Integral Play is:

• An integral framework based on the AQAL Model developed by Gwen Gordon, M.A. (educational designer and transpersonal play researcher) and Sean Esbjörn-Hargens, Ph.D. (JFK professor, consultant and author).
  
  
• A framework that uses the power of play for catalyzing deeper layers of human development and transformation.
  
  
• An approach that has as one of its core elements the exploration of “how play is not only an epiphenomenon but also an instigator of transformation”.
  
  
• An emerging model of “play” that allow players to experience both horizontal and vertical growth in specific contextual playgrounds, as well as through various inner states of engagement and flow (Mihaly Csikszentmihakyi, 1990)
  

According to Gordon & Esbjörn-Hargens (2007):

"As the player evolves, facets of the self which were once suppressed, unconscious or latent blossom into play, increasingly integrating the whole self and the whole world .... We also need to understand the potential for forms to create a shift from one developmental level to another more complex level. This requires an understanding of the complexity reflected and the play forms preferred at each stage of development".

The Integral Play framework presents fundamental developmental concepts that can be skillfully and effectively incorporated into the design of video games geared towards catalyzing human development.

As suggested by this developmental model, the experience of play can—from an integral perspective—not only embrace but strongly support the continuous growth of various Play Selves. In the Integral Play model, Play Selves correspond to consecutive and embracing levels of inner development ranging from pre-personal (pre-rational), to personal (rational), to post-personal (post-rational), to transpersonal (or spiritual) stages of inner growth.

The concept of Play Selves is originally based on the work of renowned contemporary play theorist Brian Sutton-Smith (2003), which proposes seven different “rhetorics of play” associated with value-systems originated from different play theories throughout history. Integral Play suggests that the “remarkable correlations between the play rhetorics and the Play Selves indicates that Sutton-Smith's (2003) work has an implicit developmental dimension” (p.23). Interestingly, Sutton Smith’s insights (2003) have also exerted a fundamental influence in leading research articles and books used by many game scholars, developers, and designers nowadays.

This influence includes one of the main literary references in the game industry, the best-selling book Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (2003) written by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman (renowned game designers and scholars). In my view, the Integral Play framework can bring important, complementary, and “out of the box” perspectives to some of the proposed conceptual frameworks presented by Salem and Zimmerman (2003), in terms of inviting game designers to explore the developmental potentials of play from an integral perspective.

It is hence my intention to incorporate Integral Play as part of the INDENTRO framework, since it can help making the games intentionally funnier and transformative.

In summary, Gordon and Esbjörn-Hargens’ (2007) Integral Play framework offers a thorough and well-founded developmental model of play that can be used in the process of designing integral-developmental video games, aimed to facilitate self-integration and transformation through the “conveyor belt” of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.

Given the average age of video game players today (35 years-old), it can be also a powerful tool to catalyze and integrate further development of gamers throughout adulthood stages and beyond (post-conventional) in various different lines of intelligence, which is a possibility rarely explored in other academic and conventional (mainstream) developmental theories and practices (Cook-Greuter, 2006; Torbert, 2004) —and not surprisingly, the entertainment industry itself. Well, at least until now…