Functional games combine play and learning to rethink the value of productive play. The inherent productivity of play fosters creativity and explores the potential for new cultural advancements.

What are functional games?

There’s a new phrase: functional games. It has a naughty ring to it, like the word diet snack, but the intention is to add the productive element of learning to games, a culture of play that has grown rapidly in the 21st century. Just as diet foods lure you in with the promise that you can lose weight just by eating them, functional games lure you in with the promise that you can study while playing. The idea that you can play and work or study at the same time is very appealing. The idea of turning the pain of producing value into pleasure is something that anyone who is tired of productive behavior can imagine. However, unlike dietary functional foods, which are a bunch of hype, functional games are not entirely hype. This bizarre neologism sheds new light on the productivity of play that we’ve overlooked, and offers us the opportunity to attempt a qualitative cultural evolution of our society.

Stories and productive play

It is a common perception that ‘play is consumptive’. Consumptive means that the act of playing takes time and consumes goods. Productive, on the other hand, is usually associated with creating something of publicly recognized value. But can play be productive? Play sometimes produces results. But it doesn’t have a publicly acceptable value. You can’t sell sandwiches in a restaurant that are the byproduct of a child’s play, a child who plays a professor in a kindergarten role-play is only a kindergartner outside of it, and items earned in a game are only valuable inside the game. The products of play outside of the context of play have no meaning.
However, outcomes aren’t everything when it comes to the productivity of play. Rather, the true productivity of play can be found in the act of play itself. It’s the context that keeps play coherent. Context is a story, and to play is to create a story. From the perspective of story creation, productive play is easy to see all around us.

Playgrounds create stories, amusement parks consume stories

Playgrounds and amusement parks are spaces where the act of play is constantly taking place. However, they differ in the way they treat play as an act of story creation. Comparing playgrounds and amusement parks therefore provides an opportunity to remind us of the productivity of play.
Unlike amusement parks, playgrounds don’t have ticket booths. The ticket booth symbolizes more than just a monetary price to enter the two spaces. Amusement parks with ticket booths are closed. You have to enter through a designated entrance, and the space separated by a fence is the amusement park. The play area in an amusement park is always static. It has a set opening and closing time, and the moment you leave the park, you return to your normal space.
A playground, on the other hand, is completely open. With no entrance and no fences, the play space is always dynamic. The playground expands beyond its physical boundaries into parking lots and roads, or contracts around a slide or steel bar. Children on playgrounds don’t care if it gets dark around them. There is no time for the playground to be closed.
The difference in fluidity between the two spaces reflects the nature of the play that takes place in them. The amusement park is a space of selective passivity. The moment you enter an amusement park, you are faced with a series of entrances and exits. Signs always show you where you are and where you can go. The rides that follow the signs always greet guests with their own stories. A flume ride that explores a pirate’s lair, a roller coaster that resembles a fortress, or a haunted house that evokes an abandoned house. Amusement park rides welcome guests with cinematic splendor, but they only offer one fixed story. When a new story is needed, rides are torn down and new ones installed, just like the end of a movie. Amusement park guests move in and out of the prepared narrative like reading a well-written novel.
Playgrounds also have rides. But playground equipment is only a material for active behavior. A playground slide or swing is not just a plaything. It’s something that’s constantly changing and taking on new meanings thanks to the imaginations and ideas of children. A shabby, rusty slide can become a military base, a rugged mountain, or a jungle that’s hard to walk through. Children playing on the playground are always creating their own stories and reinventing the space. Every moment, new rules are born, new laws are created, and sometimes two groups of children occupy more than one space on the same playground. A playground is a time and space in flux, a space comparable to the universe. It’s a vibrant space that doesn’t wait for its participants. The act of playing on a playground requires you to actively follow the creation and destruction of stories in every moment.
At the root of the playground’s vitality is the productivity of play. In order to play, there must be a story. And play has the ability to create stories before it enjoys them. The truly productive aspect of play is its ability to create stories.

The productivity of play and its extension

Can this same productivity happen outside of the playground? The answer to this question could liberate play from the narrow confines of computer games, playgrounds, and sports. The medium for the productivity of play is available everywhere, and the scope for play is limitless.
Like the game of bouncing a metal piece of a soju bottle cap with your fingers in MT in college, it is possible to create play through various means and methods. In this way, the productivity of play is independent of the medium in which it is executed. Rather, play has the power to utilize anything as a means of play. This active, platform-free nature of play is becoming increasingly powerful with the development of IT.
Services that support personal video channels such as “YouTube” or “Afreeca” and various community sites that are easily accessible on the Internet are the sites where countless stories are produced. The sites that provide these services are playgrounds in themselves. Users on these playgrounds are constantly making rules and using their resources to create stories, competing with each other, laughing and making each other laugh, and immersing themselves in play. When people say they spent hours watching videos or playing on message boards, they’re really just saying they spent hours playing on a playground.

Productive play and creativity

This is the kind of creativity that productive play aims to foster. In order to realize this, we need to change the way we think about productive behaviors such as work and schoolwork. Productive behavior is not just about churning out outputs that meet standards like a machine. Creating more of the same is simply wasteful. Moreover, we’ve been missing the productive aspect of play because we’ve been determining productivity based on the public need for the outcome. Truly productive behavior must be directed toward something better than what we have now.
One of the things that gives direction to productive behavior is creativity. There is both pleasure and power in the act of creating. But the discipline of creation is hard. The current state of education, which is characterized by the ignominious label of mere memorization of textbooks, and the lives of people in society, which are described as a cog in the wheel, show the failure to cultivate and apply creativity. People who are forced to learn and work in a bureaucratic environment are more like machines. There is no human being in them who attempts to create towards something better.
Deliberate and well-designed play has the ability to solve this problem. Normal play is spontaneous. The repeated production and consumption of stories through the act of play is an exercise in creativity. In the creation and destruction of stories, there are repeated imitations and variations of the old, new attempts and frustrations. This is the foundation upon which we have built the cultures, disciplines, and technologies that make up human civilization. Play is a small experiment that simulates and repeats what we have built and the processes that built it. The productivity of play is addressed by allowing us to voluntarily repeat the act of creating new stories, a discipline that cultivates creativity.

Playgrounds for productive play

However, when we look around us, we don’t often see playgrounds that are laboratories for these experiments and maximize the productivity of play. Most of what we see is compulsory education, represented by schools and academies, and consumptive play, such as games. Furthermore, our society’s misguided definition of productivity makes workaholism a proud virtue, pushing people to work more like machines.
The eroticization of the term functional gaming is a stirring reminder of what we should have taken for granted. The concept of productive play is important enough to transcend examples like word memorization games that we can simply recall. However, the value of play has been neglected or misunderstood, and it’s time to get it right.
Well-designed play is a warm-up for creation and a framework for full-blown productive activity. Productive activity is an extension of play, and play is an extension of productive activity. Recreation, which emphasizes the productive element of play, should not just be a time for dancing and singing in groups, but a time to sharpen the cutting edge of human thinking and imagination through play and relaxation.
What can South Korea do? Fortunately, a powerful characteristic of productive play is that it is not dependent on the medium of play, even if it dominates it. South Korea has an advanced level of IT technology and infrastructure that no other developed country in the world can easily match. What remains is to continue to discover, develop, and maintain attractive playgrounds that are free from the old and misguided notions of play, and that can showcase the true nature of play. When we have playgrounds like these scattered throughout our homes, schools, workplaces, offline and online, we will have already established ourselves as a country with a huge potential that is hard to match.