Play Is Not A Game
Shepherd Siegel

Only the highest achievements will do for our children. For every child in America must grow up to be president, or a star athlete, or a scholar, or a business success…mustn’t they? Gobs of money, fame, and bold leadership are what we’ re about. It seems a sin to even mention, let alone address, ordinary outcomes for children and youth. We can’t talk about their best interests unless it is in the language of celebrity and the highest possible human achievement. It’ s our national religion. And it’s a lie.

The examples and stories we feed to our children are all of highly educated, highly talented, or highly paid professionals. Woe unto Charlie Brown, Ramona Quimby, and Bart Simpson. And, yes, this obsession was tempered on the morning of Nine Eleven when it was firefighters, police officers, and construction workers who were the heroes.

But that’s the point. Even if our zealous devotion to the choicest careers becomes more democratized, we are still obsessed with the overachiever, the hero, the extraordinary performer. We feel the pressure and we pass the competitive imperative on to our children. I tip my hat to the parents and families who fight this inhuman standard-setting and love their children and want them to just be happy. And I would not be so bold as to proffer the heresy that people shouldn’t seek to excel and be all that they can be. But I do believe that a life is well-lived and a life is fulfilled when a being takes time to break from competition and pursuits of high achievement, and simply engage in play — not sports, contests or games, but play.

I am not making the case for mediocrity. I am saying that excellence, as our society has framed it, has fallen far short of bringing peace and balance to the world. And I am saying that an expanded search and effort for spiritual excellence at the societal level — which play offers — is in order.

I believe that when parents nourish the play of their children, and when play is sustained beyond early childhood, we get a glimpse of the life that celebrates more than it competes. We grossly undervalue play in our society, to the same extent that we have a bloated obsession with competition, achievement and winning.

Play is a principle basic to life, and it should be for society as well. The messages of art, comedy, children, history, and folk culture scream a hundred ways to make this argument. Yet another is the wisdom of our spiritual traditions. The basis for such a proposition is found in the Jewish concept of Sabbath. In his essay “The Sabbath,” Abraham Joshua Heschel explains that “The Sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays; the weekdays are for the sake of Sabbath.” It is not an interlude, but the climax of living1 ... The world has already been created and will survive without the help of man…on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul.”2

But with what do we fill this Sabbath moment?

Certainly, rest. The body, mind, and spirit need and love rest. One should never feel guilt but only joy and appreciation of life in rest.
And meditation and prayer, however that comes to you.

But also play. Play, like rest, meditation and prayer, is free of the competition to control space, and is therefore open to the magic of eternity. Play is not for the sake of recharging the batteries before the next cycle of work and achievement.

Play is for its own sake, is its own reward. It is very hard for us to get to the idea that our achieving is for the sake of play, not the other way around. For “life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern.”3

What is Play?

The opposite of play is not work. The opposite of play is contest and competition. There are at least four kinds of play: cultural, deep, original, and social. The classic philosophical book on play is Johann Huizinga’s Homo Ludens.4 It is a brilliant and essential piece. Huizinga describes contest, or cultural play. Such a definition thrusts us into paradox, for contest is the opposite of the other three types of play. And Huizinga implicitly grasps this: competition at its most enjoyable — like in well-played sports — thrives on some of the same juices found in other forms of play.

Deep play is the exhilaration found most often in solitary pursuits where one reaches a level of blissful connection with nature. It can be hiking or bicycling, painting or praying or playing music. As described by poet and writer Diane Ackerman in her book by the same name,5 deep play lis an inner experience necessary to the full enjoyment of play. In deep play, one can play well, but does not necessarily play well with others.

Original play gets closer to the authentic kinds of activities where play enriches our lives and stimulates societal growth. As described and practiced by trainer and writer Fred Donaldson, original play is a social activity amongst beings, in fact it is the primary socializing activity of all life forms.6 As we engage in the basic but profound acts of frolicking, rolling, laughing, people are able to touch that life force that is in the diet of all animals and pre-cultural humans (infants). It’ s something we forget how to do as parents: we start to play games or learn sports that revolve around scorekeeping and ranking, none of which can occur in original play. In contest, we are preoccupied with the excelling of the self. In original play, the self is forgotten as we connect with something larger.

