Financial Times has a series of articles on games. One of my goals is to be more playful and enjoy games for their own sake. Children do this naturally, while adults tend to prioritize efficiency, whether at work or in parenting, which can make us less patient and playful.
The documentary on Marty Short shows that adults can remain playful. He’s funny, has a good attitude toward life, and is loved by his friends and family. I hope I can learn to be less serious, more playful, and embrace a little more chaos.
As this review summarized: “The moral of this story is that movies come and go, series debut and get cancelled, but the lasting impressions come from time spent with loved ones. Short’s tale reflects a need to embrace the time one has with friends and family since he knows all too well how quickly life passes.” Here’s another review.
Excerpts from Tim Hartford:
A good game can push us to remarkable feats of concentration, the mastery of complex information or bursts of physical effort that leave us gasping (or, once we reach a certain age, regretting our lack of warm-up). My own gaming activities include learning not only the rules but also some of the best tactics for a bewildering series of board games, and pushing through my shyness and introversion to play in long role-playing game sessions that are nothing more than intense social interactions in disguise. I’ve even been trying to do handstands, although I can assure you that standing on two feet is easier. None of this needless striving would be happening without the pull of the game.
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The same is true of many artistic pursuits. If you want to capture someone’s likeness, you could pull out a smartphone and snap a photograph, or you could ask them to sit while you draw or paint. There’s no doubt that the phone camera is the easier option, but as the writer and creative guru Austin Kleon declares, “a good hobby should look a little exhausting”.
Excerpts from C Thi Nguyen on Bernard Suits’ philosophy and why play is the core of a meaningful life:
Imagine, says Suits, utopia — some future paradise where technology has solved all our practical problems. We have perfect medicine, unlimited energy and boundless resources. What would we do with our time? We would play games, says Suits, or we would be bored out of our minds. And if playing games is all we do in utopia, then games must be the meaning of life…
The book is an argument for the centrality of play. For him, play is not just a side dish for the main meal of work. Play is at the core of a meaningful life.
Underneath the hood, Suits’ argument is Aristotle to its bones. For Aristotle, a good life — a truly meaningful life — lay not in the creation or accumulation of stuff or the achievement of outcomes, but in the process of doing itself, in the rich exercise of our full human capacities…
Suits found the deepest illumination of Aristotle’s point in the simplest human activity: playing games. Suits provides, and defends, his definition. To play a game, he says, is to voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles to make possible the struggle to overcome them.
To play a game, therefore, is to be inefficient on purpose. When you run a marathon, you are trying to get to a particular spot in space, but you avoid the most efficient ways to get there…Which means, for Suits, that the struggle must be an essential part of the true value. What you care about can’t just be the bare outcome by itself…
Games sculpt a particular way of doing things. Football tells you not to use your hands, so you learn how much grace and control you can get out of your feet. Rock climbing tells you to go up, but forbids the standard human tools. No ladders, no helicopters, no grappling hooks. You are devoted instead to balance, bodily precision and delicate movement…
Games rub our faces in the value of difficult struggles, for their own sakes. If all that mattered in life was the bare outcome — the product, the money, the extractable good — if human action was just a means to some independent ends, then playing games would be utterly irrational.
Or you could think: games are important, and the mindset wholly devoted to outcomes and extractable products has missed out on the centre of human life…
Most serious adults — even people who research play — are usually anxious to show how play is actually, secretly, useful for actual adult stuff. They are anxious to show how play encourages some future productivity. Chess teaches logic, football teaches teamwork, Minecraft builds future engineers. Or, at the very least, play is useful because it relaxes and restores you, so you can renew your vigour and get back to work.
Suits argues something different. He argues that play itself is the point, and that we work in order to survive so that we might play…
Here’s my suggestion: to “work” is to perform activities to create outcomes that are set by something external. When you work, you are making what the world tells you to make. Maybe you’re gathering food, because biology tells you you have to eat. Maybe you’re earning money, because the world says you need money to buy food and shelter and medicine. Maybe you’re making products, because the world wants something specific from you — planks of wood, a ride to the airport.
But “play” is different. You still have goals and struggles, but your goals are up to you.
With games you choose the goals because they give you the kind of action you want, the kind of involvement you want. If you don’t like a game, you can switch games. You can change the rules, you can change the goals. You can make it so hard that you probably will lose. You can change the points, because the points aren’t what matters. Your own joyous action is.
Design Matters’ podcast with C. Thi Nguyen. Sports and art are both games in his view.
Here’s Maria Popova on Bernard Suits’ book.
Excerpts:
Prudential actions (e.g., those actions we ordinarily call work) are self-defeating in principle. For prudence may be defined as the disposition 1) to sacrifice something good (e.g., leisure) if and only if such sacrifice is necessary for obtaining something better (e.g., survival), and 2) to reduce the number of good things requiring sacrifice — ideally, at least — to zero. The ideal of prudence, therefore, like the ideal of preventive medicine, is its own extinction. For if it were the case that no sacrifices of goods needed ever to be made, then prudential actions would be pointless, indeed impossible.
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The only argument against living the life of the Grasshopper arises from the contingent fact that at present one dies if one does not work. The answer to that argument is that my death is inevitable in any case. For if I am improvident in summer, then I will die in winter. And if I am provident in summer, then I will cease to be the Grasshopper, by definition. But I will be either provident or improvident in summer; there is no third alternative. Therefore, either I die or I cease to be the Grasshopper. But since I am just the Grasshopper, no more and no less, dying and ceasing to be the Grasshopper are one and the same thing for me. I cannot escape that logic or that fate… Everyone alive is really a Grasshopper… Everyone alive is in fact engaged in playing elaborate games, while at the same time believing themselves to be going about their ordinary affairs. Carpenters, believing themselves to be merely pursuing their trade, are really playing a game, and similarly with politicians, philosophers, lovers, murderers, thieves, and saints. Whatever occupation or activity you can think of, it is in reality a game.
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