Cultural playfulness and empowered participation - through creativity, curiosity, and communality

This paper examines cultural playfulness in game-making with(in)cultural heritage, focusing on three fundamental and interconnected play frames—curiosity, creativity, and communality (Nørgård, 2021)—to explore the potential of cultural playfulness to empower youth participation in culture and society. By examining how game jams and game-making can be a relational, experiential, and playful approach to fostering collective knowledge and participation, we probe how this approach might enhance youth empowerment.
EPIC-WE (Empowered Participation through Ideating Cultural Worlds and Environments) is an ongoing Horizon Europe project (2023-2026) inviting youth (ages 16-25) to engage in “jamming with culture” by creating games through cultural heritage. This initiative positions game-making as a playful form of culture-making. Applying the three play frames and drawing on play theory and philosophy, we analyse the experiences of youth participating in cultural game jams. The study illustrates how cultural playfulness (Holflod et al., 2024) in these settings fosters experiences of relationality and empowerment, supporting youth as empowered cultural participants.
The discussion frames and synthesises the analysis, proposing six pedagogical principles for cultural playfulness. These principles define cultural playfulness as an approach and experience that encourages youth's empowered engagement (with)in cultural heritage through play(fulness) and game(fulness).