2021 The Values of Play International Conference

The Values of Play: A Cultural and Educational Analysis

November 20, 2021

CIPSH, together with its partner Tencent, likes to organize an academic event focusing on the issue of “Play”. As instinctive and essential to the human nature, the need of and the enjoyment of playful activities have attracted increasing attention, even debate, on the core value, instrumental implication, and the necessary conditions such represent in human societies. Social distancing during the pandemic has raised the problems of mental health to higher alert. Internet technology also demands thorough investigation and reflection on the many socio-cultural environments and policy, business conditions surrounding the entertainment and creativity associated with this development. The CIPSH Chair office at HZNU, together with the Humanities Division of the Zhejiang University, as well as its partner of the Tencent company and other institutions, were successfully held "2021 The Values of Play International Conference" to discuss the meaning and value of play as a phenomenon.

A major seminar on "The Values of Play: A Cultural and Educational Analysis" will be held online on “World Children’s Day”, November 20, 2021. The conference invited scholars from the United States, Europe, South America, Africa, the Asia-Pacific region and China itself to unravel the mysteries of games from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, history, archaeology, aesthetics, anthropology, education and information science.

Opening Remarks

The opening ceremony was hosted by Dr. Gao Zhenyu, Associate Professor of Hangzhou Normal University Jingheng Yi College of Education, who briefly introduced today's special guests and expressed his heartfelt gratitude to CIPSH,HZNU,ZJU, Tencent and HSU for their support and sponsorship. "Seek Truth Distinguished Professor" of the School of Media and International Culture, Zhejiang University, Changjiang Scholar Distinguished Professor of the Ministry of Education, Director of the Professor Committee of the School of Media and International Culture, editor-in-chief of "Marxist Aesthetics Research", prof Wang Jie; Vice Dean, Jing Hengyi School of Education, HZNU, prof Zhao Li; the Secretary General of CIPSH,  Distinguished Professor of Jingheng Yi College of Education, HZNU, Prof Hsiung Pingchen, made opening address respectively and wished the conference a great success.

Prof. Wang Jie

Prof. Zhao Li

Prof. Hsiung Pingchen

Simon Ho, President of The Hang Seng University of Hong (HSUHK), made a opening remark. President Ho thanked the organizers for their efforts in this meeting. President Ho briefly introduced the development history of The HUSHK Global Humanities Initiative (GHI). The GHI helps connect HSUHK to the world, having collaborations with CIPSH under UNESCO on innovative research projects, examining humanities issues from different and innovative perspectives. President He pointed out from three points why "games" are important to human beings, and why is this topic worthy of such academic attention?  First of all, “play” in itself must be something fun and interesting. Second, play is also closely linked with human learning and development at different ages and in different contexts. Third, play and games are closely linked to everyday life in social, cultural and economic aspects. As mentioned earlier, HSUHK’s GHI, with the support from CIPSH, organized the colloquium “Shall We Play? Cultural References for the Current Debate” on 28 October. He believes that this conference, with the knowledge and expertise of the scholars, will make a great contribution to the theme of "games" in all aspects.

President Simon Ho

Mr. Derek Yue, Chair of Tencent Social Research Center, gave a speech at the opening ceremony with the title of "The protection and development of children in the digital age". He pointed, Tencent is releasing its first report on the protection and development of children on the World’s Children’s day. This is the first report this topic for Tencent, and for all companies in China. This presentation provides an general introduction to the report, which aims to summarize Tencent practice in the past 23 years in the area of children’s protection and development, including its policies, projects, and products and services that serve to protect children’s rights and develop their skills and competences needed to prosper in the digital age. On the protection side, the report starts with Tencent’s compliance framework that makes sure Tencent complies with all government regulations on children, including strict rules regarding gaming time length and curfew, expenses, and age-appropriateness regulation on social media and content industries. On the development side, the report gives a general picture of Tencent’s effort in four big areas of literacy for children: science and technology, health, digital, and arts. The products and projects are mostly free or heavily subsidized. The report also emphasizes the importance of bringing partners and stakeholders on board for the protection and development of children, and of enhancing international collaboration in this area.

Mr. Derek Yue

Academic Panels-Session 1：The need and creativity of amusement

After the opening ceremony, the conference officially started, and the theme of Academic Panels-Session 1 was The need and creativity of amusement. The moderator of Panels-Session 1 is Prof. David Goldberg from the University of California, Irvine, USA. He briefly introduced the five scholars who will speak at this venue. 

