Contents
Any activity you choose to engage in for no practical purpose other than enjoyment of it. Games are a kind of structured play. Play is what you “get to do”, while work is what you “have to do.”
Play is freedom
Steven Poole references Johann Huizinga, whose 1938 Homo Ludens is a foundational work of ludology, the study of play. Huizinga identifies five characteristics play must have:
- Play is free, is in fact freedom.
- Play is not “ordinary” or “real” life.
- Play is distinct from “ordinary” life both as to locality and duration.
- Play creates order, is order. Play demands order absolute and supreme.
- Play is connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained from it.
Play can unlock creativity and insight
Richard Feynman (in Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman!) shares the delightful story of rekindling his enjoyment of physics by playing with it again. Pursuing his curiosity for no immediate practical purpose, it eventually leads him to a Nobel-winning insight:
He says, “Feynman, that’s pretty interesting, but what’s the importance of it? Why are you doing it?”
“Hah!” I say. “There’s no importance whatsoever. I’m just doing it for the fun of it.” His reaction didn’t discourage me; I had made up my mind I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked.
I went on to work out equations of wobbles. Then I thought about how electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there’s the Dirac Equation in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics. And before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was “playing”—working, really—with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems; all those old-fashioned, wonderful things.
It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.
Quotes
This is the real secret of life—to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play. (Alan Watts)
Play is really the work of childhood. (Fred “Mr.” Rogers)
we misunderstand play itself, casting it as exuberant, silly, a frippery that signals to us that our children are still young enough to have not yet turned their minds to more weighty endeavours. But play is serious. Play is absolute. Play is the complete absorption in something that doesn’t matter to the external world, but which matters completely to you. It’s an immersion in your own interests that becomes a feeling in itself, a potent emotion. Play is a disappearance into a space of our choosing, invisible to those outside the game. It is the pursuit of pure flow, a sandbox mind in which we can test new thoughts, new selves. It’s a form of symbolic living, a way to transpose one reality onto another and mine it for meaning. (Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age)