Paideia as Paidia: From Game-Based Learning to a Life Well-Played

Paideia AS paidia
from game-based learning
to a life well-played
Sebastian Deterding (@dingstweets)
Games Learning Society 8.0
June 15, 2012

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GRUMPY GERMAN TALKING
Before I begin, some disclaimers. First off, this is a grumpy German scholar talking, which means that we are going to get down to
fundamentals.

CONTAINS ANCIENT GREEK PHILOSOPHY
That means that this talk will contain ancient Greek philosophy. No Heidegger, though. Just so you know.

What I want to talk about today – or better, the starting point into it – is this word, »gamification,« which suddenly appeared on the
world some time in 2010/2011.

If it hasn‘t given you a moment of pause, this fact alone should: Recently, »gamification« overtook »serious games« both in global
search and news reference volume.

Most of you will have come across one or the other instance of gamification in education – like Khan Academy, which allows you to
watch little educational videos on basic topics, take practice exercises, and collect points and badges in doing so.

Or you have seen (or taken part in) the Digital Media and Learning competition »Badges for Lifelong Learning« – or seen and partaken
in the backlash against it. For I don‘t know how you feel about it, but I would say that the general sentiment in the games and learning
community seems to be:

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/joanne_lummy/3051591942/

Creepy shit!
»Gamification? That‘s creepy shit!« And to a certain extent, I agree, it is. But I think there is also something deeper going on here.

A distorted mirror
I think that we react so heavily against gamification because it is really a distorted mirror: It throws into stark relief some things that are
troublesome about our own work. Conversely, I would argue that looking into this mirror helps us see our own current limitations and
issues, and thus, bring our field forward.

Three humble propositions
From game interventions in systems
to the gameful restructuring of systems
From designing game artifacts
to the playful reframing of situations
From instrumentalizing learning and play
to building a society of paideia as paidia
And that is what I want to do today, in six alternating steps: first a deep disconcerting look in the mirror, then a humble proposition
how to go from there. And to give you an overview of what will expect you, here are my three humble propositions.

»Nothing that is learned under
compulsion stays with the mind. Do not,
then, my friend, keep children to their
studies by compulsion but by play. That
will also better enable you to discern the
natural capacities of each.«

Plato
the republic (7.536e-537a)
The motto for this I take from Plato‘s »Republic«.

1 Gamification is
an inadvertent con.

So let‘s start with the first look in the mirror, which is really more a mutual reassurement of what we, as the games and learning
community, have learned the hard way over the past decades. And from what we learned, it is easy to come to the conclusion that
»gamification is an inadvertent con.«

»Gamification is an inadvertent con. It
tricks people into believing that there’s a
simple way to imbue their thing ... with the
psychological, emotional and social power
of a great game.«

Margaret Robertson
can’t play, won’t play (2010)
These are not my words – they belong to game designer Margaret Robertson. I think for the most part, her analysis still holds, and that
it holds because there are three confusions troubling the gamification sphere – confusions we in the games and learning community
had to overcome ourselves.

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First off, they confuse games with fun! Let me quote a number of video game reviews semi-randomly culled from Metacritic: Elf Bowling
1&2: »for this reason i think game developers should have at least 3 yrs in video game exp. they should be hung like a pinyatta and
beaten.« NRA Varmint Hunter: »All the thrill of the hunt, without the thrill or the hunt.« Balls of Fury: »They should've just called it
Balls because they certainly had some while they were making this game.« Big Rigs over the road racing: »This game (and I use the
term loosely) is so pathetic it makes a sandpaper-and-vinegar enema sound positively delightful. Not that I would know.« And finally,
Little Britain, the Video Game: »Pray for an end to cash-in greed and weep for the death of quality. There shall now be a paragraph's
silence.«

»Ninety percent
of everything is crud.«

Theodore Sturgeon
sturgeon‘s revelation (1958)
All of this is just a long-winded way of saying that 90% of everything is crud – inluding games.

Con(fusion) #1
Games are not fun because
they are games, but when
they are well-designed.

That means, games are not fun because they are games, but when they are well-designed. And that entails all the hard work of design:
Prototyping, testing, iterating.

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The second confusion concerns why (well-designed) games are fun and engaging. If you look at the websites and marketing material of
most gamification proponents today, one answer to that question pops out again and again: Rewards. Points, levels, and badges are
basically all rewards in their understanding (and virtual – read: cheap – ones, too).

Which means that they engage in a very flawed pop behaviorism: They consider games as Skinner boxes that doll out rewarding points
like sugar pellets every time we hit the right lever (usually comparing loot drops in »World of Warcraft« with reinforcement schedules).
But if that reasoning would be correct, ...

Score: 964,000,000,000,000
(You rock!)

Earn 1,000,000,000,000 points

… this should be the funnest game ever, earning you a whopping trillion points every time you press the button.

»Fun is just another word
for learning.«

Raph Koster
a theory of fun for game design (2005)
Why then are well-designed games fun? The best one-sentence-answer to this in my opinion comes from game designer Raph Koster.

»Fun from games arises out of mastery. It
arises out of comprehension. It is the act
of solving puzzles that makes games fun.
With games, learning is the drug.«

Raph Koster
a theory of fun for game design (2005)
To him, games are systems purpose-built to put learnable challenges in our path – and thus give rise to the pleasure of overcoming
them: jumping that chasm, solving that puzzle, convincing that NPC to let us through.

And this theory is basically supported by all empirical psychological research into the fun in games: The central joy and thrill of gaming
lies in the tension between a challenge ...

… and the feeling of mastery, control, competence, self-efficacy in our successful resolution of it.

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/diego_rivera/4261964210

Extrinsic motivation
In other words, many gamification proponents wrongly believe or purport that the fun in games is extrinsic motivation: Some outer
reward we get for an activity that holds no inherent interest to us (like getting a lollipop for sitting quitely in a shopping cart).

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/areyoumyrik/308908967

Intrinsic motivation
Whereas psychology tells us that the fun in games is predominantly intrinsic motivation: The inherent enjoyment the activity provides,
like dancing, or cooking, or playing do. So what makes things intrinsically enjoyable? The currently most well-established theory on
intrinsic motivation is Self-Determination Theory.

»An understanding of human motivation
requires a consideration of innate
psychological needs for competence,
autonomy, and relatedness.«

Edward Deci, Richard Ryan
the what and why of goal pursuit (2000)
According to it, just as we have innate physiological needs (hunger, thirst), so we have psychological needs: To flourish, we need to
experience competence, autonomy, and relatedness. If you match that with Koster, you‘ll see that he is first of all talking about
competence – but empirical research has shown that games also deliver on the other two needs (we‘ll return to them later).

Con(fusion) #2
The fun in playing games
chiefly arises from
intrinsic enjoyment, not
extrinsic incentives.

So that‘s the second confusion.