There is play in the pretend-fighting of dogs, where the rules of “I am going to bite you” are observed and then suspended immediately before any harm is even possible. If you get down on the ground with a small child under the age of four and roll around without clutching, tickling, or hitting, you can have great fun without it ever becoming an actual game, or without attaching moral lessons to the cavorting. After a half-hour or so, you will emerge from the experience, body and soul refreshed. These are forms of original play.

Finally, we come to social play, which is what happens when original play comes into direct contact with the many public realms of our society that are seriously engaged in cultural play. Social play takes on the paradox of getting into a contest with contest — fighting the power. In a society that is based upon competition and ranking, social play is a seditious act that rattles the foundations of convention and proposes the peaceful and fun age that we have never known.

Take, for example, the twentieth century. The Impressionists presented fine art imbued with the principles of original play new ways of looking at the world. They were also the first to popularize an anti-materialist, bohemian life. There is no debating that they sought to get paid well for their art, but through their struggles and their play, they challenged the idea of art as a marketable commodity. They sought out a reality deeper than commerce, even as their break from France’ s patronage system laid the foundation for a new market. Since then, that new market has been a huge capital success, but it has killed art’s potential to liberate.

With a ghastly world war to oppose, dadas took their cue from the Impressionists — not a new market, but NO market. They refused to connect their art with a market system, and refused all conventions of meaning. In a word, the dadas played — dada IS play, and dada art merely artifact: the shed skin, the residue of moments of play. Stop viewing art and start jumping into the pool of Life and Play was the clear message of the dadas.

The Beats would renew the cycle in the post-World War II shadow of a possible nuclear holocaust. With the focus shifted from painting to poetry and literature, with mass media as a possible catalyst of cultural movement, the Beats rediscovered the bohemian life and made it their own. Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs were players of the highest order. Their rebel lives simply and sincerely rejected materialism. In the midst of a competition-based society, they reached — through writing, drinking, loving, drugging, and meditating — for some crazy equilibrium that was play-based. They tried to get and give a glimpse of what the American character, denuded of its competitive mania, might be.

The hippies took this glimpse and ran with it. Where dada and the Beats had reached the level of highly successful cult, the hippies were able to create a mass culture and the largest Western foray into social play. Many ingredients were there. There was another major war to oppose. An antiwar movement is a statement that the contest has definitely gotten out of hand. Thus, to be against war is to be for play. War is the ultimate contest-based activity, the archetype of sports.

Where painting, poetry, and literature had been the emblematic art forms of previous social play efforts, music provided and fed off of the energy of the Sixties counterculture. The antiwar movement, the power of the rock music explosion, the grandeur of the drug experience, the element of lightning-fast media, and mass participation in all of these for the first time, suggested that a play-based society was not the aberrant thinking of some radical art movement. It was a distinct possibility.

The war ended, the politics became dogmatic , the drugs got abused, and the music scene imploded, its rebel energy to be resurrected through punk and grunge, whose huge followings are more gradually connecting to a social vision and cultural movement. As the Surrealists provided haven for the activist element of dada, the human potential movement and leaders/thinkers like Gregory Bateson, Buckminster Fuller, and Stewart Brand carried on some of the vision for a play-based society. Abbie Hoffman, John Lennon, and Yoko Ono had an uncanny genius for playing with the media and provoking the American consciousness into considering a cancellation of the achievement contest. Throwing dollar bills from the gallery of the New York Stock Exchange. Running a pig for president. Conducting a weeklong press conference and love-in from bed to promote peace.

