But, then again, whenever you’ll play russian roulette, the painstation or enjoy a good fight, you’ve accepted the consequences in advance. You know you can get hurt – or worse. This is not the case with the Arm Spirit, which is, or should be, harmless.

A very good point.

It may open a link to “serious games”, where the outcome is intented to be deeply connecty with “real life” (either learning someting “useful”, or training oneself to be more efficient on a task through so-called simulators).

Maybe you’re right, this vision is related to the adult vision of the world. I think children point of view on such “harmful” games could be interesting. Besides the fact that gambling is forbidden to children, I bet they don’t need “play to be safe” to recognize it as play. Many kids seems to enjoys enjoy fighting as a form of play.

Does anyone ever heard of a study on this topic ?

Perhaps we are inclined to attach a significant outcome to play as adults because we are increasingly immersed in performance oriented tasks as we enter the adult world? In other words we need to introduce a significant outcome to our play to reconcile it with our adult understanding of the world.

But is this still a form of “play” ? Or does the limit between “play” and others activities, such as “working” lies in the idea that “games” are disconnected from “reality” ?
I think the “games must be harmless” statement is deeply connected with this particular idea of what “play” is.

But in my opinion, games likes this “masochist” pong or an hypothetic “masochist edition” of Arm Spirit that broke arm of losers on purpose (pain beeing part of the outcome) should question this “narrowed” conception of “play”.

Is “play” only limited to frivolous activities ?
I don’t think so. I think that games involving money or these games featuring a punishing game over are not “frivolous”, but are still a form of play activity.