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The third confusion is that gamification proponents often understand game elements as a tack-on, as something you can »just add.«
Now this is something we in the games and learning community had to learn the hard way as well, remember?
http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/apartmentlife/6559123353/

We had to learn that »fun learning« is not about making something look fun, or playful, or gamelike – with cute characters, colors,
sounds, and just calling something a game.

Likewise, we learned that fun learning is not about tacking a topic (like politics) onto an existing game mechanic and then hope that
somehow, magically, »learning« happens.

Finally, we had to learn that fun learning is not about inserting learning content and test sections into a game (or vice versa), like
Financial Soccer here, where you play a regular soccer game, but before you score a goal, you have to answer a question on »checking
account overdraft protection« in 15 seconds.

We have learned that good game-based learning marries, translates, equates game mechanics and the skills or concepts to be learned.
Like here in the physics game »Play Ludwig«: In order to solve this puzzle, you have to test out, discover and understand the basic
physical laws of levers.

Learning goal
=
Game mechanic

Alejandro Echevaria et al.
the atomic intrinsic integration approach (2012)
Now this is nothing new – Yasmin Kafai has talked about such »intrinsic integration« way back when –, nor will it surprise the
audience here. Personally, I like how Alejandro Echevaria and others have layed out this thought in their paper »The atomic intrinsic
integration approach«. In essence, it states that in good game-based learning, the learning goal should be the game mechanic.

Con(fusion) #3
Good serious game design
translates tasks/goals into
mechanics – rather than
adding one to the other.

So this is the third confusion prevalent in the current gamification discourse. Now you may ask: If »gamification« has so many issues –
it gets design wrong, it gets motivation wrong, it gets the relation of game mechanics and non-game goals and tasks wrong – why
bother at all?

2
Gameful design
Gamification is
a promising proposition.

I think we should bother because there is a kernel in gamification – in expanding game design beyond games –, that pushes us outside
the box of our current thinking and practice. With Steve Reed‘s keynote yesterday, you may call this »learning from gaming«. Let me
call it »gameful design«. Gameful design means shifting from first-order changes to second-order changes.

»These are two types of change: one that
occurs within a given system which itself
remains unchanged, and one whose
occurrence changes the system itself…
Second-order change is thus change of
change.«

Paul Watzlawick et al.
change (1974: 10)
I take this distinction from communication scholar Paul Watzlawick, who uses it to describe two types of change in human
interactions. First-order change are the changes in a system that perpetuate it – think of a dysfunctional relationship where every
attempt to change it actually continues it. Second-order change, in contrast, is change of the system itself.

Humble proposition #1
From game interventions in
systems to the gameful
redesign of systems

That, to me, is the potential or proposition that gamification holds. Because we as a community have for the most part focused on
deploying games as interventions in existing systems – first-order changes –, rather than questioning, intervening in, redesigning these
systems themselves, using game design as our guiding lens.

»One purpose of this book is to explore
ways in which even routine activities can
be transformed into personally
meaningful games that provide optimal
experiences.«

First!
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
flow (1990: 51)
And this is not a new idea, by the way. Already in 1990, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote …
Csikszentmihalyi was actually the first »gamification guru.« Who knew!

»Mowing the lawn or waiting in a
dentist’s office can become enjoyable
provided one restructures the activity by
providing goals, rules, and the other
elements of enjoyment to be reviewed
below.«

flow (1990: 51)
So how do we do that? Again, Csikszentmihalyi is a good guide. Immediately following the passage above, he writes the following …
We need to restructure the activity in question.

»Gaminess« is not a feature
Again, the important point here is that this is not about »adding game features«. Like usability, gamefulness (or in general, affording
motivating experiences of competence, autonomy, relatedness, surprise, etc.) is not a feature – it is a systemic quality that emerges
from the interaction of the designed system and the user.

How might we ...
restructure the activities in a
system to support intrinsic
enjoyment, using game design
as a lens?

This, then, is the guiding question for gameful design: How might we restructure the activities in a system to support intrinsic
enjoyment, using game design as a lens?

Put differently
If this were a game –
how is it broken?

Or, put more simply; If this were a game, how would it be broken?

Games in class > Class as game
If this sounds a bit abstract for you, here are a couple of examples. At the GLSES before this conference, I co-convened a workshop of
teachers who did not just use games in the classroom, but redesigned their whole classroom experience – curriculum, activities,
assessment, grading, etc. – as a game, like Lee Sheldon did with his »Multiplayer Classroom«.

Games in school > School as game
Another example are the Quest2Learn schools. Now children play and design lots of games as part of the curriculum, but Quest2Learn
also redesigned the whole school experience as a game.

Games in Undergrad > You get the idea ...
Similarly, the Just Press Play project at the Rochester Institute of Technology did not deploy games in their undergraduate education,
but redesigned the whole undergrad experience as a game – in this case, using an achievement system.

Game Atoms

model/skill goal

action
rule system

success! / failure!
challenge

feedback
+ new goal
+ more skill
One concept I find helpful to take such a systemic view is »game atoms« – a concept developed by the likes of Dan Cook and Raph
Koster: A game is a connected, nested set of mini games – a loop between goals the user pursues, actions she pursues to attain the
goal, a rule system determining the success or failure of the action, and immediate and progress feedback whether/how well the user
attained her goal. Out of this goal-action-rule-feedback loop emerges the learnable core challenge of that mini game atom.

Game Atoms

model/skill goal

action
rule system

success! / failure!
challenge

feedback
+ new goal
+ more skill
Using this as a lens to look at any activity, you can then start to ask: Are goals clear and attainable? Do players have choice in their
goals? Are the possible actions clear and offer interesting choices? Are the rules transparent and fair? Is the challenge well-scaffolded,
does it offer variety? Is immediate feedback in-time, clear, and informative? Is there progress feedback that gives you a clear idea where
you stand, how each action contributes to your goals, and gives you a graspable sense of what you achieved?

Feedback
Accuracy, speed, friendliness in
comparison, w/ recommendations

Goals
Daily, weekly, monthly,
annually w/ progress

Reality check
Let’s do a quick reality check. Say we wanted to improve the experiential quality of being a supermarket cashier with the principles outlined.
We’d likely display feedback on how the cashier is doing (accuracy, speed, friendliness) in comparison to his or her former performance and the
performance of colleagues – plus recommendations how to do better. And we’d set clear goals to strive for, daily, weekly, monthly.

Business Process Reengineering
But what about interesting choices, increasing challenge and complexity? Checking stuff out doesn’t seem to hold much of these, so
we’d likely have a look at the larger system in which the activity happens. That’s an important lesson: Like any good design, »gameful«
design has to look at the larger sociotechnical system in which it is deployed. It quickly becomes business process reengeneering …

Feedback
Accuracy, speed, friendliness in
comparison, w/ recommendations

Goals
Daily, weekly, monthly,
annually w/ status

Challenge
Training, job rotation,
job enrichment

… rather than mere software design – and as designers, we often lack the organizational access and power to do so. But let’s assume
that we can design that as well. So to ensure a good, scaffolded learning curve of increasing challenge, we’d look to design the course
of the cashier through the organization, from initial training through to job roles that are increasingly more demanding and complex.

