Second Playthrough
Design Concepts

Playful design

In short Designing things to invite open, free-form play rather than goal-driven competition.

Playful design is the practice of shaping a product, space or system so that it invites open-ended play, without fixed goals or a way to win. Instead of points, levels and victory conditions, it offers things to poke at, combine and explore, and lets people decide for themselves what counts as fun. A staircase that sounds like a piano, a toy that answers touch with sound, or an app that rewards curiosity rather than progress are playful in this sense. The approach draws on play in its loosest form: spontaneous, improvised and valued for its own sake. Second Playthrough uses the term as the counterpart of gameful design, which keeps the structure that playful design lets go.

Not to be confused with

  • Gameful design

    Gameful design builds in rules, goals and measured progress; playful design leaves those out and invites open, self-directed play.

  • Gamification

    Gamification adds game elements such as points and badges to a non-game activity, which makes it gameful rather than playful in Second Playthrough's usage.

  • Sandbox

    A sandbox is a game with few fixed goals; playful design brings the same openness to objects, spaces and software that are not games at all.

Where the game lives

  • rules
  • goals
  • feedback
  • uncertainty
  • choice
  • play

Playful design keeps responsive feedback, surprise and free choice, and puts play at the center. It drops goals entirely and keeps rules so light that people can bend or invent their own.

used dropped · What the six structures are

Examples

  • Piano Staircase (The Fun Theory)Volkswagen and DDB Stockholm, 2009

    Subway stairs in Stockholm rebuilt as working piano keys, inviting passersby to play with no score or goal.

  • ElectroplanktonToshio Iwai and Indieszero for Nintendo, 2005

    A musical toy for the Nintendo DS with no levels or scores, only small sound systems to experiment with.

  • ProteusEd Key and David Kanaga, 2013

    An island to wander in which sound and image respond to the player and nothing needs to be achieved.

Playful and gameful are used inconsistently across the design literature. For the usage Second Playthrough follows, see gameful design.

In the essays

The Game in All of These

Where the game lives

Six structures—rules, goals, feedback, uncertainty, choice, play—map any game-like thing; the missing ones explain why it does or doesn’t feel like a game.

8 min read
Beyond Entertainment

Gamification is not a game

Gamification usually borrows the visible parts of games—points, badges, streaks—and drops what makes them work: real choice, uncertainty and voluntary play.

8 min read

Sources

  1. PaperSebastian Deterding, Dan Dixon, Rilla Khaled and Lennart Nacke. From Game Design Elements to Gamefulness: Defining "Gamification". Proceedings of the 15th International Academic MindTrek Conference, ACM, 2011. Distinguishes playfulness (paidia) from gamefulness (ludus).
  2. BookRoger Caillois. Man, Play and Games. Free Press of Glencoe, 1961. English translation by Meyer Barash of Les jeux et les hommes (1958); source of the paidia and ludus poles. Reading list
  3. BookMiguel Sicart. Play Matters. MIT Press, 2014. Reading list