A Declaration of Play:

What is ‘play’?

Michael Novak in the ‘The Joy of Sports’ suggests play and games live outside ordinary life – “they belong to the world of the imagination.”

Johan Huizinga’s conception of play: As free activity, delimited within a ‘sacred’ area and thus separated from ordinary life.

Robert Caillois builds on Huizinga’s assertion and defines play as free, separate, uncertain and unproductive, yet regulated and make-believe.  Caillois’s declaration of play is subsumed under four categories, agon [competition], alea [chance], mimicry [simulation] and ilinx [vertigo].

All pronounce that play is essentially a separate occupation carefully isolated from the rest of life, engaged within precise limits of space, time and meaning according to fixed rules. Play’s domain is therefore a restricted, closed, protected universe: a pure space.

There are however some paradoxes.  Play is claimed to be ‘unrelated to survival, production and profit’, yet it is also claimed that is crucial for the development of the species and the individual. 

The interdependence of games and culture:

Games are largely dependent upon the culture in which they are conceived and practiced.  Hopscotch for example was as a labyrinth until Christianity saw the layout become that of a basilica, and Chess, which arguably originates from India, was played with 4 kings.  Following the spread to medieval Europe the game evolved to better represent European monarchical structure. 

Games the world over provide proof of the constancy of human nature on certain levels, to the extent that civilisation and its context may be characterized by its games.  This affirms the paradox that play cannot be completely withdrawn from the serious and expresses the interdependence of play with culture, but also underlines the relationship between play the very foundations of human instinct.

“Because its there.”

Was the answer offered by Mallory, world acclaimed climber and mountaineer, when asked: “Why did you want to climb Mt. Everest?”

The climber on the rock face, hanging on by his fingertips, is as immersed in a plane of reality as anyone can be.  With the constant risk of imminent death it cannot be argued that climbing as an activity is divorced from reality, however it is the condition of experience of this particular reality that defines climbing as play.

Sport and athletics shows play stiffening into seriousness but still being felt as play.  The business of sport is seen by many to overshadow the very substance of what sport stands for.  For Francis Wallace, author of Dementia Pigskin [a book on the importance of American football on American society], football is work, play, entertainment and sport.  Rather vague but in his antithesis between amateur and professional teams he cites the importance of business in modern sport.  He also attacks the American National Collegiate Athletic Association for unrealistic standards of amateurism, since football requires money.

In some respects actual business, the very station of ‘work’ and ’seriousness’, is found to degenerate into play yet still be called serious.  Commercial competition is not considered in the realm of sacred play-forms.  It exists only when a field of commercial activity demands the ‘players’ to jockey and pit oneself against his commercial opponent.  Business becomes play and because of this competitive element commercial rivalry soon makes the implementation of limiting rules imperative, hence Trading Customs.

The play-element in business is brought about in statistical analysis and trading records and in the egotistical and competitive desire to express triumph in breaking these records.  This highly ludic contrive is a beneficial for profitability, and is instilled into the workforce to motivate and increase production.

Business is deemed the opposite polemic to ‘true’ play, and identifies a distinction between the amateur and the professional – The spirit of the professional has lost the true play spirit, and with it the impromptu and cavalier nature of the amateur.

There is strength in being an amateur.