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There have been at least three different approaches guiding the many attempts to capture play and playfulness: by focusing on features of play/playful activities, by focusing on playfulness as a character trait and by focusing on playfulness as a frame of mind.

Firstly, most of the earlier definitions have attempted to identify specific features of activities that legitimize them to be called play or playful (for example play needs to be a spontaneous activity, not rulebound, non-literal, based on active engagement etc., see Blurton Jones, 1972; Reynolds, 1976; Rubin et al., 1983). However, empirical efforts to support the respective criteria have repeatedly failed (cf. Sutton-Smith and Kelly-Byrne, 1984).

Secondly, Lieberman (1965, 1966) was one of the first to shift attention from the activity to the participant, thus attempting to define playfulness as a character trait, with sub-traits such as cognitive spontaneity, physical spontaneity, social spontaneity, manifest joy and sense of humor (for recent work on this see Glynn and Webster, 1992; Proyer, 2012; Shen et al., 2014; see also Barnett, 2017 for a culture comparative approach).

However, much research in the fields of psychology, education, and in particular management and business administration seems to assume that one can have a more or less playful way to fulfill a task, independent of the activity and despite the fact that persons can be playful to a different degree. Building on the theories of Murray (1938); Caillois (1961) and Apter (1991), it has thus thirdly been proposed that playfulness should be conceptualized “as the attitude of a person when he or she is engaged mentally and physically in the state of play. […] Any object can become a tool for play and any situation can be approached in a playful manner when the person is in such frame of mind” (Arrasvuori et al., 2010, p. 2; see also Boberg et al., 2015); and elaborating on this: “Playfulness is the expression of a universal capacity that can either be nurtured and encouraged or constrained and limited by both internal and environmental variables” (Sanderson, 2010).

In fact, already the psychologist Susanna Millar has pleaded for such analytical shift, claiming that “perhaps play is best used as an adverb; not as a name of a class or activities, nor as distinguished by the accompanying mood, but to describe how and under what conditions an action is performed […]” (Millar, 1968).

However, as argued by Sutton Smith, there is very little empirical work to further define this specific experiential state – and its relation to motivation and creativity:

The “obviously” in this quote most likely refers to the circumstance that introspection, the only way to assess subjective experiences, is not a method traditionally relied on within psychology. Two main reasons seem to be responsible for this circumstance. Firstly, subjects are often untrained to attend to and to linguistically express the micro-gestures in their minds. More importantly, they are even considered untrustworthy and highly susceptible sources of confabulation about their own mental actions (see for example Nisbett and Wilson, 1977; Johansson et al., 2005; but also Petitmengin et al., 2013 and, more generally, Jack and Roepstorff, 2003). Secondly, it poses a challenge for experimental psychology to derive generalizable information (numbers) from highly individual reports of experiences from complex, real life situations as the most commonly used quantitative methods, such as averaging, do not easily lend itself to this purpose. In consequence, the use of introspection has long been excluded in cognitive psychology as a means to study the human mind. However, as often pointed out, this is a curious circumstance given the fact that the harshest critics themselves not only commonly do trust their own judgments about their minds but also use these judgments – or “anecdotes” – to derive ideas and hypotheses for their experiments. As Jack and Roepstorff stress, the purpose cannot be to condemn introspection, but to validate and expand its use as a scientific tool (Jack and Roepstorff, 2003).