Had these heroes and warriors of play been able to bring such behavior to Josie and Joe Sixpack, unimagined gateways to peace, love, play, and fun could have opened and heralded a new age. But the closest we got was someone like Andy Kaufman, who lacked the political understanding of Hoffman, Ono, or Lennon, but brilliantly juxtaposed play into unexpected arenas and gave us all cause to question business as usual. Elvis impersonations. Intergender wrestling matches. Milk and cookies following a Carnegie Hall performance. Kaufman knew volumes about play, and struggled through play to break out of his individualism. But for all this, Kaufman was still stuck in the obsession with self. Original play requires the ability to give the self up for the moment, thus creating the opportunity for a collective experience. Try as he might, the prison of comedy’s format thwarted him.

Kaufman may not have been able to play well with others, but it is the market system surrounding art, not his best intentions, that stultify that possibility. Social play is the as yet unlearned capacity to bring original play into the societal arena. Because it is anathema to a market system (i.e., competition) it, is subversive.

Experiments in such collective quasi-social play have occurred: the shared consciousness experienced in any particularly sensitive musical concert. Jazz is the most likely location for such an experience, and John Coltrane’s quartet exhibited such grace; Grateful Dead concerts were famous for it. And the writing and seminars conducted by David Bohm addressed it directly. Bohm experimented in what science fiction writer John Wyndham called the ability of groups to “think together.” He represents a deliberate search for the possibilities of a higher consciousness that could be experienced by a group that applies the principles of original play to dialogue. In other words, whether through physical play or dialogue, a group is seeking to have pieces fit together non-competitively to develop a greater whole, without having a predetermined insistence on what that whole should look like. And it’s interesting to note that our fascination with the humanistic science fiction writers like Wyndham, Asimov, Heinlein and Bradbury has been beaten down by the onslaught of ejaculatory sports-minded fantasy/sci-fi/action films that overwhelm humanity with mindless kinetics.

So this is the metaphor for our times. Not play. While it might have been risky to suggest society re-balanced in favor of play, peace, love, understanding, and fun before Nine Eleven today it must seem ludicrous. Today our very existence seems to depend upon our patriotism, ranking and selecting the very best pilots for our military, security for our public places (don’ t even think of doing anything playful or out of the ordinary in public), leaders for our hapless businesses and government, and so on. And our educational reforms are cranked up to evaluate every student, teacher, school and district based upon simple numbers that tell us what each student has achieved and how well. Such betrayals of freedom, of authentic learning, are falling into place right on schedule for this jingoistic national reorganization.

American competitiveness is not entirely bad, but the bloated size and finances of our sports institutions are emblematic of how it is way out of proportion. So it is with our national preoccupation with overachievement. This is hurting our kids, hurting our culture, depriving many of the true enjoyment of life that is found in original play.

We need to consider the implications of re-proportioning the achievement contest our sports institutions like Major League Baseball, the NFL, and the NBA so aptly represent, typically with one winner and twenty-nine losers. Martin Buber said that “Play is the exultation of the possible” and not the elimination of a competitor’s sense of possibility.

The world waits for a demonstration of the great American freedoms we are willing to mobilize the most powerful army in history to protect. That freedom is not about competition, though a free market is a part of our free society, however out-of- hand it may have become. That freedom is about the freedom to pursue happiness, through the release of the creative…art; through the formation of the collective…community; and through the spiritual pursuit of a higher order of being in the world…play.

Footnotes

1. The Sabbath, by Abraham Joshua Heschel, 1951, 1952, Meridian Books, New York, 1963, p. 14, wherein he quotes Rabbi Solomo Alkabez, Lecha Dodi; The Evening Service for the Sabbath; and Zohar, I, 75, respectively
2. Ibid., p. 13.
3. Ibid., p. 3.
4. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, (Boston: Beacon, 1950),
5. Diane Ackerman, Deep Play (New York: Random House, 1999.
6. O. Fred Donaldson, Playing by Heart: The Vision and Practice of Belonging (Nevada City, CA: Touch the Future, 1993).