A paper co-authored by Dr. Yuko Ishihara, a member of Planned Research Group A02, and Dr. Olaf Witkowski of Planned Research Group A01 has been released as a preprint on PhilArchive. The full text is available. We invite you to read it!

Paper Information

Authors: Yuko Ishihara and Olaf Witkowski

Title: Worlds at Play: A Phenomenological Account of Playfulness

Preprint: PhilArchive (2026)

URL: https://philarchive.org/rec/ISHWAP

Abstract

 This paper develops a phenomenological account of playfulness as a higher-order capacity for moving among multiple worlds. Rather than treating playfulness primarily as a light-hearted attitude or personality trait, we characterize it through four interdependent capacities: entering a world, being shaped by its meanings and dynamics, detaching and reorienting when necessary, and translating across worlds without collapsing their differences. We use "world" to refer to a relatively coherent organization of sense-making that structures salience, affordances, norms, and possibilities for action. On this basis, play is analyzed as a reversible form of immersion in a locally organized world, while playfulness generalizes this structure across cultural, social, interpersonal, disciplinary, and other domains. We examine characteristic breakdowns of playfulness through addiction, identity fixation, and double bookkeeping in schizophrenia, and consider its cultivation through freedom from fixed identification and interdisciplinary inquiry. We further argue that playfulness supports a broader metaphysical outlook in which no single world is treated as absolutely primary or self-grounding. Repeated movement among worlds can loosen the privileged status of everyday reality and make possible a mode of engagement that is serious without being reifying, and detached without becoming nihilistic. The account therefore links phenomenology, cognitive science, psychopathology, interdisciplinary research, and Artificial Life, while proposing playfulness as both an object of inquiry and a disciplined mode of engagement with multiple realities.