I sat in on Tracy Fullerton's and Bernie DeKoven's CTIN534 Experiments in Interactivity 1 class last night. Bernie kicked off the semester with a lecture on the definition of fun. Ah.... graduate school.
Key take-aways for me was the idea that the word "fun" has gotten somewhat of a bad rep in the US. That it's meaning refers to something childish, something that creates ecstacy. Bernie pointed out that it is more useful for us to examine fun as a state of Zen; an activity which takes you to a state of meditation, removes your ego, something which can be relaxing. Jenova pointed out that in China the word "fun" means something close to "interesting," as oppossed to here, where it has a different conotation.
More importantly, fun is an activity that is autotelic. (By the way, there is no wikipedia entry for autotelic, if someone needs something to do.) Something autotelic is something that "has it as its only purpose." That is, something in which the reward is intrinsic in the activity, not in some outside reinforcer. Of course, this led to an exciting discussion on what activities are, truly, autotelic. Playing a instrument with no one around, dancing in your living room, laying in a hammock.
However, it seemed like some of what makes an activity autotelic is the point of view of the person doing the activity. Some students confessed to having difficulties relaxing, or doing anything that doesn't have some extrinsic reward. Is this a result of upbringing, culture, or just personal preference?
This line of thinking, though, led me to my huge takeaway from last night's class:
Can life itself be autotelic?
I like to think so.