As it turns out, such systems already exist. Here is a checkout terminal at a US supermarket. Each time you serve a customer, you score
either a G (green) or R (red) based on your overall speed, and you see progress feedback on your last scores and overall scores. In fact,
the majority of service sector jobs are already designed like this – full of metrics to review, targets to reach and job ladders to climb.
http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/dpstyles/4141140976/sizes/o/in/faves-7834371@N04/

Even so, I would submit that more often than not, our cashier would feel more like this little fella ...

… than this guy. In a word, like a tightly monitored, micromanaged lab rat instead of an engaged player. So what is missing?

3 Gamification is
not very playful.

This brings us to the second look in the mirror: What is missing is that gamification is not very playful. And this, I think, applies to
many game-based learning applications as well. Now what do I mean with »playful«?

Well, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind when I say »playing a video game«? I submit that it is predominantly this.

The Box

Very literally, it is a box. Some square screen, some interface tied to a piece of hardware running a piece of software that generates
output in reaction to our input.

Game
The Box
A designed artifact

It is a game – a designed artefact. And that is what we have been predominantly occupied with in gamification (and game-based
learning): the artifact and its design. Are we missing anything in this picture?

Game
The Box
A designed artifact

Very much so. We’re missing everything that is happening outside the box: People, and what they do with the game, including all the
culture and social norms and conventions and negotiations and practices ...

Game
The Box
A designed artifact

Playing
A frame of engagement

What we are missing is playing – a specific mode, context or frame of engaging with that artefact. Playing video games – and the
experiences and engagement we associate with it – very literally requires both: A game, and playing it.

For we can play with many different things: Sticks and stones, other people, passing cars on a long holiday trip – even work.

debugging
playtesting/reviewing
presenting gameplay
making a machinima
a scientific study
learning (serious games)
sports (e-sports)
work (goldfarming)

Likewise, we can engage with games in many different ways: We can test them, review them, analyse them, play them – or work on
them, as in the case of goldfarming. But these modes of engagement do not necessarily equal the one we usually equate with leisurely
gameplay.

»I would call it a game –
but I did not play it.«

One interview participant of my PhD research summarized this neatly. Herself a game designer, she reported on her experience playing
competitors‘ games in order to analyze them. Here‘s how she described the experience: »I would call it a game – but I did not play it.«

Sociotechnical systems
Information ecologies
Situated action
Embodied interaction
Social contextures
...

And the weird thing is: We know all this – in theory. In organizational psychology and HCI and STS, we know this at least since the
1950s (which is when the term »socio-technical system« was first introduced): To understand the uses and effects of technical systems,
we cannot separate them from the specific social contexts in which they are embedded.

So ...
What about this
frame called playing?

This then leads us directly to the next question: What characterizes the specific frame or mode of engagement we call »playing«?

http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/oem2002006062/PP/

Let me hint at the answer in two contrasting stories. The first is taken from the sociological paper »Banana Time« by Donald F. Roy. In
it, Roy reports on his experiences working on one of these drill presses, punching thousands of little items of various shapes and sizes
per day, and how he and his co-workers managed to make such menial tasks sufferable.

»De Man cites the case of one worker who wrapped
13,000 incandescent bulbs a day; she found her
outlet for creative impulse, her self-determination, her
meaning in work by varying her wrapping movements
a little from time to time. ... (L)ike the light bulb
wrapper, I did find a ›certain scope for initiative,‹ and
out of this slight freedom to vary activity, I developed
a game of work.«

Donald F. Roy
»banana time« (1960)
Here is his explanation, introduced by a similar story from French sociologist de Man.

»I need to be very routinized;
I mustn’t let myself drift.«
»I hammer it through.«
»Often, you have to force yourself to do it.«
»You’re under real pressure.«
»It’s extremely exhausting.«
»It wears you out.«
»My friends usually cannot comprehend how
stressful this is.«
Compare this to the following quotes from interviews I did for my PhD research. What would you guess are people talking about here?
They are talking about »playing« video games, of course. These are video game journalists reporting on their experience of playing a
game as part of their job.

»Sometimes, you have to
play, you have to get further –
and then, play is work.«

I think their sentiments are best summed up in this statement.

Question
What makes the most
tedious work a game,
and the best games
tedious work?

So, what‘s the underlying principle here? What made the most menial task a game for Roy, what made playing the best games tedious
work for the game journalists?

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»First and foremost,
all play is a voluntary
activity.«

Johan Huizinga
homo ludens (1938/1950: 7)
The answer leads us back to the origins of game studies, namely, Huizinga‘s study of play. As he writes: All play is voluntary. That is the
first and most defining element of this frame or mode of engagement.

»The key element of an
optimal experience is that
it is an end in itself.«

flow (1990: 67)
Here is Csikszentmihalyi reiterating the same point.

»Whoever must play,
cannot play.«

James P. Carse
finite and infinite games (1986)
And James P. Carse on the same matter.


the what and why of goal pursuits (2000)
Another way of saying this is that play is a quintessentially autonomous activity. Because we engage with it voluntarily, for its own sake,
it gives us the intrinsically enjoyable experience of being autonomous. This psychological insight is important.

Fun Voluntary

Voluntary Fun
Because it turns our habitual thinking on its head: We usually think that people play games voluntarily because they are fun – so kids
will voluntarily play this cool learning game in school if only it is fun enough. But this gets the order wrong: Gameplay is fun because we
engage in it voluntarily, because in doing something for its own sake, we experience our autonomy.

Autonomy
≠
Independence, lots of choice,
absence of constraints

Richard Ryan, Edward Deci
self-regulation & the problem of human autonomy (2006)
Note that autonomy does not simply mean independence, lots of choice, or the absence of constraints (though the presence of
meaningful choice may support the experience of autonomy).

»To be autonomous means to behave
with a sense of volition, willingness, and
congruence; it means to fully endorse
and concur with the behavior one is
engaged in.«

motivation, personality, and development (2012: 85)
Autonomy means to act with a perceived internal locus of causality and self-concordance: The experience that we willed into an action
based on its congruence with our personal needs, goals, and values.

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/84609865@N00/2753253595

Cloister life can be highly autonomous
Even living in a cloister – the most restrictive, prescribed, controlled environment imaginable – can be experienced as highly
autonomous if you feel you willed into being in that cloister and sticking to its prescribed routines because it is good for you, because
you want it, because it concurs with your needs, goals, and values.

