Goals, Ecosystems, Playground: Uses of Gameplay for Knowledge

Both games and play are central to humanity and culture. What seems to be an immemorial awareness has also been formulated in scholarly terms very early in the development of social sciences – one would probably think of the seminal work Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga (1938), even if earlier accounts exist.
Yet for a part, the academic interest in gameplay is probably linked to the similarities between the scholarly activity and a game that can be mastered. Interestingly, Berthoin Antal and Hamann (2023) remark that the explicit recognition of these similarities remains the exception. Even in Bourdieu’s work (1988) , which assimilates the academic milieu a game that can be mastered, the “focus is not on free, undisciplined, and creative exploration, but on competition, strategies, and rules.”
In other words, such visions of academia foreground its features of a game, i.e. a goal-oriented set of rules, while silencing its play(ful) aspects, that is the individual attitude, often frivolous and disruptive, of the one who plays. However, the academic dispute between game studies, the term originally coined by Espen Aarseth as a disciplinary unifier for research on gameplay; and play studies, reinvestigated by several researchers in reaction to the centration on rules and artifacts and shed light on the actual activity of play instead, is now outdated and there is no point in reiterating it.
In this chapter, we will try to use our multiple experiences to broaden the scope of discussion, based on our collective experience. Some of us are researchers in game studies; others are teachers, educators, game designers, and cultural workers using games in their work; some are interested in board games, some in digital games, or in more traditional childplay; we live and work in different countries (Belgium, Brazil) and in different languages (Dutch, English, French, German, Portuguese). Most of the time, we mix several of these characteristics.
As researchers, we are interested in the link between game and science; as educators, in the use of games for learning; as designers, in how people learn playing our games. The common denominator of our interests lies in the many uses of gameplay for knowledge in all forms. Thus, in the following, we will explore this relationship. First, we will discuss a trendy term for such uses: gamification – and see that it does not suffice to gain an understanding of the whole matter. Second, we will explore split up uses of games for knowledge in different GOALS, which can be related to different cognitive processes. Lastly, we will zoom out to reconsider this categorization in the light of a broader perspective: that of ecosystems of play, which will lead us to reflecting on participation.