Exploring the job/game boundary: the Klein bottle game

Games are often characterised as closed or autotelic, a term coined by Csikszentmihalyi (1990) to describe a state of ‘flow’ or ‘optimal experience’ for the player. But a player may be any problem solver where the solution of the problem is the end, if not the obsession. In this paper we interrogate a common perception of a game as dichotomous with job. The image of a boundary between game and job is an artificial construct, owing much to history and ideology. To query the validity of the boundary construct we propose the analogy of an all embracing game, the Klein bottle game, that makes use of the mathematical description of a boundaryless topological space.