Pfff …
I‘m bored.

amotivated

Edward Deci & Richard Ryan (2002), The »What« Deci»Why« of Goal Pursuits
Edward and & Richard Ryan: The »What« and »Why« of Gaol Pursuits (2002)
http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/pensiero/95412049

Importantly, the experience of something being motivated autonomously or controlled, extrinsic or intrinsic, is not a simple either/or,
but a spectrum. Let‘s look at the example of a student reading a class book. At the outer end of the spectrum, according to Self-
Determination Theory, sits amotivation: The student is not motivated at all.

150 more pages,
and I get my 10$.

external

Pfff …
I‘m bored.

amotivated


Next up is the most controlled motivation: external or extrinsic motivation. The student reads for no other reason but the external
rewards or punishments attached to reading. Reading will likely be very shallow, and not a pleasant experience.

I must not disappoint
my parents!

introjected

150 more pages,
and I get my 10$.

external

Pfff …
I‘m bored.

amotivated


Still controlled and not very pleasant is introjected motivation: The student has internalized outer actors into herself. Instead of others
controlling her with punishments and rewards, she is controlling herself via her ego and sense of self-worth: »I must/should/have to
do X, else I‘m not worthy/others will think poorly of me.«

I must not disappoint It‘s important for me in
my parents! school to read this now.

introjected identified

150 more pages,
and I get my 10$.

external

Pfff …
I‘m bored.

amotivated


The first form of autonomous motivation is identified motivation: The student doesn‘t perceive the activity as an outer demand by
others (internalized as inner voices or not), but understands the value of the activity for herself.



150 more pages, I totally see how this
and I get my 10$. helps me become a chef!

external integrated

Pfff …
I‘m bored.

amotivated


Even more autonomous is integrated motivation: This means that the student not only sees the immediate value or need of the activity
for herself, but that the need is well-connected to and integrated in a harmonious, organized whole of inner goals and needs. It »fits in
the bigger picture«, there is no internal tug of competing or disagreeing interests and goals.



150 more pages, I totally see how this
and I get my 10$. helps me become a chef!

external integrated

Pfff … I‘m good at this – this is
I‘m bored. actually fun!

amotivated intrinsic


The most autonomous form of motivation is intrinsic motivation: If the student reads because reading to her is a source of inherent
enjoyment. – So much (or little) on autonomy. Now autonomy is not the only component of play as a mode or frame of engagement.
Let me give you a (non-exhaustive) list of some further important aspects.

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A vs. Quality
…safe space and Variety
A second important aspect of play is a safe space. When do young animals and kids play? Answer: When the parents are around, able
to jump in when something overwhelming happens, monitoring the environment to ensure there are no outer imminent threats.

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/jijis008/850175016

… vs. Quality and Variety demands
Lack of outer distractions &
So what does »safe space« mean? First, as noted, a lack of outer demands, distractions or threats.

Lack Quality and Variety
… vs.of serious consequence
Second, the activity itself is disconnected from intended serious consequences – the result of playing is not supposed to be taken and
translated into some outer, instrumental purpose or consequence – or into a statement or judgement about the worth of the
participants. No matter what you do – »we‘re just playing«, »it‘s just a game«.

»Psychosocial moratorium principle:
Learners can take risks in a space
where real-world consequences are
lowered.«

James Paul Gee
what video games have to teach us... (2003: 67)
This is something the games and learning community knows as the psychosocial moratorium principle, as Gee calls it (taking the
phrase from Erik Erikson). Such a safe space is important not only because it allows learning by failure, but also because it supports,
again, the experienced autonomy of the situation: There is no instrumental end to it. You can focus on it for its own sake.

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/jlatimer/5173242541

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»As if«
A third element present in most play activity is that it is »as if«, fictional: The actors change or add to change the meaning of involved
persons, actions, objects. Not only do they have no serious consequence – they are also not meant »seriously«. Instead of their
instrumental meaning and function, we add our own stories, rules, goals, meanings to them.

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http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/docentjoyce/3138887652

Shared focus & attitude of exploring ...
Fourthly, to the extent that play is a collective enterprise, this shift in consequence and meaning has to be carried by everyone. Everyone
has to »play along«, otherwise the play breaks down. Such playing along involves a shared active focus on and valuing of certain modes
of action: First off, exploring, trying out new combinations of actions, objects, meanings.

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/paulgorman/1392988135

… mastery, ...
The second shared focus and attitude is mastery: If you play, you try honestly to be good in whatever it is your playing at, you put effort
and soul into it. If the boy or the girl in this scene wouldn‘t try to play Chess as good as they could, they »wouldn‘t really play«, they‘d
be spoilsports for the other.

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/7amanito/3030759646

… benign transgression, ...
Thirdly, play is a place of benign transgression: Exploring to what extent and effect you might step out of some social rules, norms,
conventions. This (according to the benign violation theory) is the source of all humor, and humor in play. The important bit here is
that this transgression is benign: It is done for the sake of everyone‘s enjoyment, not to seriously hurt anyone (then it becomes trolling).

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/bixentro/540642579

… and most importantly, fun
Which leads us to the final part of the shared focus and attitude of play: shared fun. The point of a beningn transgression like an office
prank is to have fun together. If the pranked would start crying because he felt seriously hurt, it would stop being fun – and stop being
play.

e nt
em 5
El #

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/wondermonkey2k/6188527275

Attunement
This shared focus and attitude come about in a process of attunement. Indeed, attunement play is the first form of play for us: When
mother and child establish eye contact, the baby starts a radiant smile, which the mother reflects by smiling and baby talking back,
reciprocating and attuning their emotion and attention.

»When mother and child have fun
together, … they are establishing ... the
convention that they take precedence
over the fun. When the child cries, the
mother stops having fun.«

Bernie de Koven
the well-played game (1978: 18)
Here is how Bernie de Koven puts it in his book The Well-Played Game (which IMHO is the most criminally underappreciated book in
game studies, by the way): In attunement play, mother and child establish a shared convention of caring for one‘s own fun through the
other‘s fun, ultimately caring more for the other than for fun.

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/iboy/5709372593

Communal attunement
This is what we see in all other forms forms of social play as well: We watch out for the others‘ fun. This here for instance is a shocking,
threatening moment: A full hit in the face! Oh God! Did I overstep the line? Will he cry? Has it stopped being fun? Has it stopped being
»just play«?

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/iboy/5709372593

Ahhh, thank God: All is well, he is laughing. I can continue soaking him :). (Otherwise, I would have tried to repair the play situation:
Soothe the soaked, ensure him I didn‘t want to hurt or shock him, hand over the water pistol: »Here, it‘s your turn, you may now soak
me – don‘t you want?«)

»It is the nature of a fun community to care
more about the players than about the
game. ... We are having fun. We are caring.
We are safe with each other. This is what
we want.«

Bernie de Koven
the well-played game (1978: 19-20)
Here‘s Bernie de Koven again: Play is enabled and carried by a situational »fun community« of people who care more about fun than
winning, and more about each other than their own fun. (Did I mention that The Well-Played Game is an excellent book? You‘re really
missing out on something if you haven‘t read it yet.)

e nt
em 6
El # I won‘t let you fall.

