supply a context for the safe and reliable gratification of human drives; Caillois’ analysis assumes, without argument, that “human instincts” or “drives” are essentially destructive, and thus in need of control and regulation; Huizinga himself rejected the term as downright meaningless, and Caillois nowhere explains what he means by it

It may well be that our “instincts” are also geared towards solidarity, empathy, concern and cooperation from the very start. There is no reason to accept Caillois’ pessimistic vision of human nature at face value

  • The concepts of play upheld by different philosophers are closely connected with their underlying ideas about human nature.

the element of danger may sometimes come to the foreground, but this should not always provoke us into calling for protective measures. Unregulated street festivals can be perilous, but they can also provide improvisational arenas leading to innovative forms of spontaneous sociability.

  • Risk
  • Instead of relying on a definite plot or finalized script, performances were “generated” in an improvisational manner, often on the basis of a loose set of general guidelines. Artists thus cultivated an unpolished and rough atmosphere.
  • not gradually acquire habits that would maximize their feeling of mastery at the expense of unpredictability; these performances rendered it fluid, uncertain, and negotiable
  • Performance and Exploratory Learning

treating the learning process as an exploratory arena. Student players explore their relations to themselves and to others through the process of playing; does not create a game with the expectation that players will learn a predefined set of ideas or skills. Instead, … constructs a system of constraints, such as a simulation or a set of simple instructions, and then allows the player actively to learn by exploring and tinkering with the system. In each case, there is no prior “course content” to be learnt, no predefined terminus of the process, only a rough specification of the general region to be explored, and so the player’s individual trajectory may surprise even the designer. Designers and players may become co-creators of the play situation. Learning would be thus embedded in the process whereby the co-creators experimentally explore and extend the medium of play.

The core aim of play is the organization of experience; highlight our awareness of our own bodies, the risks of interpersonal trust, the fluidity of individual identity, the relationship between individual autonomy and reciprocal interdependence, etc

Korean-American artist Nikki S. Lee - learning experience involved in the process of transforming oneself into another

Electrical Walks; Christina Kubisch

The connection between playing and learning is closely interconnected with the exploratory and open-ended aspect of these actions

The essence of creative experimentation is that players perform an action not to realize some preconceived end state but to see what happens

Bruno Latour (1999) has noted, a failed experiment is not necessarily a bad experiment, provided that the researcher manages both to draw vital lessons from the failure and to use those lessons in the preparation of subsequent experiments. The fruitfulness of an experiment is shown by what the researcher draws from it, and this is in turn shown by what she subsequently does with its results

The worst enemy of experimentation is the tyranny of model answers, which compels teachers and learners to focus on a predefined endpoint instead of on the intrinsic rhythms of the learning process.

It is more common for students to become entangled in unproductive, destructive or unfocused ways of thinking, for instance. A playful education would be highly sensitive to the rhythms of the thinking process.

radical Danish painter Asger Jorn proposed treating experimentation as a form of learning; the process of learning does not consist in the transmission of skills from teachers to students, but in the active design and execution of experimental actions by the learners themselves, without any utilitarian purposes (Knabb, 1981). Curiosity and risk-taking become fundamental values of exploratory learning

The aim of aesthetics … is to confront and reflect upon their own experiences through participation in ludic actions

playful learning; a profound rethinking of the essential nature of its methods and subject matter; the player now thinks of learning as a form of play. The medium of learning is the modulation of intensities, because intensity is the core of its subject matter

Students are not human resources waiting to be engineered but players with a craving for experience; The act of designing games should be seen as an integral part of curriculum design. The teacher and the game designer would then collaborate in the development of the course content and teaching methods

Conclusions

begin designing frameworks for actions that may or may not be considered playful. This project demands a struggle against deep-rooted assumptions about what constitutes a proper game genre and game design method, and to cultivate an attitude of open-minded receptivity to the ambiguities, contingencies and potential risks of human play.

a tentative approximation to regions of life that resist exact categorization; to speak as precisely as possible about categories and distinctions that cannot be neatly demarcated; The difficulty lies in paying attention to important conceptual differences while keeping our descriptive categories sufficiently supple to accommodate ambiguity and vagueness.

Endnotes

References