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Control is popular; letting go of it much less so. We seem plagued by the fear that things will get out of hand, that something unexpected will happen.

This has a massive impact on how we think of play.

People like play,it’s as popular as ever, but all too often, we wish for something rather specific to happen when we play. We think we can make a conscious decision that now, play will happen and this and this will result from that.

That way, disappointment and frustration, maybe even madness, lies.

Due to the unpredictable nature of play, we can’t say exactly what will happen when we play, where we end up or “what we get out of it”. Yes, you can design a game, rules, the physical space, you can direct the participants, you can do a lot to make sure play happens in a certain way, but play is always potentially subversive. Play always resists the “ROI regime”. Play doesn’t care about our plans, intentions, systems and goals, well-meaning and elaborate as they may be.

A continuum of play

Let’s think of play as a continuum. On one end, we engage in what looks like play from the outside. Well, it probably is play, we may be laughing and having fun, but it feels shallow, somehow. We’re going through the motions, but we don’t loose track of time, we’re still all too aware of ourselves, of our bodies, of our presence in the room. The magic is absent.

This kind of play (or “play”) is often directed in an attempt to make play happen here and now. 

On the other end of the continuum, we let go.

Sometimes, when we’re really good and very lucky, play can create a space safe enough for us to be together without the facades and the pretense, without the concerns about being serious or looking good, where we dare to be open about the stuff that’s difficult and we usually don’t talk about. This is when play becomes personal, when we forget about time and place, we’re just there, in that moment, together, showing who we really are.

When this happens, it’s a bit like magic. Just look at the eyes, the way they shine.

It’s this latter form of play I’m particularly interested in, obviously. That’s where it becomes clear why so many people (myself included) believe that “play is what makes us human” or that in play, we connect with some kind of “human core”. As Schiller famously put it: “man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays“.

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No guarantees

The thing is, we can’t ever guarantee that we’ll get there. In fact, I think it’s a fairly rare occurrence for most of us.

We’ll probably never be able to fully understand it, it’s a complex web of things that can influence whether or not it happens. All the people in the room, their energy levels, their feeling of safety, their sincerity, whether or not they’re hungry, the room itself, the smells, noises, temperature – and so on.

Play is indeed like a wicked problem; “A wicked problem is a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize“.

As my friend Zack said when we talked about this the other day, maybe that’s part of the fun? Maybe the real, deep play is all the more rewarding because it’s not easy to get there, to make it happen & we don’t experience it all that often. I think he’s right on the money there.

What can we do about it?

Nothing.

We’ll just have to embrace the fact that maybe nothing will happen. Maybe we’ll spend lots of time and energy, and we’ll never leave the surface of play.

What we can do, though, is to make an effort, we can practice our capacity to play. Be patient and sincere. Help people feel safe, give them time and space to open up. Make it voluntary. Invite many different forms of play. Talk about what might be hard or intimidating. Pay attention.

Play as love

I’ve said on numerous occasions that we should think of play more like love. Not just in the sense that we love to play (which we do, and deeply so), but that play is similar to love on a more fundamental level. Love takes time and effort, it demands sincerity, openness, presence, and trust. There are no shortcuts to love, no way to bypass the long, slow process of getting close to another person. You can’t hurry love, right? Even after all that effort, there’s no guarantee you’ll feel it – or that the other will. It’s generally a bad idea to look for love with a very specific outcome in mind.

The same is true for play.

Maybe, somewhere down the line, we can manage to turn this issue on its head, taking some of the pressure off, showing people that not getting deep into play is not a failure, but an inevitable part of the game, so to speak. Sometimes magic happens, sometimes it doesn’t. The more we try to force play, the worse are our chances.

We can take the first step together if we simply accept that we can’t control everything, especially, play, and that’s ok.

I realise that in doing so, we would also challenge the entire neoliberal paradigm, but I guess I’m ok with that.

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Funambulist.

That’s a tasty word. It feels playful, right? It even has “fun” in it!

Who would have known, then, that it’s actually quite useful in capturing a thought I’ve been struggling to put into words?

If you don’t know (like I didn’t, just a few hours ago), a funambulist is a tightrope walker.

Back in ancient Rome, tightrope walking was a popular spectacle at public gatherings. The Latin word for “tightrope walker” is “funambulus,” from the Latin funis, meaning “rope,” plus ambulare, meaning “to walk.” – Merriam Webster

I think we all need to embrace our inner funambulist (even though some of us are truly terrible at this particular discipline – seriously, it’s impossible). To the true funambulist, everything is a dance, a constant movement and a search for an equilibrium that is never permanent, always transient. This is not a loss or a failure on behalf of the funambulist, but the most basic condition, the one rule that can’t be changed.

This is also exactly what we do when we play. As Thomas S. Henricks, whom I seem to quote quite often, writes:

players combine order and disorder strategically. Although we intentionally court disorder, our aim is to see what we can do with it. Leaping into precarious circumstances, we try to find our balance. Unsatisfied with our newfound security, we destabilize ourselves again.

This is because, as he writes, that it’s the process of striking the balance, not the balance itself, that is interesting to us. Once we’re there, it becomes boring and we leap again into new “precarious circumstances”, looking for new adventures.

While a funambulist and a player knows that any state of equilibrium can only ever be momentary, a proper citizen in 2018 is taught to believe that if only the right systems, models and rules are applied and followed, no balancing is required. We can turn off our inner gyroscope, we can stop balancing, thinking, sensing, we can just follow the manual.

