The Twenty-Third Triennial Conference Games: Playing with competition at an academic conference

Lean, John ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9262-8713 (2021) The Twenty-Third Triennial Conference Games: Playing with competition at an academic conference. Journal of Play in Adulthood, 2 (1).

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Abstract

At the 2019 Playful Learning conference, I designed and ran a cross-conference game that was focused on the idea of competition in education and play. Whilst play and competition are connected in literature, this relationship is not necessarily seen as a positive one, and my game provided a space to interrogate the relationship between the two. Discussion of the conference game, via reflection on its design and conversation with the players, opens up into more general discussion of competition’s role in play(and play in education). I find that, in this specific context, competition facilitated and provoked playfulness in unexpected ways.