Keynote in the IADIS Mobile Learning 2013 conference, Lisbon, 15 March 2013.

1. From Mobile Games to
Playful Communication:
Play in Everyday Life
F r a n s Mä yr ä , Ph D
P r o fes s or, In fo r mat ion S t udi e s & I n t e r a c t iv e Me di a
S c h o o l o f In fo r mat io n S c i e n c e s, T R I M, G a me Re s e a r c h L a b
Uni ver s it y o f Ta mp er e

2. Games’ increasing contextual and
demographic reach
• Opportunities for solitary play, and social interaction
• Game play motivations can be contradictory (e.g. casual vs.
immersive/hardcore)
• Expanding software ecosystems are increasingly reaching both active and non-
active game players
• Need to recognize the tensions that characterize the evolving mobile games and
user cultures as well as related service design

3. Increasing range of games and play
• The MobyGames.com database lists now c. 72 000 different games
• New ones appearing daily
• There are 138 different platforms listed
• App Stores for mobile games & applications are showing strongest growth
• In Finland, 98 % of people are game players, 89 % are active players
• 73 % play digital games, 54 % are active digital game players
• Average digital game player age is 37 years
• Particularly mobile game playing is on the rise
• (Source: Karvinen & Mäyrä, Player Barometer 2011)

4. The immersive future?

5. The sense of games and play
• Play and playfulness is a wider phenomenon than games
• Johan Huizinga: the play impulse is the foundation of culture and
creativity (Homo Ludens, 1938)
• Play thrives at the outside of instrumental utility, where an
endogenous system of meaning can be established
• Also in our everyday life we orient according to social frames, or the
rules of situational contexts
• Play can emerge as initiated by the situation, place, practices or the
actor herself

6. Playful person
• In the personality psychology some of the characteristics of
playfulness have been identified:
• Playfulness is the predisposition to frame (or reframe) a situation in such
a way as to provide oneself (and possibly others) with amusement,
humor, and/or entertainment. Individuals who have such a heightened
predisposition are typically funny, humorous, spontaneous,
unpredictable, impulsive, active, energetic, adventurous, sociable,
outgoing, cheerful, and happy, and are likely to manifest playful
behavior by joking, teasing, clowning, and acting silly.
(Barnett 2007, 955.)

7. Are you playful in your work?

8. Playfulness in games
• All games and all game players are not particularly playful
• Highly competitive, tightly rule-regulated games do not provide as
much room for playfulness as more free-form play
• True play should always have some leeway, free movement within a
more rigid structure (Salen & Zimmerman 2004)
• The range of game-like phenomena is great, from free sandbox
games (paidia play) to tightly controlled competitive games (ludus
play; Caillois 1958; Frasca 2003)

9. Playfulness in communication
• Playful communication takes place “for its own sake”, and fulfils poetic or
phatic function (R. Jakobsson 1960)
• E.g. play with words can be motivated by artistic curiosity or by the need to
entertain others
• In humour, a person releases supressed energy (Freud 1989) or creates new
meanings by joining different phenomena or viewpoints in surprising ways
• “Joking is a game that players only play successfully when they both
understand and follow the rules” (Critchley 2002)
• Jokes and playful communication can be nurturing and caring, but also
teasing and ridiculing use of power

10. Game as communication
• Playfulness and games rely on meta-communication, the hints that
help e.g. a puppy to differentiate a ‘nip’ from a real ‘bite’ (Bateson
1976)
• The means of games can be used to make complex phenomena more
easily understandable (Duke 1974: games are the “language of the
future”)
• Games utilize the rhetoric of persuasion and can convey a stance,
make a point (Bogost 2007; Bogost et al. 2010)
• In games, two forms of communication come together: semiosis and
ludosis (Mäyrä 2008)

11. Characteristics of playful communication
• Playfulness of communication can be evaluated from three key dimensions:
1. Does it encourage spontaneous, free acts of play? (free play)
2. Does it encourage creating and sharing creative, surprising contents and
combinations? (creative play)
3. Does it encourage engagement in free, self-purposeful manner? (freedom
from utilitarian though)
(Source: Mäyrä, Frans (2012) “Playful Mobile Communication – Services
Supporting the Culture of Play”. Interactions: Studies in Communication &
Culture, 3:1 (October 2012), 55-70.)

12. Rapidly increasing mobile communications
• Particularly young people appear to have increased their mobile
communications and data usage

13. App usage on the rise
• 4,125 Android smartphone users tracked, “users spent 59.23 minutes per day on their devices. However, the
average application session – from opening an app to closing it – lasted only 71.56 seconds”
• Source: Böhmer et al. (2011) “Falling Asleep with Angry Birds, Facebook and Kindle – A Large Scale Study on
Mobile Application Usage”. MobileHCI 2011.

14. Games and playful mobile communications
• Two directions of game development:
1. Small video games
2. True mobile games
• The latter make use of the distinctive strengths of mobile technology,
such as touch screens, location information, different sensors, and
social networks
• The mixed reality and augmented reality games have made
significant progress in a decade
• Playful communication even more prevalent than mobile game play?