I‘ll know and say
when it‘s too much.

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/lucianvenutian/439410200

Trust
A safe space and attunement give rise to is trust: Trust in the others and trust in yourself to be benign and capable in handling the
situation. As a colleague of mine, Maaike de Jong, is finding in her PhD research on using playfulness in philosophy classes to support
self-reflection, this trust in others and yourself is what enables students to will into the play situation.


the what and why of goal pursuits (2000)
Shared focus and attitude, attunement, trust – this is just another way of saying relatedness. A well-played game carries the unique
enjoyment of autonomously exercizing our competencies, in a relation with supporting-supported others.

Okay, okay, but …
why should we care?

Now you may say: This sounds all swell, but why should we care whether our game (or learning intervention) is perceived as
autonomous and playful, or not?

Controlled Autonomous
Supports shallow, outcome-driven, Supports deep, conceptual, flexible
passive learning and problem-solving creative, proactive learning & thinking
Edward Deci & Richard Ryan (2012), Motivation, Personality, and Development
John Reeves (2002), Self-Determination Theory Applied to Educational Settings

Increases memory; persistence; quality,
Increases short-term compliance quantity and creativity of performance;
challenge-seeking; grades

Facilitates satisfaction of
Undermines intrinsic motivation
other intrinsic needs

Facilitates short-termism, Supports internalization of mastery
unethical »gaming« behavior and autonomy values

Depletes willpower, Energizes,
detrains autonomous regulation, supports autonomous regulation,
trains control orientation trains autonomy orientation

Reduces positive emotions, long-term Improves positive emotions, long-term
well-being, self-worth well-being, health, self-worth

First, there is now several decades of solid empirical evidence that autonomously motivated (learning) activities is unilaterally better for
learning, performance, socio-emotional development and well-being than controlled activities.

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/meredithfarmer/335828945

Play is the opposite of fear and stress
Secondly, play – a space of control, safety, trust, and mutual care – is the opposite of fear, of fight-or-flight reactions. And again, we
know from decades of research that intense situational fear and stress, chronic fear and stress, and learned fear reactions are toxic for
health, well-being, cognitive development, and learning.

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/jlatimer/5173242541

Finally, play itself is crucial for our psychosocial development. As Vygotsky already noted, in make-believe play, we learn to add our own
goals, rules and meanings onto reality. We free ourselves from the rule of external and internal impulses by submitting to chosen
others – and do so with an intense joy. It is the first instance of self-structured, self-determined action, where we practice these skills.

In play, we learn ...
Self-awareness; self-knowledge; self-
control of emotion, attention, and effort;
self-regulation
distancing; persistence; self-efficacy;
autonomous goal pursuit
Attunement, empathy, theory of mind;
social signaling; rule-following and rule
social regulation
negotiation; boundary negotiation;
bonding, trust, intimacy
Symbolic reasoning; creativity; set
creative skills shifting; frame switching
More generally, play is where we learn all the essential skills and preconditions for learning, living well, living together with others, and
thriving in a 21st century »creative economy«.

In play, we learn ...
self-regulation
distancing; persistence; self-efficacy;
social regulation

creative skills
shifting; frame network of current work in this area.
Have a look at this book by Dorothy Singer and others for a good introduction into the
switching

4 Playful design
Gamification is

So: If playfulness is crucial for learning and motivation, but also missing in current gamified applications (and lots of game-based
learning), the obvious conclusion is that we should be designing for playfulness.

to playfully reframing situations

And since play is a social frame of engagement, one of many possible ways of engaging with games, this means that we need to extend
our attention from »merely« designing game (or gameful) artifacts towards also paying attention to and trying to design for a specific
reframing of the situation in which our designed artifacts are encountered in. How might this look like? Let‘s have a look at a practical
example.

What we usually design

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrlerone/405730185/sizes/o/

What happened here? How did this group of people convince ordinary pedestrians on their way to work (in business suits!) to step out
of their routine, and start playing? The water guns were certainly necessary components, but if you had just dumped a bunch of water
guns at the side of the bridge, I submit nobody would have started playing with them. This brings us to a general problem: What we
usually design is only the water gun – the object.

Who decides whether this is play

(or playing is allowed)

But who decides whether that object will be played with (or whether playing is allowed in the current context) are the people present in
the current moment. So how do we convince, invite, seduce them to define their current situation as a time to play?

le
cip
in 1
P r #

Support autonomy
If autonomy lies at the heart of play, the first design principle obviously is to support autonomy: Participation in the activity needs to be
perceived as voluntary. If you watch the video closely, you will see a moment where one organizer hands a man a water gun, but he
turns it down, and she happily puts it back into her shopping cart: Nobody was coerced to partake.

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/amrufm/2593920251/sizes/z/in/photostream/

Meaningful choice
More generally speaking, autonomy is supported by design through offering meaningful choice: whether we partake, what we pursue
(our goals), how we pursue them (strategies), who we pursue it with (participants), when and where we pursue it (time and space),
and how long we partake: leaving must be as voluntary as entering.

Connection to goals, values, identity
Furthermore, if autonomy flows from the feeling that one acts in congruence with one‘s goals, values, needs, and identity, then
showing how an action connects to these also facilitates autonomy. This is what the financial service mint.com does well by allowing its
users to enter their own financial goals. Every activity the platform then suggests to them visibly »pays into« their own goals.

le
cip
in 2
P r #

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/charamelody/4613804703

Create a safe space
The second principle is to create a safe space around the activity, that is, to disconnect it from serious consequence and ego-
involvement (thinking about how others or you yourself will think of you as a consequence of you failing or succeeding). This is why
negative feedback is discouraged in brainstorming sessions, for instance.

le
cip
in 3
P r #

Metacommunicate: »This is play!«
Thirdly, following Gegory Bateson (and Erving Goffman), every situational frame is introduced, continually marked, and ended by
(sometimes implicit) metacommunicative messages, in our case the message »This is play«. Our players did so with the implicit cues
of team shirts (red vs. blue), water guns, taking position – but most importantly, by smiling openly.

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/mccun934/3604759449

Make a bow
This open smile is similar to the play bow initiating play between dogs and other animals: A bow is a first cooperative move in which
you make yourself vulnerable. You show you mean well, you do no harm, you can be trusted.

Disrupt standing frames
Furthermore, like our pedestrians, people are usually within an ongoing frame you have to actively disturb. You need to make people
aware of the fact that they are currently in a frame, and that they can change that. This is what the Clown Army does when it intervenes
in demonstrations: It disturbs the fight-or-flight frame between police and protestors, opens them to see the situation differently.

