---
date: '2023-10-18'
description: the state of being.
id: play
modified: 2026-10-27 09:56:22 GMT-04:00
tags:
- pattern
- philosophy
title: Play
created: '2023-10-18'
published: '2023-10-18'
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slug: thoughts/play
permalink: https://aarnphm.xyz/thoughts/play.md
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---
> 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](https://paulgraham.com/ds.html)
### software.
![[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ao8GS488hA&t=579s&ab_channel=StrangeLoopConference]]
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](https://woolgather.sh/issue/2)
Can we shift [[thoughts/education#system|education system]] away from assessing students to let them explore their own interests?
[Magic Circle](https://subconscious.substack.com/p/magic-circles) or [from squishy\[dot\]computer](https://newsletter.squishy.computer/p/magic-circles)
- A magic circle marks the space and time in which participants follow the rules of a game. Those rules give actions their meaning: moving a chess piece counts as a move because the players have agreed to play. The boundary remains permeable to ordinary life.
- boundaries of magic circle often via ceremonies:
- National Anthem before olympics game
- Gong before yoga class
- Walking down the aisle at a wedding
The threshold suggests a connection to [liminal space](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminality) in anthropology. [Conway’s Game of Life](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life) raises a separate question about what rules can generate. Its cellular patterns follow fixed update rules; the magic circle concerns the meanings participants give to playing. [An interactive Life implementation](https://www.physics.umd.edu/hep/drew/life/) makes those update rules visible.
Graeber on [What’s the point if we can’t have fun](https://davidgraeber.org/articles/whats-the-point-if-we-cant-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
### [
> \[!notes\] Philosophy as play
>
> Involves a form of perspective shifting: trying on or inhabit alternative perspective
C. Thi Nguyen calls trying out other belief systems for fun intellectual playfulness.[^1] An epistemic trap shapes what someone counts as evidence: a conspiracy theory can treat every challenge as further proof of the conspiracy. Play can prompt someone to explore a perspective their usual beliefs would dismiss. Nguyen argues that this offers a possible way out of such traps; enjoying an idea does not establish that it is true.
[^1]: C. Thi Nguyen, [Playfulness Versus Epistemic Traps](https://philpapers.org/archive/NGUPVE.pdf)
or also, [trying playing if you haven’t in a while](https://zaira.blog/blog/try-playing-if-you-havent-in-a-while/)
### 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
#### pretentiousness
In [[library/Pretentiousness|Pretentiousness: Why It Matters]], Dan Fox defends the room to try unfamiliar forms of art and ways of living. Calling someone pretentious can discourage that exploration, especially when it tells them to stay within their class or social role.
Necessitates freedom, conditional freedom?
Play often initiate some sort of pressure, such that it expects us to be a part of the construction.
] 