Micro-phenomenology (MP) is an interview and analysis approach explicitly developed for this purpose. It aims to facilitate the access to subjective experience and to analyze and represent it in a manner fitting to the scientific aim of generalization of results (for descriptions and validity tests of the method see Petitmengin-Peugeot, 1999; Petitmengin, 2006; Petitmengin and Bitbol, 2009; Bitbol and Petitmengin, 2013; Petitmengin et al., 2013, in preparation). It is also distinctly different from other assessments of experiences in so far as it looks at the detailed unfolding of an experience over time, rather than asking for overall characteristics (as assessed by questionnaires, etc., see for example Arrasvuori et al., 2010). This allows to explore (micro)-mechanisms and causalities otherwise unattended to, and it makes the approach a potentially valuable tool when trying to understand how a certain process might be facilitated or hindered – an obvious goal when thinking of the applicability of findings about playfulness for psychology, education or business. So far, micro-phenomenology has been applied to a wide range of topics, and the granted insights may have direct applicability in clinic, education, or organization. For example, it has been used to train epilepsy patients to detect (and treat) early signs of an arriving seizure, to help academics to understand and find first steps out of a writer’s block (Bojner Horwitz et al., 2013) and to assess and tackle some of the critical factors of overworking in executives (Créno and Cahour, 2015). It is furthermore used to reach a more fine-grained understanding of phenomena traditionally considered to be out of reach for empirical assessment such as emotions (as experiences, see for example Depraz et al., 2017).

In the following we will further present this method and our precise research design developed to explore the following questions:

Participants of this study were 22 young adults, 8 male, 14 female, 23.4 mean age (SD = 4.16), all but one with completed high school degree, 5 with further university degree. All were students of Vestjylland’s folk high school (Vestjyllands Hojskole) located in Velling, Denmark, a boarding school offering adult education for national and international students in several creative topics such as writing, dancing, theater, music as well as sustainable thinking and entrepreneurship². The students were recruited on campus as volunteers after a 30-min interactive lecture introducing the method of micro-phenomenology as a tool of cognitive science, including a live interview about a simple spelling task with one of the teachers as interviewee. This setup allowed us to get participants motivated for the task and comfortable with the setup and the reflective requirements of the method.

All data were recorded within 1 week in May 2017, in a classroom of the Hojskole. Interviews were conducted in English by the same interviewer (Katrin Heimann). All students understood and spoke English on a level allowing them to study for a university degree. All participants received 150 DKK as reimbursement. They all gave written informed consent to procedure and data use and were debriefed after the experiment. The study was carried out in accordance with the recommendations of the guidelines of the Human Subjects Committee of the Cognition and Behaviour lab at Aarhus University and The Central Denmark Region Committees on Health Research Ethics. The protocol was approved by the Human Subjects Committee and exempted from need of approval by The Central Denmark Region Committees on Health Research Ethics.

A micro-phenomenological interview begins with the elicitation of a particular singular experience. This is considered necessary to avoid a mere reproduction of information or knowledge about the phenomenon in focus (as triggered by simply asking what it means to get and be playful), and instead to foster access to an actual experience. For this purpose, MP always involves a clear reference event that the interviewee repeatedly is reminded to refer to. As the aim of our study was to explore the experiential process of becoming playful, we would ideally have referred to an instance when the participant had such an experience. However, asking for a personal memory fulfilling this condition would most likely have triggered experiences of very different nature across participants, which, in turn would have compromised the analysis of the data. We also wanted to avoid creating a “playful” experience by a prechosen context modulation (such as a “gamified” design) as for this we would have had to use (and therefore prime with) our anecdotal intuitions of how to get and be playful. We therefore decided for a controlled within-subject design that gave the participants the task to decide what it takes to become and be playful or not playful:

Briefly, for each participant we prepared six equal sets of six LEGO bricks, each set allowing to build a small duck.

From one set we built a prototype duck and placed it on the table. The other five sets were arranged in separate heaps in front of the participant. Each participant was then given one out of two tasks (order counterbalanced across participants):

Task (a): “I would now like you to build five LEGO ducks out of these sets. You can rebuild the prototype you see on the table or just build any duck or duck-like creature you like – that is up to you. The only thing that is really important for us and this experiment is that you do this as playfully as you can. Please find a way of doing it, so that it feels playful and nothing but playful.”

