Going to town after finishing my previous post, thereby keeping what readers (if any) might have assumed to be a beginning of sunstroke to spread irreversibly to the rest of my body, I fully enjoyed and benefited from a fantastic Saturday evening... in the shade. Added to that a good night sleep and this is enough to find the onset of yesterday's ideas a little weak: although I am fully happy with thinking that when there's room for emotions, there's room for play and what followed, I must admit the reasoning I made starting from Kane's and Norman's ideas may be subject to criticism (including from myself).
But Henry has helped me to an alternative 
According to the discussion he initiated on WebCT, let's start by considering the difference between fundamental and applied research.
The latter is much more directed than the former. It may be thought of as having stronger rules and a more defined goal. According to Frasca (in Newman 2004, p. 19), applied research would fit better in the ludus category than would fundamental research. Although he proposes that the distinction is related to outcome rather than rules, Caillois' contribution is nevertheless helpful (2001), for outcome often implies rules. And that is the case in Henry's example.
Further, rules - or constraints - are the realm of creativity.
As a friend of mine studying Music would say and in spite of what too many people think, creativity is not that divine-kind of thing that can turn a classical musician into a lucky artist. In fact, it is quite accessible to anyone (it can be learned) and its most defining pre-requisite is constraints themselves: being creative is to be able to evolve through the constraints at hand to reach a given goal. In other words, going back to the definitions above, being creative is to play a specific game.
Consequently, play is part of any game. Hence the expression “to play a game”.
This inclusiveness may be the reason why differentiating play and game is a difficult task: there can't be any clear categorisation (which would require mutual exclusiveness between both notions).
Implications
Our discussions on this course seem to mirror the popular idea that work can't always allow for the expression of play.
- We said above that the more restrictive a problem, the more creativity it potentially enables one to express (because again, creativity doesn't mean pure freedom of choice).
- We also said that play is part of any game.
It follows that the most restrictive activities such as working in a factory enable a strong sense of creativity to be expressed and therefore, that they potentially give the more room for play.
The “enable” and “strong” are important in the previous sentence because they point to a crucial nuance at the core of the “work vs play" problem previously alluded to:
only very skilled - very creative - people may be able to play in such restrictive environments as factories (on the side, it's interesting to notice how smart people are often very playful, in a subtle and refined manner).
But why is that?
I think it may be because factory work (to use this handy example again) is the closest we may come to a machine kind-of-job. This is the link between this post and the previous which proposed that emotions are play-grounds.
No matter what, agreement on this idea is probably less important than considering play as possible in any game though because that has stronger implications for education. For instance, that's what makes experiential learning such a fascinating approach to course design (Toohey 1999) to explore... And quite likely, the emergence of that design is a consequence of the importance play has taken in our Western societies.
References:
Caillois, R. (2001). The classification of games. In Man, play and games. Urbana, Ill., University of Illinois Press; Wantage: University Presses Marketing.
Newman, J. (2004). What is a video game? Rules, puzzles and simulations. Videogames. London, Routledge.
Toohey, S. (1999). Beliefs, values and ideologies in course design. In Designing courses for higher education (Buckingham, SRHE and OUP): pp. 44-69.
Comments
It might be interesting to analyse how play might be further broken up:
Let's focus on fundamental research (although applied research may be conceptualised in a similar way).
It involves goals and rules: because of the exploratory nature of fundamental research, the former are fluid (can vary from moment to moment according to any important finding considered worth of further exploration). So it is a kind of game.
So, how does play shows itself?
It is that component that makes the exploration possible and that enables the goals of the "containing" game to be changed if the researcher deems it appropriate: it is the various instants of probes that the research carries.
Going further, play might, as a probe, be thought of as a cycle of micro-games driving the global game (the research project):
it is made up of multiple deliberate decisions leading to action in the world (sometimes simulated in the mind) that have a micro-goal (hence, a micro game). Each action results in short instants (let's say one second) where nothing is under the researchers' control, until feedback is received from the world (sometimes its simulation in the mind) - On the side, that's how play enables one to face the unexpected (Kane 2005) and habit may be an important factor. That feedback enables the researcher to regain control for continuing to play and so on, until it leads to an interesting finding that might rebound on the global game's overall goal (the fluidity talked about earlier).
This responsibility that play carries for driving the whole game unavoidably points, once more, to the disguised role of emotions.
I haven't had time to watch it yet but the link between play and creativity (which leads me to call the former a game) also seems to be supported by Tim Brown (2008)
Brown, T. (2008). The powerful link between creativity and play. In TED talks.
Retrieved 11 March 2009. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/tim_brown_on_creativity_and_play.html