Prof. David Goldberg

The first speaker was Margaret Tillman, associate professor of Purdue University, and her speech was titled "The Serious Business of Play". Cognitive scientists recognize the importance of creative play in stimulating the growth and development of infants and toddlers. In the early twentieth century, Chinese educators began to analyze and evaluate the importance of physical education and motor development from a number of different lenses—and turned increasingly away from militarized drill and simple motor exercises toward supervised but creative free play. With special equipment and dedicated playgrounds, progressive educators inspired by John Dewey sparked children’s creative imaginations and social participation in ways that were already integrated into life and “work.” With specific expectations about China’s needs and behaviors, they modified and created educational toys especially for Chinese children. Educational toys and free play were an integral part of the daycare and kindergartens.

Associate professor Margaret Tillman

The second speaker was Prof. Harold Sjursen from New York University, USA, and his speech was titled "The Ethics of Play". In this presentation he begined by distinguishing between formal and informal play and play among children vs play among adults, and the special case of adults playing with children. He then argued that classical utilitarian and deontological approaches to ethics do not offer clear guidance regarding "ethically responsible play." Digital technologies such as artificial and augmented reality have sometimes by design made the boundaries between the game environment and external domains porous, as for example in cases like that of Pokémon Go and The Beast. In conclusion,he argued that high-tech gaming presents a prime example of the new ethical dilemmas posed by contemporary technology and which led Hans Jonas already in 1977 to call for a new ethics for the technological age.

Prof. Harold Sjursen

The third speaker was Prof. Hsiung Pingchen, Secretary-General of CIPSH and Distinguished Professor of Jinghengyi Education College of HZNU. Her speech topic was "The Fantastic of the Social Imaginary: Cricket Fight in Imperial China". She pointed, Chinese people’s fascination and encounter with the crickets since antiquity to the present day presents a curious case of the ever importance of entertainment and the undeniable element of fantasy at work in the everyday as social Imaginary. Retelling this story may add historical depth and cross -cultural reflection, as the world now continues to argue on the role of social life in face of quarantine, masking and distancing during the pandemic.

The fourth speaker is Dr Zhao Yupei from College of Media and International Culture, Zhejiang University, Her speech was titled "Identity transformation, stigma power, and mental wellbeing of Chinese eSports professional players". This presentation aimed to understand how Chinese eSports players who depend on social, political, and economic resources, negotiate the transformation from “gaming addicts” to professional athletes, with specific attention paid to Chinese cultural norms. In China, the expanding eSports culture has produced a vast cohort of video-game players whose peak age ranges between 16 and 22 years. This study explores the dynamic identity transformation and mental wellbeing development processes of eSports professionals in a risk-prone society. It comprises in-depth interviews with players, coaches, managers, and commentators working in 15 top eSports clubs in the Chinese cities of Shanghai, Guangzhou, Suzhou, and Chengdu. We find eSports is perceived as non-secure, casual, and irregular by the Chinese public and that the mental changes experienced by eSports professionals throughout their careers have been significantly influenced by a more sophisticated form of state power and social norms, including cultural cognitive beliefs, economic stimulation, and authority attributions.

Dr Zhao Yupei

The last speaker in the morning session was prof. Wang Jie from College of Media and International Culture, Zhejiang University. His talk was titled "Rituals and Games: A Way to Realize Utopian Impulses". He pointed,

Since human beings are organized into an organized society, games have always been a way for humans to realize their utopian impulses. Utopian impulse takes as the main form and internal driving force to drive towards infinite object goals. Therefore, the cultural mechanism that restrains and regulates utopian impulse has been continuously created in different historical stages of society. With the development of Internet technology, with the widespread adoption of digital technology in the field of human daily life, utopia impulse has a trend of personalization. With the help of digital technology and Internet technology that have the ability to drive infinity, digital technology succeeds Ditopia. This is a question inevitably raised by contemporary society: In the New Axis Age, in what way will the utopian impulse of mankind be realized? Does it still lead mankind to a better future? Regarding this question, the basic point of this article is: labor based on the laws of beauty is the key realization of contemporary utopian impulses.

Round Table-Session 1：Imagination, entertainment and technology

After Prof. Wang Jie finished his speech in Panels-Session 1, he then acted as the moderator of Table-Session 1 and introduced the five scholars who spoke. Each scholar had ten minutes to share their speeches.

