ABSTRACT
For a long time the computer was a tool for experts, inaccessible and also prohibitively expensive for private users. This changed in the mid-1980s. The increasingly widespread use of the computer and the growing experience of its users have since led to a new kind of interaction. In many cases the computer is no longer seen as a machine with which well-planned, methodical, or repetitive tasks are conducted. The interaction 1 with it is now perceived as an open-ended process characterized by creative, explorative, goal-oriented, and challenging activities. Connected with this process is self-directed learning, experimental tinkering around, and the self-gambling of the user; and clearly the medial character of the computer invites these types of use. Often, this approach defies a purposeful aim or necessary duty or pushes it in the background. In recent years a number of paradigms have been proposed and discussed that address this change of perspective, but play appears not to figure prominently among them. Some treat it with more sympathy, but others dismiss it entirely. Play is widely understood as a means to an end, e.g. to support the motivation of the user, to make tasks more effective, as a simulation of reality, in an educational game or as an area in which technical improvements can be demonstrated, which is opposed to fooling around, wasting time and energy, and the trivialization of media use. In this chapter, a substantial relation between interactive computer use and play is recognized, and play is proposed as a possible perspective for everyday computer interaction. It is demonstrated how Huizinga’s well-known characteristics of play can be applied to everyday computer use, and how the “play spirit” of the player can be identified in the attitude of the user.
