Gameful but not necessarily playful User Experience

Photo by Esteban Lopez on Unsplash


Gameful and playful

What is actually the definition for gameful? Given by Sebastian Deterding, Dan Dixon, Staffan Björk, Elizabeth Lawley and Lennart Nacke in their paper with title Designing Gamification: Creating Gameful and Playful Experiences:

"Gameful design … refers to the design of hardware and software in non-game contexts using design elements from games."

And what is the definition for playful? Again given by Sebastian Deterding, Dan Dixon, Rilla Khaled and Lennart Nacke in their paper with title From Game Design Elements to Gamefulness: Defining “Gamification”:

"… no consensual theory or terminology of playfulness has emerged so far."

So, what could possibly define the term of playful? Given by Hannu Korhonen, Markus Montola and Juha Arrasvuori in their paper with the title Understanding Playful User Experience through Digital Games, playful is:

"… to design something that is pleasurable to use."

Searching further towards a definition, interestingly I found the following quote given again by Sebastian Deterding, Dan Dixon, Rilla Khaled and Lennart Nacke in their paper with title Gamification: Toward a Definition:

"…we are talking about elements of games, not of play."

In that sense, it could be interesting to seek how play is actually defined. Interestingly — again — by searching further the literature it comes up that the concept of play is not yet clear due to cultural aspects. Brian Sutton-Smith states in his book with the title The Ambiguity of Play:

"… some of the chaos to be found there is due to the lack of clarity about the popular cultural rhetoric that underlie the various play theories and play terms."

In conclusion to this hunt for a definition, I would like to quote something last from the book with the title Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games by Tracy Fullerton, Christofer Swain, Steven Hoffman:

"…playfulness is a state of mind rather than an action."

Gameful or playful?

So, in the sense that a design could be gameful by applying game mechanics in the design process, I ask myself whether this would mean in parallel that the same design could be for the same reason playful. Thus, does the state of gameful suggests also the one of playful?

In another article regarding game mechanics (link) i presented few examples of mechanics used in popular games, and examples of some cases of real-life interactive applications and systems where such mechanics could also be indicated.

To my understanding it is pretty much clear that by using the game mechanics as a UX tool in order to work on the design of an interactive system, does not necessarily mean that the same system is targeted to be or conclusively is playful. To the contrary, robotic surgery environments, for example, are not playful at all.

Gameful but not playful

By distinguishing the two aspects, those of play and game, we could create the following schema:

  • The play is more like the concept and the game the design solution.
  • The play is more like the theory and the game its application.
  • The play is more like the stimulus and the game its implementation.
  • The play is one of most successful ways so as to motivate, while the game is the way to reach empathy.
Thus, while being gameful does not necessarily mean playful, by reaching levels of empathy and by motivating simultaneously, there could be achieved engagement.

Engagement, how?

A game based design approach could allow user experience practices to reach engagement in interactive systems, or in other words, the integration of game mechanics within the design process could enable richer or higher levels of engagement, previously not even imagined.

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