President of International Asian Cancer Screening Conference (IACCS), prof. Tony Hsiu-Hsi Chen with the title of "Artificial Intelligence in Health Care Gained from COVID-19 Pandemic". Despite the disruption of all aspects in human life resulting from COVID-19 pandemic, the value of how to turn crisis into opportunity has gained importance in the post era of pandemic. Virtual health care via artificial Intelligent is one of great things that has been operated and seen in telehealth (virtual visits to hospital) following the principle of social distancing during almost two years of COVID-19 pandemic. While the framework for assessing the value of digitally enabled care has been envisaged whether such new digitally-enabled-care models can be adapted as a new normal pattern to benefit human life should be evaluated from various value steams with a panorama viewpoint of all the stakeholders of society.

Prof. Tony Hsiu-Hsi Chen 

Dr. Li Siling of Tencent Social Research Center, from "Digital games and traditional culture: the case of Tencent", told us that much research has been done on the educational, cultural and health uses of digital games. However, debate in China regarding digital games games still focuses on the binary of games as productive vs pathological. This presentation uses cases of Tencent digital games to demonstrate the potential of digital games in promoting traditional cultural.

Dr Li Siling

Dr. Chris Moffett of the University of North Texas, USA brought us a presentation on "Playing with Fire: Cosmotechnics and Art Education". He believes that we live today in a pervasive landscape of gamification and technology/artifice. The call for increased gamification of education misses the fact that education is already the model for virtual gamification, as a training ground for what we misleadingly call “the real world ." Taken together, he hoped these three points--that risk is an inherent component of play; that technology is always part of a larger cosmological potential that can take diverse forms; and that art can be a form of risky play that exceeds any particular technological form--can provoke more experimentation with the relationship between art, play, and technology.

Dr. Chris Moffett

Dr. Xu Li from University of North Texas, USA gave us a speech titled "On Aesthetics Play--From a Chinese Philosophical Perspective". In the tradition of Chinese culture, the words with similar meanings to Play would be You Xi and Wan, especially You. You is an important concept that is promoted in the ancient Chinese philosophical tradition. For example, You appear in Analects by Confucius. It not only indicates an attitude towards art, but also reflects a way of life in a world where the rituals and political ideals are achieved. It becomes more radical and fundamental in Zhuangzi's writings. It is a free, aimless, and spiritual activity that has no utilitarian purpose. You masters the art of forgetting, dispenses with all thoughts, and achieves a state of being fully engaged with the world. There is no distinction between subject and object, internal and external, body and mind, the pure freedom and engagement of You thus has ontological and aesthetic significance.

Dr. Xu Li 

Associate Professor Sun Lili from Jingheng Yi College of Education, HZNU, who presented a video recording entitled "Storytelling: The narrative context of understanding children's spiritual world". Children not only listen to stories, they also tell stories. Storytelling is a kind of fantasy game. It is a dynamic process in which children organize and reorganize and transform children’s self-experience in a variety of ways, including speaking, acting, writing, and drawing. An expression of "who". In practical exploration, we found that stories are children’s presenting their lives in a wonderful way, and it is an indispensable context and clues for us to more directly interpret and understand children’s spiritual life, as Bruner pointed out, We are living in the narrative and explained by the narrative. In addition, we also found that telling stories is also a way of implementing gamified courses. Teachers can create suitable, free, and supportive learning spaces for children. Therefore, education should not only enlighten children to understand the culture of their society, but also help children discover the significance of their own experience, which is an important part of children's learning and life.

Online audience, Morning Session

Academic Panels-Session 2：The history and environment of games

In the afternoon, the moderator of Academic Panels-Session 2 is Associate Professor Ou Dongshu from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She introduced the speakers. 

Prof. Ou Dongshu

The first speaker was Prof. Emmanuel Anati, President of Atelier Research Center for Conceptual Anthropology, the title of his speech is "Conceptual Playing: Playing with Thoughts". Playing with thoughts is a daily conceptual activity of every human being, it determines attitudes, behavior and human relations. Playing with thoughts is the main source of cultural and scientific evolution. And each small play with thoughts awakens additional thoughts. He discussed the concept of Play from PLAYING WITH DOLLS, PLAYING WITH THE RELATIVE DIMENSION OF THE UNIVERSE, PLAYING WITH SIZE AND TIME, PLAYING WITH POWER, PLAYING WITH PEOPLE. In the end he came to the value of playing with thoughts: Playing with thoughts is a permanent process of the human mind, it is the core of creativity. It made dolls become children, it defined the dimension of space, it allowed pharaohs to invent the pyramids, it made men walk, explore and colonize the planet, and among an infinity of other things it conceived this seminar.