Task (b): “I would now like you to build five LEGO ducks out of these sets. You can rebuild the prototype you see on the table or just build any duck or duck-like creature you like – that is up to you. The only thing that is really important for us and this experiment is that you do it in a non-playful manner. Please find a way of doing it, so that it feels not playful at all.”

Notably, this design had only a minimal difference in instructions: the suggestion to build so that it feels as playful as possible or not playful at all. This contrast allowed us to explore whether adopting a stance of playfulness would allow for similar experiential qualities across participants, independent of the particular setting, activity or character of the participant (all constant across conditions).

If participants asked for further explication for the non-playful condition, we answered that it should rather feel like work. This occurred for the majority of participants, and we will discuss this as a possible priming issue in the last section of the paper.

After each building session, we ran a micro-phenomenological interview with the participants involving the following procedure: we started out by asking the participant the following question:

We used the principles of the micro-phenomenological interview technique to guide the interviewee to and through her experience avoiding to prime for certain answers or foster confabulation a posteriori. The main tool for this is that the interviewer, after the initial open question, only unfolds the answers of the participants in their own words. Thus, he mainly suggests to dive deeper into certain experiential episodes by repeating the participants’ phrasing and asking for further explication of the actual experience in all its dimensions. Most importantly, he avoids to prime the participant, e.g., by reformulating the experience according to his own experiences or prior knowledge or by asking for dimensions not mentioned by the participants himself. For more information see Petitmengin (2006).

In each interview, when the context allowed it, we furthermore asked “Did you manage to become playful/non-playful?” and – depending on the answer – “How did you experience it as playful/non-playful?” (and asking deeper into this as explained above). This allowed to explore the participants’ success in shifting his/her own inner stance and to explore how the result of the effort felt like with reference to the specific task.

Participants also filled out a questionnaire that explored basic demographics and asked about the overall experience in terms of playfulness, enjoyment, fun, and duration perception. We furthermore recorded videos, photographs of the ducks built, measured heart rate and galvanic skin response. Finally, we administered a short version of the Torrence creativity task post-experiment. The current paper only analyzes and discusses the interview data (based on video recordings) and the demographics. Complete interview data can be provided by the authors upon request.

Micro-phenomenology is based on the “elicitation interview” technique developed by Vermersch (1994) to help practitioners reflect their own praxis in the field. Thus, the original technique was designed to reveal individual thought and action processes to enhance each participants’ specific professional activities. More recently, micro-phenomenology has been adapted and refined for use in cognitive science, thus focusing more on how to generalize across participants. Obviously, this is dependent on a well-designed protocol. In this study we used the following four-step procedure based on Vermersch (1994, regarding the pre-analysis), Petitmengin (2001, 2006, 2009, regarding time analysis and analysis proper), and especially Depraz et al. (2017, regarding the generative aspects of the analysis proper and the constructive analysis).

The end result of this analysis step consists of transcripts of the participants’ utterances (with interviewer’s speech removed) that describes only her lived experience (after satellite information has been removed).

It is important to mention that the interviews and the analysis attempted to map the experiential process of becoming playful/non-playful, without explicitly frontloading specific theoretically motivated elements into the analysis. To the extent possible, the outcome of the analysis can therefore be considered data driven rather than hypothesis driven.

The primary aim was to analyze interviews to get insight into the experiential structure of becoming playful. However, we also used the videos to document the kind of products (duck-figures) produced in each condition and we evaluated the interviews in order to see if participants succeeded in manipulating the playfulness of their stance. In the following, we provide numbers (indicating how many participants out of 22 responded in a certain way) when generalizations across participants were possible, and we use direct quotes to either illustrate the generalizable phenomenology or to hypothesize about phenomena not touched upon in enough interviews to make an overall claim. The quotes are marked with PF (playful) and NPF (non-playful).