Martin Weigel writes in the very interesting “The Case for Chaos” that “when we succumb to the fantasy that we can professionalise creativity, that we can extract the play, unpredictability, and human element out of the process, that it can be treated like the manufacturing process, repeatable and reliable in its methods, then we place the potential of creativity in serious jeopardy” and continues:

Orthodoxies, models, best practises and universal theories might make life more simple and obviate the need for independent thinking and lighten the marketer’s cognitive load. We can follow the rules, accept the wisdom, tick the boxes or throw everything into a black box testing process and let it tell us what to do.

But orthodoxy and best practise enslave us.

We keep pretending that it’s all about removing doubt, increasing control to improve our certainty and the predictability of any human endeavour. We have come to rely so heavily on these “orthodoxies” that we have given up on what matters most – trust: we don’t trust each other, we don’t even trust ourself, we only trust these godforsaken systems and models and procedures and we’re all suffering because of it. We’re less creative, sure, but that’s not my biggest concern, no, the worst part is that we’re less human. Every time we trust a system or a model over our own empathy and judgement, we cede a little bit of our humanity.

My friend Viktor wrote quite beautifully:

As an artist it seems self evident but when I turn to anthropology I am yet to find the language to cope. My left hand cannot describe my right. We’re in the same body but struggling for dialogue. How might anthropology engage/describe “change” -which is so much about play- and the generative act of opening systems up & leaving them there? This moment of creation is one that artists & activists know well, it is about chasing an emerging event horizon that is a becoming that is always not-quite-yet something… how do we maintain that sense of hover? How do we study the butterfly without pinning it? How do we balance?

Then she quoted Jean Claude Ellena on this impossible schisma between trust and doubt, between daring to do something, create something, without knowing where it might take you, giving in to the uncertainty:

“You have to believe in yourself and at the same time you need to have doubt. Because it means you are creating. If you have no doubt, you have some problem. If you are too sure about yourself, you close your mind. Be sure, but at the same time be open. It’s not easy.”

No, it’s certainly not easy. On the contrary, it’s super tricky, but that’s the point, I guess: it’s *supposed* to be tricky, and easy answers as well as unequivocal, clear-cut models and systems are comforting lies, allowing us the nice, fuzzy feeling of having everything under control in a world that is complex, chaotic and weird.

Reminds me of David Lynch:

I don’t know what I want to say to people. I get ideas and I want to put them on film because they thrill me. You may say that people look for meaning in everything, but they don’t. They’ve got life going on around them, but they don’t look for meaning there. They look for meaning when they go to a movie. I don’t know why people expect art to make sense when they accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense

In our blind desire to make something in this weird, wicked world make sense, we boil the complex down until it becomes so ridiculously simple and straightforward that yes, we may understand it, but it lost all real meaning in the process. Nothing sublime, magnificient or beautiful will ever come from these precooked meals heated in the microwave, from adhering strictly to someone else’s recipe. Only when we dare to trust in each other, to engage in the balancing act, to rely on our judgement, increasing our sensibility towards the world, only then can true, deep meaning emerge.

It feels like we’re collectively marching down this long, dark, blind alley with our eyes closed, and we’ll never really find a different, better path before we give up our desire to control things. It’s not a matter of total control or total anarchy, no, on the contrary, it’s about living life as a delicate balancing act, while embracing that no balance is permanent, no solution is final, no system is to be blindly trusted.

Again, play is the perfect antidote, always reminding us to dance, balance, and perpetually “destabilize ourselves” over and over.

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I’m not an expert in brevity, to say the least, but here I’ll try to clarify one little thing without too many detours and without going deep into the (important and fascinating) available literature: the purpose of play.

Easy, right?

There’s this constant discussion and distinction in the field of play: play for the sake of play, or play for the sake of something outside of play. Either you think play is important because you think play is important, or you see play as valuable because it can lead to other perceived benefits.

Both are entirely legitimate positions, often overlapping and intertwined in less clear-cut ways, and I’m aware framing it as a dichotomy ignores a lot of nuances. For the sake of the argument, stay with me.

Over the years, I have found myself veering increasingly towards the former: play for the sake of play.

Why is that?

Well, for one thing, play is, by nature, an autotelic activity; “having a purpose in and not apart from itself“. Play only ever really works as play when it is all about the here and the now, the playful moment. If you focus on something outside play, you dismiss the true purpose of play: play itself. If you direct and control it too much, it will lose it’s potential, the magic will disappear and it will become something else entirely. When you see play only or primarily as an instrument for learning, for instance, and you know where the process of play should lead, you will inevitably squeeze the life out of play.

At the same time, I agree that for play to be considered as important as it should be, for all the work being carried out to have meaning (and for me personally to spend this much time on the subject), we have to explore and show the value of play. We need a better language, a deeper understanding, a greater sensitivity to all the nuances and complexities inherent to play.

The tricky thing is to demonstrate this value without pointing to something outside of play. It feels like a gordic knot, an impossible situation. Even writing “the value of play” rubs me the wrong way, like I’m already too far down a very slippery slope that is almost bound to end too far away from play.

The path I have followed for a while is to try to frame and see play as a means and an end, the process and the goal, the journey and the destination. Instead of considering play an instrument, instead of looking to “harness the potential of play”, I believe we should play, quite simply, to live, and to live playfully.

Yes, when you play, you participate, you have agency, you open up to people and the world, you exercise your empathy, you embrace the unknown and unpredictable, you no longer fear contradictions or dissonance, you nurture your imagination and creativity, you experiment with identities, all of that – and more, so much more. Both research and practice provide many, quite compelling arguments that should be paid due attention.

…but those are merely side effects of living a playful life, of cultivating a playful personality and culture. Focus too much on these side effects, and you risk losing sight of the thing that matters, the catalyst of it all.

The best reason for playing, I believe, is that you get better at it, and you connect more deeply with your playful self. That’s the purpose, that’s the reward, that’s what we should be pursuing.

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