PoP Book 06.2s MidRes - Flipbook - Page 18
If you want more than just a playful attitude, though, scrape away at the
whole human saga and think about how much of it came to be through
a broader concept of play — simple play, elaborate play, infantile play,
sophisticated play, ethereal play. And not just the light stuff, either. Don’t
forget the dark and violent games we play, too. It’s at work in even the
most serious kinds of activity, like the great games of justice and the law.
As the philosopher Gadamer puts it: ‘the first thing we must make clear
to ourselves is that play is so elementary a function of human life that
culture is quite inconceivable without it’.9 We play with everything around
us — ideas, customs, rituals, beliefs and, of course, each other. And, all
the while, nature plays with us.
It’s been called protean, kaleidoscopic, quicksilver, multifaceted, hard
and soft; and once you tune your eye in you see it all over the place. It’s in
the play of light, the play of waveforms, the interplay of machine parts.
This thing is big, and as anyone who’s tried to wrestle it before can tell you,
it also has an extremely slippery nature. As soon as you get close to a
definition it tends to slide sideways out of reach. Like a game of Whack-aMole, play keeps popping up in another place, smirking at the hammer.
So is it really even a thing?
•
I’m guessing already this might not be looking like some readers’ normal
picture of play. You may have expected more toys, puppies, and golf by
now. It’s an easy mistake to make. And if you thought there’d be the kind of
Comic Sans typeface and pre-school styling which add up to the usual,
lazy, default look of play, you’ll either be disappointed or extremely relieved
to find it’s almost completely missing. But the twists and turns haven’t
even started.
•
‘We can imagine that this complicated array of moving
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things which constitutes ‘the world’ is something like
a great chess game being played by the gods, and we are
observers of the game. We do not know what the rules
of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to watch
the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may
eventually catch on to a few of the rules.’
Richard Feynman Lectures 2.1, Basic Physics
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There’s an ancient Hindu word for play, ‘lila’ (leela). Like many words from
Sanskrit, it’s hard to translate directly to English. It’s a much more layered
What is Play? / Elephant
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