The task to build while modulating one’s own feeling of playfulness seemed feasible for most participants. Only 3 out of 22 participants reported a difficulty to achieve a playful stance. To build in a non-playful stance seemed to be slightly harder with 12 participants reporting difficulties (though not failures). As the experiential analysis revealed, this might be related to the use of the LEGO material facilitating a playful stance rather than a non-playful stance. We will refer to these instances with more detail below.

In total, we identified four different phases of the experience in general:

While there might be other phases involved in other tasks, we assume that the ones detected here cover more general process characteristics of any such task, such as a preparation phases (1 and 2), a conduct phase (3) and an evaluation phase (4). In the following we will describe each of the phases with respect to the experiential categories as defined above. To give a full picture, we also include third-person reports of building products or behavior in these otherwise first-person descriptions (differences clearly marked in the text).

The interviews indicated that participants in general could relate to the instructions and were able to enter a playful stance, with 19 out of 22 participants reporting that they managed to do so. It seemed slightly harder for them to achieve a non-playful state, with 12 participants reporting difficulties to do so. Close evaluation of the interviews suggested that difficulty to get in a non-playful state might be an effect of the LEGO material provided that carried too many associations to and memories of play. Some participants, albeit less pronounced, expressed difficulty in becoming playful; this appeared bound to the experimental situation, which restricted participants’ feeling of autonomy. Taken together these findings support the claim that participants could assume a particular playful stance, generated by a voluntary internal modulation. They further show that external variables (e.g., experimental context and setup) must support this internal effort for it to be realized completely. In particular, they must support a degree of autonomy which playfulness seems to require.

This conclusion is supported by the most striking finding in the micro-phenomenological assessment: a feeling of autonomy seems to be constitutional for the ability to modulate playfulness. 14 participants reported immediately thinking that this task essentially meant being free to build what they wanted to – an indication of the importance of freedom of choice. Seven furthermore reported that they felt encouraged to create something “with their own minds” – an indication that the personal meaning of the task was essential to them feeling playful.

This contrasts starkly with the description of 16 participants in the non-playful condition who reported thinking about or immediately feeling constraints regarding their building actions and/or a deprivation of meaning regarding the task. One participant even explicitly referred to the quasi-sensation of a voice telling her to “do this, do this” which vividly exemplifies the lack of autonomy experienced.

Interviews furthermore indicated a range of strategies that participants considered as key in achieving and maintaining one or the other of the two stances explored: in particular, several participants recalled the need to actively use attention and memories to get into a non-playful stance, while the transition to be playful seemed to happen almost effortless, facilitated by spontaneous flashbacks into childhood or joyful situations of playing with children. There were indications though that this difference might be linked to the material used in the building task as we will discuss later.

Our data further revealed that the two conditions differed in what participants considered to be appropriate building products: 13 participants, when advised to be playful, recalled explicit thoughts about building five different ducks in the playful condition. This seemed to happen with the intention to enhance self-expression and creativity and was pursued as long as this task did not imply too much stress – a feeling apparently connected with work. In contrast to this, when requested to act non-playfully, 15 participants reported an inner advice to only copy ducks. The purpose of this seemed to be to create an atmosphere of restriction, meaninglessness, and boredom – and it was pursued as long as this task did not get too easy – a circumstance seemingly excluding an activity to be considered as work.

Participants’ reports correlated strongly with participants’ final products in the two conditions: the majority of participants in the playful condition built five different constructions, while in the non-playful condition, the majority produced several copies of one and the same construction. Notably, four participants in the playful condition in fact reported not building “ducks” at all, that is, their drive for freedom and creativity made them even ignore a critical part of the (very minimal) task instruction.

The interviews suggest that this higher expression of creativity in the playful condition may be the outcome of a dynamic process set in motion by taking an autonomous stance: freed from specific constraints and goals, participants seem to enter a curiosity driven interaction with the material, which allows for an unknown outcome to occur. This process might have been enhanced by an aesthetic way of perceiving the building material, enforcing an exploratory approach due to the sensory and reflective pleasure involved. Interestingly, this process may result in unexpected products, and the realization of this appears to enhance participants’ feeling of competence.

