The road to happiness is paved with playful intentions

Through exploring the relation between designing for happiness and designing for play experiences, the paper proposes key elements that constitute meaningful play experiences. The paper proposes that designing for playfulness may also lead to more meaningfully engaging experiences. Meaningful experiences emerge when the activities of the experience comply with the interests, passions and goals of the person having the experience, by which meaningfulness is naturally linked to intrinsic motivation. This is true also for play activities, which are typically defined by e.g. being voluntary activities. Building on conditions for meaningful experiences, the author addresses the element of playfulness as a key to separate what can easily be good and meaningful experiences from experiences of play. The contribution of this paper is to provide an understanding of the components of a play experience and the relation between meaningful and playful experiences. The paper introduces the Play Blueprint, a framework depicting the key components of play experiences, intended as a valuable tool in designing for play(ful) experiences.