While play in museums for children is not a new concept, there is little research on what play looks like for the adult visitor. This study investigates adult play in museum exhibits designed for family learning, using Stuart Brown’s (2010) typology of play.

However, Koster's definition is only a part of his aesthetic judgement concerning games. In his justly acclaimed book A Theory of Fun for Game Design (2005), pictured above, Koster provides a definition of fun in which he expressly excludes all manner of experiences as fun. For instance, rollercoasters only provide "visceral fun" and are thus 'not fun' according to Koster's approach. Here we can see value judgements coming to bear on the aesthetics of play not from the conceptual approach to 'game' but from the conceptualisation of 'fun'. That Koster excludes all kinds of "visceral fun" as being fun is one of the strangest value judgements in the entire discourse of game studies, since to a great many players these kinds of experience are the very essence of fun. Instead, Koster positions learning as the central experience of fun, stating: Games are puzzles to solve, just like everything else we encounter in life [and] serve as very fundamental and powerful learning tools.

argues for the global relevance of play in Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics by revealing play as the key concept that depicts the process of all understanding_that is, the dynamic, dialogical, and interpretive process by which interlocutors come to grasp a common subject matter together.