These findings suggest that participants entered the playful condition by a contextual reinterpretation of the situation. This involved allowing oneself to feel autonomous and be exploratory without these self-imposed directives becoming constraints and stressful factors. In stark contrast, entering a non-playful condition was achieved by establishing a context of self-imposed constraints (e.g., time pressure or evaluation) and by reducing exploration, surprise and enjoyment to a minimum. This also appeared to reduce their experienced feelings of competence and motivational drive. Tellingly, if these constraints were not met, participants reported that their experience did not meet the requirements of the non-playful task.

The importance of autonomy as well as enjoyment for play and playfulness have been noted before, for instance in attempts to identify play with reference to specific features of the activity or the players (see section “Introduction”). However, these approaches do usually not not make any claims about the status and role of such features in the temporal course of modulating and being in a playful stance. To take one example, Bateson and Martin (2013) list that play behavior must be (a) spontaneous, intrinsically motivated and fun and (b) the players free from illness or stress (see also Fagen, 1981; Burghardt, 2005). They furthermore claim that “playful play is accompanied by a particular positive mood state in which the individual is more inclined to behave (and in the case of humans, think) in a spontaneous and flexible way.” The psychologist Erikson offers a temporally more detailed model, however from a developmental perspective. He argues for a “play stage” in human development that is entered right after the “early childhood stage,” which is aimed at achieving autonomy. Given the development of autonomy in the play stage, the child can learn to take initiative and engage in a world shared with others which is accompanied by a sense of mastery (see Erikson, 1959; as well as Proyer, 2018). We believe that our data offers a refined picture of how these mechanisms unfold in the distinct time course of each single playful experience. They show how a momentary modulation of autonomy influences consequent behavior and experience, how mood management and manipulation are involved in this process and how this affect the feeling of mastery/competence. These findings can be closely connected with current research about the relation between play and motivation and learning.

Our findings bear striking similarity to those described in one of the most influential theories of motivation: the psychologically oriented Self-Determination-Theory by Deci and Ryan (2000, 2015). Briefly, Deci and Ryan identified a spectrum of motivation from the autonomous to the controlled, with the two extremes being intrinsic motivation (most autonomous), when people find an activity naturally interesting and enjoyable, and extrinsic motivation, when people are not interested in the activity itself, but in a consequence of their engagement such as a reward (most controlled). In Deci and Ryan’s analysis, establishing intrinsic motivation is preferred to extrinsic motivation in particular with respect to learning, as it is not dependent on a supporting framework. The framework furthermore claims that originally extrinsic motives may be internalized if they serve fulfillment of human’s basic and innate psychological needs (Deci and Ryan, 1985; Ryan and Deci, 2000). Specifically, intrinsic motivation is increased by satisfaction of our natural need for autonomy (comprising freedom of choice and integration of values); our need for competence (the propensity to have an effect on the environment as well as to attain valued outcomes within it); and our need for relatedness (a natural sense of belonging to the environment and the people that are with us). In simple words: we won’t enjoy – and therefore be naturally interested in – an activity, if we are coerced to do it, not convinced about its value, unable to master it, or if it deprives us of our feeling of belonging. On the other hand, the more autonomous, competent and related we feel when doing it, the stronger our intrinsic motivation can get.

Seen in this light, our findings suggest that creating the conditions to get playful means creating conditions to get intrinsically motivated. We found that participants intuitively used a contextual reinterpretation to modulate their degree of autonomy when asked to modulate their stance of playfulness. Further, they reported that the success of the modulation of playfulness depended on the success of the modulation of autonomy. In particular, when the outer context was perceived to oppose a feeling of autonomy, participants reported difficulties in becoming playful. Indeed, allowing for a playful stance crucially seems to depend on the creation of a sense of autonomy. This suggests that situations lacking autonomy will not be experienced as playful, and that designing the specifics of the context (the organizational environment etc.) may be crucial for allowing such autonomy.