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/webatelier/5929298899

Use cues and associations
As already noted, using cues associated with play help. This is why Lego Serious Play brings Lego pieces to board rooms, for instance:
It triggers memories of play (and focuses peoples‘ attention away from their possible embarrassment onto the shared social object they
engage with).

le
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in 4
P r #

… vs. Quality and Variety
Model attitude and behaviors
Fourthly, to encourage others to play, you need to actively model it. This is what the organizers in the video did (recognizable by the
blue and red shirts): They were the first to run forward and start shooting each other with water guns. You embarrass yourself a bit first,
to show others that it is okay and not dangerous to let go of your embarrassment guards.

A brillant playful reframer and modeler in this regard is former mayor of Bogota, Antanas Mockus. When he came into office, Bogota
was one of the most crime-ridden, desperate cities of the world. To reinvigorate civic culture in the streets, he initiated a series of highly
uncoventional but also highly effective playful interventions – like dressing up as »Super Citizen«.

Reassert values over rules
To reassert public space as a space of deliberate mutual care, he let mimes control traffic – and ridicule rather than punish drivers who
were inattentive. During half-time of a national soccer championship, mimes distributed 350,000 »thumbs cards« which citizens could
use to signal to each other in everyday life when they behaved well or badly. (See the work by Karen Greiner and Arvind Singhal)

le
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in 5
P r #

Offer generative tools/toys
A fifth facilitator for play are generative tools or toys – things that are open to, and indeed encouraging of, the exploration of a deep
unprobed space of possibilities and creative self-expression. The coming together of water guns, people, and a bridge create a delicious
possibility space: Where shall I hide? How should I move? Whom should I shoot?

To me, the epitome of a generative tool/toy is Lego, because it exemplifies so beautifully the qualities that afford generativity. Apart
from the obvious, general points (well-outlined by Jonathan Zittrain), I want to focus on two qualities.

Small pieces, loosely joined
The first one is »small pieces, loosely joined«, as David Weinberger put it. A raw matter of »social objects« that can be quickly
composed, combined, analyzed, changed, recomposed, added to and taken away of, shared. Lego is a very literal example of this.

»So when designing tools
for play, underspecify!«

Kars Alfrink
a playful stance (2008)
The second quality that makes up playful tools is underspecification, as Kars Alfrink argues. The designer does not preconceive every
possible interaction and foreclose any other – as in the case of Fisher Price (or Apple, for that matter). Adam Greenfield calls this
»beautiful seams«. Each part of a designed ensemble retains a surplus of uses beyond its pre-conceived function in the ensemble.

(Obligatory Minecraft slide)
Most of you will certainly already think of the obvious cases in games: Sandbox simulations like The Sims, Spore, and the current
mother of all sandboxes, »Minecraft«.

MySpace
But is is helpful to also look at examples for underspecification outside of games. One was the initial MySpace. By forgetting to
foreclose the ability of users to insert their own HTML code to style their profile pages, MySpace unintentionally unleashed the
creativity of their users, much to their own benefit.

Powerpoint!
Another one is Powerpoint. Seriously, Powerpoint is the office equivalent of the Spore creature creator – spawning monsters both
deadly and delightful. Sometimes, I would guess that the number of hours of unfettered playful joy toying around with Powerpoint
effects surpasses that of total hours whiled away in Halo.

le
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in 6
P r #

http://ﬁle-magazine.com/blog/before-i-die-by-candy-chang

Provide invitations
And if you give people generative tools/toys, you should also give them invitations. In her wonderful book »The Participatory
Museum«, Nina Simon reminds us that open participation needs to be scaffolded as well. Nothing is as scary as a blank page – at least
for most adults. But a page with a defined blank for me, and traces of the participation of others? Invites me.

I like to call this »Freedom, with rails«, like a climbing wall. For the experts, you want maximum freedom, but beginners usually need
starting points, suggested paths.
http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/purplemattﬁsh/3205907410/sizes/o/in/photostream/

This playground by the Danish playground design group Monstrum is a beautiful example. We see: crates, a lighthouse, a half-
submerged ship with a hole in the side. What happened here? We get no complete story, but material, an opening to our own
imagination.

Autonomy
Choice in goals & strategies,
concordant w/ values & needs

Safe space
Culture of trust, forgiveness,
mutual care, zero blame

Shared attitude
Lived focus on exploring, mastery,
benign transgression, shared joy

Generative tools/toys
Inviting openings for exploration
and redesign

Let’s do another reality check, shall we? If we apply the principles of playfulness to the supermarket cashier, what would we do? We might
create a workplace where he or she is invited to define, choose, and exchange goals and strategies with colleagues around shared values.
Experimentation and trying to master every aspect of the job would be modeled by managers and the team, and a goal not met or experiment
that didn’t work out would be gladly forgiven. Workers had the freedom to redesign their workplaces (and have some fun in doing so). Now
this, to me, sounds much more like an engaging workplace; it is what breathes live into the well-formed structure of »gameful« design.

5 Gamification is
instrumentalising play.

On to the final look in the mirror: One group of objections that people often sport against gamified applications is that they
instrumentalize fun, play, and their users for the purposes of companies.

»Exploitationware«
Or to use Ian Bogost‘s term: Gamification is really just »exploitationware«. And if you look across the suite of gamified applications
currently out there, I think you will agree. For most of them want you to be ...

Get out more with your associate employees.

Stay in the game. Move on.
They want you to be fitter, happier – in order to be more productive. They want you to self-manage, self-control, self-optimize, self-
motivate in order to fit even better into the Game of Life that was defined by others for you. As of today, none of them taps the utopian
potential of play – to temporarily step out of, reflect on, try out alternatives to, and ultimately transform the rules of that game.

Technologies of domination
To use Michel Foucault‘s term, they are predominantly technologies of domination.

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/49968232@N00/3065306865/

Instrumentalizing play eats itself
Not only is this ethically questionable – it is also self-defeating. For if autonomy is the core of play, and what makes play engaging, and
if autonomy is to act willingly in accordance with your own goals, and is thwarted by perceived control of others exerted on the activity,
then instrumentalizing play for someone else‘s goals destroys the very source it tries to tap into: the joy of autonomous activity.

At best, playful re-appropriation
At best, what you will get are playful re-appropriations in which people re-assert their own goals and autonomy over the situations – like
FarmVille pixel art.

http://albanyny.bitsbytesbots.com/after-school-enrichment

Undermining intrinsic motivation
At worst, you will undermine the existing intrinsic motivation. It is well-documented that extrinsic incentives attached to an activity may
undermine the intrinsic motivation to do said activity, if the reward is perceived as controlling. By the same token, making playing a game part
of mandatory, graded homework may turn what was previously an autonomous activity into one that is perceived as controlled.

