Samuel Bird

Remembering Play - Spielloch

There is a hole where Play used to reside - Spielloch.

Let’s engage in some first order thinking.

What is Play?

Wikipedia defines Play as: a range of intrinsically motivated activities done for recreation.

I agree that the essence of Play is that it’s intrinsically motivated - that is, we are primarily seeking first order effects (e.g. experiencing happiness and laughter during a game of charades) and not a knock-on higher order effect (e.g. a sense of achievement from admission to a drama school).

To say it is done for recreation is to helpfully constrain the type of intrinsic motivation we permit - for example, hunger is perfectly valid intrinsic motivation but activities that serve to sate hunger would not be considered Play.

An important feature of Play is that it’s active and not passive. When I play Hop-Scotch, I am physically moving and interacting with the world. When I play Hangman, I am generating ideas, putting them down on paper, and engaging with my opponent and the puzzle. When I watch 4 seasons of a TV show, no matter how classic, I’m not Playing. I’m not a luddite either, reading a book also doesn’t count! Both watching a TV show and reading a book may well be Fun, but they are not Play.

At first sight, I wouldn’t have considered conversation to be Play either, even if intrinsically motivated by Fun. Yet (good) conversation is very much active. I admit this puzzles me, and I wonder if I should update my concept of Play to include a subset of conversations. I think the issue is that one can’t easily draw a line around conversation as Play and conversation as Something Else. We may enjoy a Fun conversation with someone, but the primary purpose of conversation at large is not Fun but (arguably) utility and higher order effects. Maybe that is way too cynical though. I think this is an interesting question.

Likewise with fitness. I’ll come back to the issue of competition in a moment, but first just consider fitness activities such as Running or Weight lifting. Do they count as Play? Like conversation, fitness activities at first appear to exist in a grey area between Play and Utility (or other types of $\neg\text{Play}$). Many people do run primarily for Fun, without much concern for the health benefits; and many people run primarily for the health benefits (and their second order effects, like living longer and therefore having more time to gaze adoringly at their beermat collection). Unlike conversation, I’d instinctively claim that fitness activities can be counted as Play, assuming the motivation is intrinsic and primarily Fun. What’s the difference between fitness activities and conversation? Perhaps there is some bias of experience at play, but to me conversation is unavoidable and fundamental in a way that fitness is not. Conversation is very much a default, not a choice, much like breathing. A nice gulp of cool breezy air can be quite satisfying, and breathing is reasonably active (engaging my mouth, diaphragm etc.), but it’s certainly not Play. Excuse the absurdity but I stand by the underlying point. Perhaps they would be flipped in my mind if I were to live in a different society, existing in near isolation and needing to run all day in order to get by, but alas.

It is important to remember that Play is an abstraction, and like most abstractions it is leaky. It is probably impossible to meaningfully describe a box ‘Play’ and place all things either inside or outside of it.

Can Play be Competitive?

In many modes of Play, it’s possible for competition to emerge. For example, maybe I play chess for fun, but one day discover FIDE ratings and tournaments.

I don’t know if it’s possible to identify a particular point in time when competition causes an activity to switch from being primarily intrinsically motivated by Fun and not, but it can certainly happen. In this event, an activity may cease to be Play.

On the other hand, the presence of competition can boost the intrinsic reward of an activity and make it more Fun. In this case, it is surely still Play. When I played Call of Duty as a kid I was much more competitive about it (not better necessarily) than today, but that really added to the enjoyment rather than detracting from it. Winning is fun. As long as Losing isn’t the end of the world, it’s likely a net positive.

Competition can be either constructive or destructive to Play. If competition doesn’t dethrone the primary intrinsic motivation then it can be constructive, or at worst neutral. However, if it replaces the primary intrinsic motivation of Fun with something else then it is destructive to it’s notion of Play. A common case of the latter would be when our sense of self-worth gets tied into our performance in a competition. Of course, this can happen quite easily, especially when we’re young. Self-competition can be just as damaging in this regard to a mode of Play.

When we are children, we typically don’t have systems in place to notice when an activity has been soured, or when our motivations have changed. To be frank, we mostly fail at this as adults too, but it’s certainly possible to do a better job and improve at this. This is something we can track though when starting out Playing with a new activity.

