Why Play? Examining the Roles of Play in ICTD

Why Play? Examining the Roles of Play in ICTD

The role of technology in socio-economic development is at the heart of ICTD (ICTs for development). Yet, as with much Human Centered technology research, playful interactions with technology are predominantly framed around their instrumental roles, such as education, rather than their intrinsic value. This obscures playful activities and undermines play as a basic freedom. Within ICTD an appar...

Why Play Logical Games?

We owe to Paul Lorenzen an extraordinarily rich intuitive idea, first presented in his papers ‘Logik und Agon’ [Lorenzen 1960] and ‘Ein dialogisches Konstruktivitätskriterium’ [Lorenzen 1961], the fruitfulness of which we are barely encompassing today. In the language of game theory, it is the idea of defining logical particles in terms of rules for non-collaborative, zero-sum games between two...

Why Work When Can Play

Why do adult dogs 'play'?

Among the Carnivora, play behaviour is usually made up of motor patterns characteristic of predatory, agonistic and courtship behaviour. Domestic dogs are unusual in that play is routinely performed by adults, both socially, with conspecifics and with humans, and also asocially, with objects. This enhanced playfulness is commonly thought to be a side effect of paedomorphosis, the perpetuation o...

Why I Don’t Play the Piano

My work in the past several years has dealt primarily with the study of the processes used in constructing varieties of problem solving behaviors. I have studied processes ranging from the propagation of constraints and non-chronological control schemes to belief revision, introspection, self-consciousness, and learning. While I consider many processes like these to be crucial ingredients of ef...