Framing as strategic instrumental action
Secondly, if you just put a game structure onto an activity – a goal, rules, and a quantitative indicator determining whether you reached your goal –,
without the play frame stating that the activity is done for the sake of shared fun, you frame the activity as strategic instrumental action, a game in
mathematical game theoretic terms, where people are encouraged to strategically minimize effort and maximize self-interested payout.
http://www.rasmusen.org/x/images/pd.jpg

The effect being that people become purely strategic actors, forgetting that they are first and foremost social, ethical actors. In games, we know this
phenomenon too well. We call such people »Munchkins«. To quote the definition from Wikipedia: »A munchkin seeks within the context of the game to
amass the greatest power, score the most "kills", and grab the most loot, no matter how deleterious their actions are to the other players‘ fun«.

»It is through a community of people
who care more about fun than winning
that the Well-Played game happens.«

Bernie de Koven
the well-played game (1978: 5)
In a word, they forget that they are part of the »fun community« that constitutes play.

Focus on rules & outcomes over values
As the management consultat James Rieley observes in his book »Gaming the System«, such munchkin-dom is pervasive in organisations: People start
to focus on following procedure and meeting KPIs, rather than asking what these are good for, and whether they help the organisation. In a sense,
Brenda Brathwaite‘s boardgame »Train« is a meditation on this human tendency to perform well within a system, without questioning its ends.
http://www.rasmusen.org/x/images/pd.jpg

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/5tein/2347819903

Gaming the system
»Gaming the system« is just another side of that coin: It the stated, framed purpose of an activity is not its enjoyment or mastery, but some
instrumental end outside that activity, and there are clear goals, rules, and quantitative indicators as to how to achieve that end, gaming the system is
logical. It‘s doing precisely what the system wants you to do: Strategically minmaxing your way through to make the indicator.

»The more a quantitative social indicator
is used for social decision-making, the
more subject it will be to corruption
pressures and the more apt it will be to
distort and corrupt the social processes it
is intended to monitor.«

Donald T. Campbell
assessing the impact of planned social change (1976)
This is nothing new, of course: This is what Donald T. Campbell already observed in the 1970s on the use and side effects of indicators
in public services (like schools).

The Enemy is Us
And as you will have noticed in the last examples I gave: This is us. This is what we ourselves are constantly doing.

Games learning …?

We are instrumentalizing games and play for the sake of learning, and instrumentalizing learning for the sake of, well, … of what?
Society? It is impolite for me as a guest to point my finger at the host, so I will start in my own backyard, Germany.

http://www.bmbf.de/de/90.php

Here‘s the mission statement of the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research: »Education and research secure our
prosperity. Education and research are the foundations upon which we build our future. The advancement of education, science and
research through the Federal Ministry is therefore an important contribution to securing the wealth of our nation.« With that out of the
way, let‘s have a look at the States.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/education
To quote president Obama‘s opening statement on the official White House site: »A world-class education is the single most important
factor in determining not just whether our kids can compete for the best jobs, but whether America can out-compete countries around
the world.« This is what we instrumentalize education for. And this is from where it is trickling down.

policy-makers

administrators
educators
students

Instrumentalisation trickling down
Via goals and metrics and funding allocations, policy-makers hand down this instrumentalization to administrators, who hand it down
to the educators, who hand it down to students (through teaching to the test etc.), no matter whether the individuals in the system
subscribe to this purpose or not.

???
Get a good job
get admitted to a good college
MAX SAT & GPA

get a good grade
The same holds for parents and society at large: As long as a degree from a »good« college gets instrumentalized as a short-hand
indicator to determine whether you get a certain job, and as long as the GPA gets instrumentalized as a short-hand indicator to
determine whether you get admitted to (a »good«) college, this outer instrumentalization of school learning will be manifested in
grading.

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/gozalewis/3585052105

One recurring theme of this conference has been in-game assessment to improve the terrible experience of testing in school. Yet I
would submit that what makes testing sucky is not that tests are badly designed (although they are), but that they are the most other-
controlled, coercive, instrumentalized, ego-involved, consequential situation there is. You can hide tests away in gameplay as much as
you want: If students have to play a game, knowing that their in-game performance will be instrumented to generate a game, I submit
that this will generate the same amount of stress and anxiety as regular testing.

Failure
Another big theme of the past days was failure: How failure in games is somehow good and accepted and indeed a core component of
good learning (see Super Meat Boy), and in school, a horrifying scar. Again, I would submit that the difference is not so much in the
material design, but in the social framing: In school, failure is framed as highly consequential and ego-involving. In gameplay, failure
has no consequence attached by others, says nothing about you – and to the extent that it does, as in e-sports players doing a
tournament in order to make a living, it gives rise to the same stress and anxiety as school testing.

6 Paideia as paidia
Gamification is

So is there a way out? Is there a way not to instrumentalize play and learning? I think there is, and that is my third humble proposition:

From instrumentalizing play
and learning to paideia as paidia

We should move from instrumentalizing play and learning to building a society for paideia as paidia. As you may tell from those words,
we have now arrived at the promised ancient Greek philosophy.

More precisely, we have arrived with Aristotle. You see, in his »Nicomachean Ethics«, Aristotle asked a very similar question: What is
the ultimate goal, the thing that we don't do for something else, that we do for its own sake, and do everything else for its sake?

»If, then, there is some end of the thing we do,
which we desire for its own sake (everything
else being desired for the sake of this), …
clearly this must be the good and the chief
good.«

Aristotle
nichomachean ethics (1.1094a)

»Now such a thing happiness,
above all else, is held to be.«

Aristotle
nichomachean ethics (1097b)
And Aristotle had a pretty simple answer to this question.

Not seeking pleasure & avoiding pain
Now Aristotle was not a hedonist: He notes that happiness does not mean seeking bodily pleasure and avoiding bodily pain. Although
children begin by being driven purely by bodily pleasure and pain, and the majority of people remain so, he thinks that they live a poor
live, »just like cattle«. He is looking for a deeper, lasting happiness.

εὐδαιμονία
Well-being, flourishing, the good life:
»the exercise of the rational faculties of
the soul in conformity with excellence or
virtue, or if there be several, the best and
most final one.«

Aristotle
nichomachean ethics (1098a)
It is eudaimonia – which we today might translate as flourishing, well-being, or the good life. And what is well-being for Aristotle?
Quote: »the exercise of the rational faculties of the soul in conformity with excellence or virtue, or if there be several, the best and most
final one.« Now this may sound a tad cryptic, so let me explain how Aristotle comes to this conclusion.

For Aristotle, to flourish means to exercize and perfect one‘s specific
capacity, function or purpose – one‘s ergon – for its own sake.

The ergon of human beings is reason, understood broadly: As humans,
we have the unique capacity to not just be controlled by pleasure and
pain, but (a) to reason and (b) to act in accordance with reason – that is,
to perform deliberate, planned, goal-directed, self-determined action even
against our impulses. Both have their own, inherent »proper pleasure«.