What happened to Play?

Playing was so important to us as children, whether it was alone, with friends at school, or with siblings and family. Whether it was playing pretend (roleplay), making up cooperative games in the playground, card games, video games etc.

As an adult, I’ve somehow come to view play as something dangerous, to only be done in strict moderation.

Did I stop playing or did it just evolve and I lost track of what it meant?

Is it possible that as our minds grow, so does our sense of Play and Fun?

First of all, we stopped playing purely imagination-based roleplaying games (pretending). Much of this playtime went instead to video games. For me, eventually those stopped as well. I became absorbed at first in my work, and then my social life, and then a combination of the two.

Going out and partying substituted Play for a large chunk of my adult life. Perhaps out of necessity this left little time for other modes of Play. It’s also naturally connected to other familiar-from-childhood modes of Play such as Dancing and Party games, which can be mapped to Clubbing and Drinking games. This doesn’t necessarily have to be the case - I know plenty of adults who always lead social lives more oriented around other Fun activities e.g. boardgames or kite-flying.

In the last couple of years, I have mostly put an end to the more voracious pastimes. That those activities are often unsustainable can be an issue. To some extent, they’ve been replaced with new modes of Play, or the rediscovery of previous modes, but this took time and did not happen all at once. Moreover, I think there is definite room for improvement. Play is something that still feels self-indulgent to me, even lazy in some cases.

Why Play?

FUN, FUN, FUN, FUN, FUN, … It is a reward in and of itself. Tap into it.

Paradoxically, spending time Playing, being intrinsically motivated by Fun, has a bunch of great higher order effects. Some of these are clear, and some are perhaps spurious but seem true to me. Of course, if our primary motivation is these higher order effects, then the activity ceases to be Play, and we’re back where we started. Fun eh?! Ideally, we can establish a habit of Play and embracing our intrinsic motivation, while taking the higher order effects for granted or forgetting about them altogether. Surely this isn’t so hard, after all Play is intrinsically rewarding by definition! One obstacle to developing such a habit is Guilt based reasoning (I recommend Replacing Guilt for a nice perspective on this). In the next section, I’ll elaborate on ways to make more time for Play and building the habit.

With the warning above kept in mind, some of the higher order effects of Play:

A misconception that I once held (as a teenager unsurprisingly) was that Play is primarily a means of escaping boredom, or the frustratingly bounded and constrained reality of childhood. That it is somehow self-deception. I now believe I had this the wrong way around. A life without Play can be frustratingly bounded and constrained, but Play is no lie; rather, it’s a way to enrich life and discover intrinsic motivations, curiosity, and tastes.

How does Play distinguish itself from other more passive forms of Fun? The higher order effects listed above are part of it: for example, Play is more effective at exposing us to new experiences (real tangible experiences, as opposed to knowledge and stories - though I admit there may be a another grey area here). Even before those effects though, Play is also participative; Play makes us a part of the activity, part of something external. When we play poker, we are a part of the game. When we play tennis, we are a part of the match. This is interaction between ourselves and the external world. Play is to Reinforcement Learning what reading a book is to LLM training.

Making time to Play

I find it enriching to set time aside to deliberately practice Playing, and to experiment with new modes of Play. I suggest an experiment in regular Playtime.

What possible modes of Play are there for an adult?

2 examples of activities that I do quite naturally and would count as Play:

The idea of deliberately setting aside time for Play might seem weird to some people, and it won’t be helpful for everyone. Some folks likely Play too much already, others get a respectable chunk of Play in naturally, but I reckon there’s a sizeable chunk of the population that has forgotten how to Play and doesn’t even realise it - Spielloch.

Suggestions for deliberate Play practice:

In my experience, personal projects can involve a large amount of Fun and intrinsic motivation, but it can be hard to disentangle them from higher order effects e.g. skills we also hope to gain in the process. Here I’m really talking about coding projects (build app for X to do Y or learn Z) or study projects (study book A to learn B). I would be wary about counting them as Play in a purist sense, but maybe it’s okay in some cases. As a side note, personal projects are great - I maintain a quarterly personal project system which I might expand upon one day.