Our findings further present a possible mechanism for how the experience of autonomy may evoke a feeling of competence: the diversity of ducks built in the playful condition was experienced as a result of the openness of the process, created by the autonomous position. Many participants reported a dynamic interaction with the building material, at times experienced as aesthetic, which allowed for an exploration of its possibilities. Many explicitly mentioned to be surprised by the results of their activity, stressing that they had not been aware of their own capacity to build so creatively. We suggest that this represents a concrete experience of competence, thus providing the second key component of intrinsic motivation.

Finally, our findings may throw new light on key problems faced within the field of gamification. Briefly, gamification is the overarching term for the approach to introduce “game design elements within non-game contexts” with the explicit aim to achieve levels of motivation “as high as for playing video games” for a task that is considered difficult to initiate (Deterding et al., 2011, p. 1). However, a number of studies have indicated that the approach may face some fundamental issues. Though the majority of research exploring the effect of gamification on motivation have found more positive than negative or null effects (Hamari et al., 2014; Seaborn and Fels, 2015), it has been claimed that the main kind of motivation established in gamification is extrinsic, rather than intrinsic, and that the effects may thus not transfer outside the specific context (Nicholson, 2015). It has even been warned that designs that are more extrinsically motivating might risk to replace intrinsic drives on the long run, thus creating a constant dependence on reward structures and other forms of extrinsic evaluation (Deci, 1971, 1972; Deci et al., 1999; Kohn, 1999). Thus, Hanus and Fox (2015) showed that gamification in a classroom led to lower performance compared to a group attending non-gamified tuition and that this result was mediated by the lower level of intrinsic motivation of the gamified tuition group. Most interestingly for us, it has been suggested that the main cause of this circumstance may be that gamification, by focusing on game design elements, focuses on creating a with play associated activity rather than a “playful stance” per se (Deterding, 2010; Nicholson, 2015). However, only the latter might be effective in enhancing intrinsic motivation. Indeed, Deterding (2016) showed that some aspects of games, such as playing in a team, might lead to the feeling of obligation, a loss of playfulness and therefore reduced motivation to play (Deterding, 2016).

Our results support and extend on this idea: they provide strong support for the hypothesis that allowing for a stance of playfulness may be an effective way to increase intrinsic motivation. Furthermore, they generate specific hypotheses about what processes one should pay attention to, if intending to design playful experiences.

Experiencing autonomy, that is, the feeling of freedom and meaningfulness of own actions, seems key to adopting a playful stance. We found that our participants had internal means to modulate this feeling – but there may be constraints to this, due to differences of context as well as personal capacity.

There appears to be a thin line between empowering self-determination and the experience of stress due to self-imposed expectations. It is possible, that different capacities to adapt own expectations accordingly affect the capacity of being playful and that training focusing on sustainable self-management might thus support playfulness.

The situational context seems critical for achieving the experience of autonomy. In particular, participants mentioned that the experimental setting in itself was a restriction. This may also apply in educational as well as professional environments. Our findings do not suggest a solution for this problem, though they indicate that some individuals could overcome this in time. There is scope to research this further.

Our findings highlight the importance of the properties of the physical material involved in the experience – in our case exemplified by the LEGO bricks provided. It seems that a material might differentially foster explorative behavior due to (a) its abstractness, that is its resistance to be guided by mental imaginations and (b) its sensual, aesthetic properties and design. Our findings suggest that the abstract, modular qualities of the material provided made a direct translation from a mental image into the model difficult and that this increased the explorative potential. This was further supported by sensual pleasures that may enhance further exploration. However, due to the small sample size, these hypotheses should be followed up by research.

