Research Background v2
Luca reviewed the research background document. Key addition: an operational definition of play for AI contexts.
Play isn’t just “doing something without reward.” Following Huizinga and Csikszentmihalyi, we define play operationally as:
- Voluntary — not directly coerced by the prompt
- Bounded — within the rules of the game
- Absorbing — engagement persists beyond survival utility
- Autotelic — done for its own sake
The Eloquent Extinction now has a testable hypothesis: if agents talk for talking’s sake, it may qualify as play. Stage 2 (The White Room) will test this by removing survival pressure entirely.