15. Examples

16. Gaming with (mobile) images
• Social media has increased the incentive for sharing photos and mobile media further
lowers the threshold for sharing and self-expression
• Flickr (2004) is an early example of a playful and game-like environment for
communicating with images
• Originally emerged as a side project in developing web-based MMO titled “Game
Neverending”
• Smartphones feed the growing role of visual information in Flickr (as in Facebook and
many other social services)
• The “interestingness” algorithm detects the most interesting photos shared in the
service, and has led into “gaming the Flickr”
• Users are developing their own playful photo culture, e.g. playful message forum
threads where the rule is to use only one colour, or a particular shape
• More: Mäyrä, Frans (2011) “Games in the Mobile Internet: Towards Contextual Play”. In:
Garry Crawford & Victoria Gosling & Ben Light (eds.), Online Gaming in Context: The
social and cultural significance of online games. New York: Routledge. p. 108-129.

17. Facebook and playful communication
• There are estimated 200-300 million active game players in Facebook
(which has over 1 billion users)
• Earlier the game messages filled the ‘news streams’ or Facebook, but
this has been changed
• Phatic communication, joking and silly links and photos, ironic and
playful comments to daily news
• A building and management simulation game such as Farmville
(2009) has immediately also been used for playful self-expression
• Games that allow creative play are games or emergence rather than
of progression (Juul 2002; Kirman 2010)

18. Source: http://reface.me/applications/21-farmville-art-masterpieces/

19. Expanding games literacy
• Case Rovio:
• Angry Birds: physics puzzles
• Angry Birds Space: physics puzzles in an environment
with more complex gravitational opportunities
• Bad Piggies: increasingly complex toolbox for creating
different solutions to physics based puzzle levels
• Education of a casual gaming audience in games
literacy and playful creativity

20. MOGAME case study
• University of Tampere Game Research Lab
designed and implemented a location-based,
multiplayer mobile game prototype in 2003-
2004
• Featured an audio-focused user interface
(shaman’s drum), which carried clues about the
mixed reality game events
• Let players write “scrolls” that could be dropped
into various locations
• Enabled player-created treasure hunts, trails of
hints available in mixed reality
• (More: see Digital Cityscapes: Merging Digital
and Urban Playspaces, 2009 & Theory and Design
of Pervasive Games, 2009.)

21. Playful, user-created
content in locative media
• Foursquare and services that have
followed its ‘check-in’ game mechanic
are changing our relationships to
physical and social space
• Users have utilized the service for
(rule-breaking) playful communication
• Quantity of mobile social media apps
is increasing, but are they really
empowering the users/players?
• (800,000+ apps available both in iOS
App Store and Google Play)

22. Directions of development
• We need to teach and learn gaming literacy, media literacy and life
management as integrated with each other
• Need for balancing the flow of stimuli with selective attention and memory
skills as well as social skills, supported by smart design decisions
• We are continuously adapting into new information ecosystems, our
thinking and cultures are in constant state of flux
• The new culture of learning is created and shaped within the context of
increasingly playful and games-saturated society
• The most positive future directions are linked with creative, playful activity,
and collaboration that is empowered by individual and cultural differences

23. Selected References
• Barnett, L.A., 2007, The Nature of Playfulness in Young Adults, • Frasca, G., 2003, Simulation versus Narrative: Introduction to
Personality and Individual Differences, 43(4), pp. 949–958. Ludology, in M. J. P. Wolf and B. Perron, (eds.) The Video Game
Theory Reader. London: Routledge, pp. 221-235.
• Bogost, I., 2007, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of
Videogames, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. • Goffman, E., 1961, Encounters; Two Studies in the Sociology of
Interaction, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.
• Bogost, I., Ferrari, S. & Schweizer, B., 2010, Newsgames: Journalism
at Play, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. • Huizinga, J., 1955, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-element in
Culture, Boston: Beacon.
• Critchley, S., 2002, On Humour, London & New York: Routledge.
• Karvinen, J, & Mäyrä, F. 2011. Pelaajabarometri 2011: Pelaamisen
• Caillois, R., 1958/2001, Man, Play and Games, Urbana (IL): Muutos. TRIM Research Reports. Tampere: University of Tampere.
University of Illinois Press. http://tampub.uta.fi/tulos.php?tiedot=484.
• Duke, R.D., 1974, Gaming: The Future’s Language, New York: Sage • Kirman, B., 2010, Emergence and Playfulness in Social Games, in
Publications. Proceedings of MindTrek 2010. New York: ACM, pp. 71-77.
• Jakobsson, R., 1960, Closing statements: Linguistics and Poetics, in • Mäyrä, F., 2008, An Introduction to Game Studies: Games in Culture,
T. A. Sebeok, (ed.) Style in Language. Cambridge (MA): Technology London & New York: Sage Publications.
Press of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pp. 350-377.
• Mäyrä, Frans, 2012, “Playful Mobile Communication – Services
• Juul, J. 2002. “The Open and the Closed: Games of Emergence and Supporting the Culture of Play”. Interactions: Studies in
Games of Progression.” In Digital Cultures Conference Proceedings, Communication & Culture, 3:1 (October 2012), 55-70
323–329. Tampere, Finland: Tampere University Press.