Year: 2025
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Pursuing a decidedly interdisciplinary perspective at the intersection of game studies and comics studies, this extended abstract aims to explore how the concept of playfulness can be made productive for furthering our understanding of the production, aesthetics, and reception of contemporary comics.While playfulness has rarely been discussed in any particularly sustained way in comics studies thus far, it has, of course, become increasingly common within game studies to acknowledge that the terms "play" and "playfulness" do not refer to the same concept.While play can be considered a socially designated, organized, recognized, or otherwise "framed" activity, playfulness, in contrast, can be regarded as an attitude, mood, state of mind, or disposition that may or may not accompany a given (play) activity.Often, theorists then define playfulness in "autotelic" (Csíkszentmihályi 1975, 10) or "paratelic" (Apter 1991, 16) terms.Thus, despite differences of perspective on whether this attitude, mood, state of mind, or disposition applies mainly to free-flowing playing activities in the sense of paidia (Caillois 2001; see also, e.g., Bateson and Martin 2013; DeKoven 2014) or extends further to goal-oriented, rule-based gaming activities in the sense of ludus (Caillois 2001; see also, e.g., Apter 1991;Jørgensen 2014;Makedon 1984;Malaby 2009;Salen and Zimmerman 2003;Stenros 2015), as well as on whether playfulness should be conceptualized as being restricted to "positive" play (e.g., Bateson and Martin 2013) or as also including "transgressive" or "norm-defying" play (e.g., Stenros 2015; as well as Mortensen and Jørgensen 2020; and the contributions in Jørgensen and Karlsen 2019), most theorists of playfulness would seem to agree that it can be characterized by a (fulfilled) willingness to act spontaneously, in a state of absorption, with a lack of regard for concerns outside of an activity itself.Beyond their differences concerning the paidia-based/ludus-based and normabiding/norm-subverting aspects of playfulness, autotelicity-centric theories are also notable for what they would appear to exclude in the context of designed or mediated representational works such as comics.While conceptualizations of playfulness as
Authors: Kieron Brown, Jan-Noël Thon
Institution: Osnabrück University
Language: English
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W4411974440