Play While You Work: Productive Play for Digital Content Creation

In this paper, I present my ongoing dissertation project in- vestigating playful interaction techniques for productive pur- poses. 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 hedo- nistic value, low learning curve and creative self-perception. At the same time, the work results are comparable to stan- dard tools in a reproduction task