Prof. Emmanuel Anati

Associate Professor Zoltán Somhegyi of Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary, Budapest, his lecture titled "Learning, Playing, Creating—On the Diverse Forms of Early Art Appreciation". Art education in general and art appreciation in particular cannot be started early enough. Children of a very young age enjoy playing with basic forms of creating, like drawing, modelling, composing, building etc. This genuine interest and joy in simple creating can however be connected to other forms of approaching art and its appreciation. These early forms of art education and art appreciation will then be beneficial also for the preparation of future visits in museums, galleries and art fairs. Many of these venues and events have art pedagogical activities specially designed for children, where such forms of early acquaintances with art, among others through these playful activities and learning from the aforementioned type of books, can be considered as a good preparation for deepening the experience of art.

Prof. Zoltán Somhegyi

Associate Professor Xu Guangtao, Jinghengyi School of Education, HZNU, his topic is "Metaverse, Virtual-Real Coexistence and Adolescent Development". Metaverse is a virtual shared world that transcends the limitations of time, space and resources. Affected by the new crown epidemic, many activities of people have gradually shifted from offline to online. Metaverse has also become the focus of discussions between the industry and the media, and is considered a ticket to the next generation of the Internet. As the digital generation of aboriginal teenagers, they are the main force in the new era of the metaverse. For example, the metaverse-related game platforms Minecraft and Roblox with over 10 million users, the main user groups are teenagers, and these meta-universe concept games The characteristic is: User Generated Content (UGC) + immersive social interaction + connection with the real world. These characteristics make young people happy to create and share independently, and because of the existence of virtual avatars, young people are more likely to break the barriers of the real world and socialize and collaborate with other peers, elders and even family members. In his speech, Prof. Xu started from these three characteristics of the metaverse, and discussed the development of young people's creativity, exploration, social collaboration, and digital media use through some real cases.

Prof. Xu Guangtao

CIPSH President, prof. Luiz Oosterbeek's speech titled "Learning to replicate, fail and transform: an archaeological perspective on the role of play for knowledge and sustainability". Play is a key dimension of learning among primates and of modern Humans, being reasonable to consider that it had a relevant role in Human evolution. While complex mastering an integrated approach to time, space and causal nexus of phenomena is a major adaptive advantage of humans, these are virtual competences that require learning through experimentation, before becoming abstract transferrable concepts. Piaget studied these process in contemporary children, arguing that individual ontogeny would recapitulate human phylogeny. Indeed, assessing technological processes, as well as past artistic expressions, one may recognise some patterns described by genetic psychology studies, not in terms of evolution of the industries, but of synchronic difference between elaborated (adult?) and crude (child ?) evidences. Miniatures of objects that resemble toys, experimental drafts of tools or sketches of artistic depictions, … suggest that core experiments of play were not structurally different throughout Human evolution, despite the major cultural but, also, paleoanthropological evolution. Play would also relate to singing and mnemonics, particularly relevant for oral societies, in terms of knowledge transfer. However, archaeological studies on this theme are limited, despite the wide bibliography in child studies. The presentation presented major avenues of research on this cross-disciplinary domain of studies.

Prof. Luiz Oosterbeek

Jing Hengyi School of Education, HZNU Distinguished Professor Leonard J. Waks, his speech titled "Dewey on Play and Art in the early primary curriculum". John Dewey offered a distinctive vision of child play and its place in the intellectual and social development of children. He addressed the role of play in several somewhat neglected but important early essays on the course of child development, but his best-known statement is in chapter 15 of Democracy and Education. This paper draws on all of these materials to reveal Dewey's approach to the place of play in school.Dewey argued that modern psychology had rejected the theory of ready-made mental faculties in favor of complex instinctive and impulsive tendencies. Play activities provide channels for these natural tendencies, making school agreeable and reducing the burden of classroom management. It is, however, superficial to include play activities in school for such reasons. Child study research shows "the fundamental worth of native tendencies to explore, to manipulate tools and materials, to construct, to give expression to emotion." As a result, "the whole pupil is engaged," so that the child can attend to a large variety of materials and processes that are "distinctly educative in effect," and can build "cooperative associations" giving these materials and processes a social meaning. In short, he concludes, the grounds for assigning a definite play for play in school are intellectual and social, not merely a matter of agreeableness or convenience.

