Very interesting experience in Tampere, at the annual Seminar, this time on the topic of “playful experiences”; the title must have sent several people’ s creativity spinning, as it is a very ambiguous concept.

Chaired by Frans Mayra, Olli Sotamaa, Aki Jarvinen, Oskar Juhlin, several stimulating interventions, my humble contribution was “Playfulness and trust in the Obama campaign on Facebook: bringing civic engagement into play”.

Only another paper, by Maaike De Jong, related to play and playfulness as a philosophical concept; I was expecting more work along that line, instead Olli Sotamaa talked about Little Big Planet and co-creativity, Annakaisa Kultima about the latest developments of the “expanded game experience” concept: she and other Finnish researchers, I remember only Kuittinen, published this key paper in 2007 about casual games that developed the idea of casual games being just a part in a larger scheme, called “expanded game experience”.
Jessica Enewold presented a really cool research on playing mums, and also Markus Montola’s presentation was very inspiring, on the general concept of play; I wish I could remember more presentations, these were my highlights
Here is the programme