Paraplay: Exploring playfulness around physical console gaming

Abstract

We present the concept of paraplay: playful activities that take place within the context of an interactive game or other play activity, but outside the activity itself. By critically examining work related to gaming and play goals and motivations we argue that the concept of playfulness should have a stronger role in our understanding of gaming sessions, and particularly social gaming sessions. In order to further understand the role of playfulness in social gaming we conducted an empirical field study of physical console gaming. Six families with a total of 32 participants were provided with an Xbox 360 console, Kinect sensor, and three casual physical video games to play together for a pe..