Prof. Leonard J. Waks

Round Table-Session 2：Social and educational values of playfulness

The second round table meeting in the afternoon was hosted by Associate Professor Gao Zhenyu. Prof. Miao Xuehong from Nantong University brought us a speech entitled "The value of children's spontaneous play". Childhood is the secret of mankind, and games are the secret of childhood. Children's games are complex and diverse, and they are constantly evolving in the process of individual development. Different games have different values. This exchange focused on the value of spontaneous games for infants and young children. This issue is not only a problem of game occurrence, but also a problem of education. Spontaneity and freedom are the basic attributes of children's games. However, due to the influence of human survival practices, spontaneous and free children's games have gradually declined, replaced by adult-designed and organized games (including screen games), caused by the decline of spontaneous games The problem of child survival and development has become increasingly prominent. It is planned to consider the value of children's spontaneous play in children's neurodevelopment, psychological development, inner spiritual world construction and children's cultural creation from a multidisciplinary perspective.

Prof. Miao Xuehong

Associate Professor Qian Yu from East China Normal University shared with us "Philosophy of Zhuangzi and Deep Learning in Play". The speaker shared a story of a kindergarten play study in Shanghai to discuss the deep level learning in children’s play. In the western context, the primary characteristic of deep learning is "Involvement". The OECD (2004) defines involvement as a ‘a state of being’, the key characteristics of which are concentration, strong intrinsic motivation, fascination and intensity of functioning. In traditional Taoist culture, deep learning in play is embodied in the spirit of carefree and complacent play. Wonderful games also fully reflect the involvement of children, a kind of self-less, meritless and nameless state of play, just as Zhuangzi said to forget the boundaries, "riding on the righteousness of heaven and earth, and controlling the debate of the six qi, so as to visit infinite".

Prof. Qian Yu

Professor Zhao Weili from Jing Hengyi School of Education, HZNU, her topic is "Rethinking Gaming-Learning Boundaries from a Post-foundational Perspective". Educational research has recently overcome a die-hard boundary between learning and gaming/play, reconceptualizing gaming/play as a form and/or component of learning. Yet, gaming-learning is still largely subjected to an anthropocentric ordering in that child learns something through the activity of gaming (often through some high-tech tools), i.e., expressed as a subject-verb-object-by-means/tools grammatical structure. Post-foundational lines of thinking rightly problematize such a modern grammar and mode of signification, inviting us to rethink our ordering among child, learning, gaming, tools, as well as our naturalized essentializations of these each item as disparate things. Put differently, post-foundational research alerts us to the assumed “ethico-onto-epistemes” (Barad, 2007) undergirding our otherwise commonsensical thinking and practices about, among others, human being, subject(ivity), gaming, (educational) knowledge, and high-tech tools. As an example, I introduce an international project on Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist Research (https://postqualitativeresearch.com/) that I am part of, and share a case study on how to re-envision the interpellation among child, learning, and gaming along a post-foundational gesture.

Prof. Zhao Weili

Associate Professor Gao Zhenyu shared with us: Entertaining but Serious: Implementing Play-based Philosophical Inquiry with Children in Classrooms. Eastern and western scholars have deeply discussed the relationship between philosophy and playing and acknowledged that doing philosophy must have the spirit of playfulness. Nowadays the practitioners have studied and explored the importance of game in Children Philosophy for a long time, proving that playing and Children Philosophy could be effectively integrated. In essence, playing games has the characteristics of freedom, rule-orientation, purpose and fantasy, it is meaningful to the children’s cognitive and emotional development. George Ghanotakis’ playful board game and the philosophical play of summer camp designed by “Philosophy for Children in Alberta” are the most prevalent play models of Children Philosophy around the world. The analysis on these two models would contribute to the diverse development of the practice of Children Philosophy in China.

Prof. Gao Zhenyu

Dr. Yang Yanlu from Hangzhou Kindergarten Teachers' College College, ZJNU, her talk was titled: "Children's Universe and Froebel's Philosophy of Play". As we all know, the "Kindergarten" born more than 200 years ago has a better name called "children’s garden". Then, what is "child", Froebel gives a romantic explanation linguistically：spontaneously expressing the internal essence through his own strength. In order to enable children to fully represent their own universe, Froebel invented “gift”（Spielgabe）and provided children with a platform to understand the world from the form of life, beauty and knowledge. Different from the current situation that kindergartens increasingly rely on high simulation materials, the low structure materials provided by Frobel for children's games are to open children's speculation about the universe and stimulate children to complete the creation of the universe through their own strength.

Dr. Yang Yanlu

Online audience, Afternoon Session

Closing ceremony 

In the closing ceremony, associate Professor Gao Zhenyu promised to publish the excellent papers selected from the conference in "New Children's Research". Prof Hsiung Pingchen expressed her heartfelt thanks to all the organizers, co-organizers, participants and staff. She also pointed out that we will continue to hold large-scale international conferences in 2022, and everyone is welcome to participate with enthusiasm. The conference ended successfully while echoing World Children's Day.