Play While You Work: Productive Play for Digital Content Creation

In this paper, I present my ongoing dissertation project investigating playful interaction techniques for productive purposes. The objective to find out how users can effectively create digital content while actually playing. Building upon and extending the notions of gamification, serious games and games with a purpose, I focus on productive aspects of play where not a task is extended with playful interaction, instead I aim to create playful environments where play is the main activity, while at the same time, productivity can be achieved as a direct result of the game or play activity. A first user study revealed that the approach has a high hedonistic value, low learning curve and creative self-perception. At the same time, the work results are comparable to standard tools in a reproduction task.