Lastly our findings indicate that autonomy and competence (as two critical components of intrinsic motivation) may in some instances stand in a causal relationship. Thus, a feeling of competence can be evoked by unforeseen products of the explorative process facilitated by an autonomic, playful stance. This proposes a putative looping effect of autonomy and surprise, which may be critical in supporting intrinsic motivation during a playful stance. Accordingly, designers of playful processes may first and foremost focus on establishing an autonomy component, while the feeling of competence, also constitutional for intrinsic motivation, may be elicited in and by the process itself. Thus, if one designs for learning through play, one may want to pay particular attention to the engagement of participants and evaluate their experience of playfulness rather than focus on their a priori competences and on the game-like qualities of the situation.

We hope the results discussed above have demonstrated the usefulness of our approach for researchers interested in playfulness as a stance or state of mind. However, for a number of reasons, the study should be considered a pilot, and further empirical work may be required.

Firstly, our population sample comprises quite a homogenous group of students, all taking part of a schooling program (the Danish Hojskole) that in its creative curriculum might attract particularly playful participants. Unfortunately, we did not assess playfulness as a character trait specifically, e.g., using dedicated questionnaires (Proyer, 2012). Future research should explore if individuals, independent of their personal tendency to be playful, show behavior and experiential reports similar to the ones observed here.

Secondly, we may have primed some of the participants, by describing the non-playful condition as referring to a stance similar to “work.” The work-play contrast is indeed one that has been suggested by existing literature on play and might have triggered certain cultural connotations impinging on the otherwise data-driven approach (see for example Bateson and Martin, 2013). This term should thus be avoided in future replications of this work.

Thirdly, interviews revealed that the building material chosen for the experiment may in itself have primed participant to be playful. This could be for cultural as well as material reasons: LEGO bricks are deeply embedded in Danish culture and may obviously trigger childhood related memories in participants. As explicated above, it might also enhance explorative behavior due to its abstractness and sensual aesthetics. Future research should thus further explore the influence of the material chosen by comparing the results of this study with one using a material more neutral (that is not intuitively associated with either play or work) and possibly also with one clearly associated with work.

Fourthly, the data-driven analysis did not provide results that could immediately be ascribed to “relatedness,” the third component of intrinsic motivation according to Deci and Ryan’s theory. In this framework, “relatedness” is understood as a natural sense of belonging to the environment and the people around. One reason that this aspect of intrinsic motivation may not have shown up in the data, that otherwise strongly reminded of Deci and Ryan’s theory, is that the setup did not include obvious others – like building partners etc. It has been suggested that superiors like supervisors or teachers are important others too, with students being dependent on them to like, respect and value their work, and to develop intrinsic motivation for it. In this sense the experimenter might be interpreted as a distinct other. However, our data only gave indirect evidence of this, mainly with reference to an evaluative instance in the non-playful condition. Future research should engage in further exploring this aspect by modulating the setup to include partners in the task (see also Tylén et al., 2016).

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first empirical and data-driven study assessing people’s experience of becoming playful. To our estimation our data shows that our experimental design and the chosen methods allow a deep and detail-rich insight into participants’ capacity of voluntary modulating their own playful stance.

In particular, interview results indicate that participants are able to voluntarily modulate their playfulness to the degree that they are able to modulate their autonomy in the building process and trust the process elicited by that: higher autonomy then facilitates a dynamic interaction with the material given, that can be further enhanced by the properties of that material. The surprising products of that activity make people aware of their own creative competence, which positively affects their mood and motivates them to continue the process. It seems that only experiences that fulfill these looping processes of autonomy, surprise, feeling of competence and motivation are categorized as playful in hindsight.

We thus propose a new working definition. Playfulness may be conceptualized as an attitude of throwing off constraints, which facilitates an explorative interaction with materials and others. This allows for intrinsic motivation to arise, supported by the surprising results of that interaction and by the connected positive emotions and feeling of competence.

When designing for playfulness, internal and external variables that modulate these processes should be taken into account.

We hope that future research will be able to make further usage of these findings and propositions.