True eudaimonia requires to reason and act in accordance with reason
»excellently,« virtuously. Virtue refers to the trained, acquired habits or
dispositions necessary for doing something well – like the skills a
craftsmen needs to develop to perform his craft well. But to be truly
virtuous, action must not only be properly habituated so that it flows
effortlessly, Aristotle notes: It also has to be deliberate, conscious, and
done for its own sake, for its own »proper pleasure«.

Doing something in accordance with virtue only because you were
trained to do so, without consciously knowing, valuing, and enjoying
doing it virtuously is »merely decent«.

»If any desire pleasures which depend
on themselves, they will find the
satisfaction of their desires nowhere but
in philosophy.«

Aristotle
politics (1267a)
And that is why philosophy is such a great pastime for Aristotle: Properly cultivated, it is the autotelic exercize of mankind‘s highest
capacity, and it doing so autonomously, self-determinedly, and self-sufficiently. This conclusion has earned a lot of critique: Maybe
Aristotle‘s own innate highest capacity was to do philosophy – but that doesn‘t necessarily hold for everyone.

The notion of self-concordance provides
the telos to ground a modern theory of
the virtues. … Self-concordance is
intrinsically motivated teleological activity
that aligns with one‘s enduring values
and interests.«

Hope May
aristotle‘s ethics (2010: 148/150)
Along these lines, Hope May has recently provided an interesting re-reading of Aristotle through the lens of Self-Determination Theory.
She says: Aristotle is wrong – we need to replace »reason« as the only ergon of man with our innate individual capacities. But he‘s right
in that positive psychology agrees that the autotelic exercize and perfection of one‘s innate capacities does support well-being.

»If we understand the ergon of a human
being as self-concordance, then self-
knowledge and the perfection of the
analytic, navigational, and motivational
competencies (to realize it) are the
virtues.«

Hope May
aristotle‘s ethics (2010: 148)
Furthermore, Aristotle is right in that the capacity to deliberately pursue our innate capacities, needs, and values, against the tug of
pleasure and pain, that is, to act self-determinedly, is in fact the ergon universal to all human beings. Virtues, in this reading, are the
skills and competencies we need to do so.

Paideia
And as Aristotle noted time and again, although we have the innate capacity and indeed need to live a self-determined life, we need to
be educated to do so, and do so well. We begin as slaves to bodily pleasures and pains. That, then, is the proper and ultimate purpose
of education in the Greek sense, of paideia: To cultivate the virtues required to flourish, to live a self-determined life. (And we can add
that it is also the precondition for all effective self-directed, interest-driven learning.)

»For the Greeks, the highest work of art was
the living human being. … It (humanitas)
describes the education of a human into its
true form, into a proper, full human being.
That is the real Greek paideia.«

Werner Jaeger
paideia: the ideals of greek culture (1934: 14)
To quote the great scholar on the matter, Werner Jaeger: »For the Greeks, the highest work of art was the living human being. … It
(humanitas) describes the education of a human into its true form, into a proper, full human being. That is the real Greek paideia.«

The ultimate goal of paideia is to enable the individual to come to its own understanding what »the good« is. Therefore, paideia is not
instrumentalizing: Its very purpose is to enable the individual to live a self-determined, non-instrumentalized life in accordance with its
own insight into what »the good life« is, and furthermore, to reflect whether the education it received served this purpose well, and
then deliberately embrace (in Self-Determination Theory terms, integrate) – or reject and change it (although that last bit is more a
modern addition than original Aristotle). The purpose of the »Nicomachean Ethics« was to enable its students – who already brought
proper virtues with them – to gain this insight why the virtues were not just blind tradition, but something whose purpose they could
understand and based on that, deliberately embrace so that they would perfect their own education.

»While it (the city-state)
comes into existence for the
sake of life, it exists for the
good life.«

Aristotle
politics (1.1252b)
And this, to Aristotle, is the ultimate purpose of the state: To set up a constitution (politeia), laws, regulations, and an education
(paideia) so that its members are enabled to live the good life together – given that man is a zoon politicon who both needs others to
subsist, and naturally desires to live with others.

Paidia
as paidea
So how does all of this relate to play, paidia in the Greek term? The first obvious answer is that play is a good and proper form for any
kind of learning. But I want to suggest a double answer that goes deeper than that. The first half is paidia as paideia, play as education
understood in the Greek sense.

the virtues of self-determined
In play, we learn ...flourishing in a community
self-regulation
distancing; resilience; self-efficacy;
social regulation

creative skills
shifting; frame switching action. In human
As we have seen, play is where we first practice and acquire the precise virtues that enable self-determined
development, paidia, play, is the ideal and necessary space and form of true paideia, equipping us with the competencies we need to
live life well, and live life well with others.

Paideia
AS paidia
The second half of my answer is paideia as paidia, education as play.

the good life
Remember that for Aristotle, eudaimonia is the autotelic, self-determined exercize and perfection of one‘s innate capacities – and note
how this definition maps quite well with what we saw play to be: the autotelic engagement in an activity with a shared focus on
exploration, mastery, and fun, in attunement with others.

work

play
But if such autotelic pursuit of excellence is the good life, then as long as we work for the sake of play, play for the sake of work (or play
for the sake of learning, and learn for the sake of life), as long as we frame teaching and learning as something you only do to
»prepare« »make a living« or »have leisure«, rather than something we do for the excellence we find in it, we are modeling the »false
life«, we model to our students and each other that things should not be done, and done well, for their own sake.

work

play
Most importantly, we do not let them and us practice and partake in the good life. Work and school and play are all part of, not just
preparation for, the good life. We live the good life to the precise extent that we are able to transform whatever situation we find
ourselves in into a self-determined pursuit where we find some measure of excellence, some focus on mastery and joy, some
connection to our goals, needs, and values.

a thing well-done for its own sake
is a moment of life well-lived

Three humble propositions
From game interventions in systems
to the gameful restructuring of systems
to the playful reframing of situations
From instrumentalizing learning and play
to building a society of paideia as paidia

These, then, are my three humble propositions for moving the field of games and learning forward: To expand the scope of our
ambition from deploying games as interventions in systems toward the gameful restructuring of systems (second-order change). To
expand the scope of our attention from designing material systems toward the playful reframing of situations. And to realign our goals
from instrumentalizing learning and play toward building a society of paideia as paidia, of education as the site where we acquire the
virtues to live a self-determined, excellent life with others.

As if it were a game we chose to play

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/sukanto_debnath/53007354

For when we do so, we learn to fully embrace our life: To seek out and determine our challenge and our freedom in the hand that we’ve
been dealt, and to play it with mastery and cunning, with creativity and style, as if it were a game we chose to play.

Thank you.
@dingstweets

sebastian@codingconduct.cc

codingconduct.cc

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