PoP Book 06.2s MidRes - Flipbook - Page 25
•
Ian compares his daughter’s attitude and experience to his own. There he
is, trying to avoid the free body-mist sprays, and cursing whoever came up
with malls, while his daughter has given in to her predicament, and opened
her mind to all possibilities. She’s improvised an immersive toy to consume
her, and is pulling excitement and imaginative meaning from the most
boring thing there is: white-tile flooring. While he’s only focused on goals,
she’s attending to process, and she’s turned misery into joy. And just think
about the simplicity. The player of this game hones her focus to make
exacting moves so she can extract maximum satisfaction from a structure
with just one basic rule.
The first proposition of this view of play, then, is equally simple: with even
the most elementary game you can imagine, the appeal lies not in any
wild freedom it seems to offer, but in the very nature of its limits. In order
to play this kind of game you have to accept the obstacles it throws up
and submit to them. It’s these strict limitations which draw you in and make
it satisfying.
The next proposition is that by playing a game like this you’ve unconsciously set out a ‘playground’ around yourself — a metaphorical space
containing whatever grand or humble action you’re exploring. Chefs,
as we all know, have their ‘kitchen playgrounds’, artists have their ‘studio
playgrounds’, and surfers have their ‘ocean playgrounds’; but there are
1.16
virtual playgrounds staked out all the time, everywhere. And they’re not,
by any means, only physical spaces. In fact, they’re almost certainly a
hybrid of the physical and the conceptual — like the coder at his desk
playing in the digital infinity behind the numbers on screen, and
behind his eyes.
A playground’s perimeter and contents can be almost anything you
choose, anywhere you choose; and these playgrounds also have a
strange paradoxical quality to them. Simply by wrapping an imaginary
fence around something in order to play with it, normal service with
the real world outside the playground is temporarily suspended, making
what’s inside the fence seem more real, and what’s outside the fence
seem more like fiction.
•
So, what can we conclude?
The fun of playing in this way, it seems, comes from limiting freedoms
rather than expanding them. And the reason we’re bothering to talk
What is Play? / Almost Nothing
29
