Play

play?

intentional activity of doing the thing you want to do

⇒ create share ownership of spaces which competition cannot and have as much fun as we can. Turn life into a canvas, rather a graph with checkpoint.

Throw away your 5-year life plan, to create a garden of your curiosity

Commercial viability vs. creativity endeavour, Do thing that don’t scale

software.

🏀 A Note on Playful Software 🏀

Playful software != video games. I mean tinkerable, whimsical, playful consumer software: creative software, social networks, dating apps, messengers

Play that's not segregated from ordinary life pic.twitter.com/cHyGpcI9m8

— XH (@xhfloz) 19 septembre 2023

Four components

• whimsy
• new people
• surprise
• joy

Involves freedom of choice - social - about the process

Create spaces not product

not necessarily meaning you are doing for yourself, but make it possible for others to utilise the space.

Play as a form of tinkering

Internet playground

Can we shift education system away from assessing students to let them explore their own interests?

Magic Circle

• is a space which a game takes place. Once we step into it, we suspend the rules of life, allow the rules of the game to take over our interactions

• boundaries of magic circle often via ceremonies:

  • National Anthem before olympics game
  • Gong before yoga class
  • Walking down the aisle at a wedding

⇒ similar to the idea of liminal space in anthropology, or Game of life

Graeber on What’s the point of we can’t have fun

Why does the existence of action carried out for the sheer pleasure of acting, the exertion of powers for the sheer pleasure of exerting them, strike us as mysterious? What does it tell us about ourselves that we instinctively assume that it is?

• “Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man” (Friedrich Schiller, 1795)

philosophy

Philosophy as play

Involves a form of perspective shifting: trying on or inhabit alternative perspective

Intellectual playfulness¹, loosely, is the disposition to try out new ideas, perspectives and systems of thought (involves perspective shifting) for the sheer joy of it. It is a disposition to explore ideas for the value of exploration itself.

• intellectually playful exploration sometimes can better serve the goal of finding the truth, than will exploration that is strictly aimed at finding the truth
• it functions against epistemic traps: belief systems that undermine our epistemic efforts, leaving us stuck inside them

Irony

Play involves lightness with rules — the ability to lightly step away from but also the ability to lightly adopt.

To be serious about a game is to play it under the idea that its goals are really and genuinely important — as an Olympic athlete does.

To be playful about games is neither to be utterly serious, or utterly ironic, but to move easily into and out of commitments to rule-sets

To be playful is to wear the games’ care lightly

To be playful is to be pretentious

Pretentious: Why It Matters by Daniel Fox

• argues that pretentious invokes curiosity and creativity, instead of negative connotation

Necessitates freedom, conditional freedom?

Play often initiate some sort of pressure, such that it expects us to be a part of the construction.

Footnotes

1. excerpt from Playfulness vs Epistemic Traps ↩