¶ … Play material
Defining Play
To define what it means to 'play,' I first turned to the dictionary. Immediately, when I looked at the entry for "play" given by freedictonary.com, I was confronted with a seemingly limitless list of different definitions of the word "play." To play can mean to act in "jest or sport," or "to occupy oneself in amusement, sport, or other recreation." The noun "play" can also mean a drama or comedy on the stage, and the verb to play can mean to play a part a work of theater. A play can mean to employ a particular maneuver during a game, or to play a particular position in a sport. These definitions suggest responsibility rather than the apparently free and discursive nature of play.
As someone who has played football in college, I appreciate the sense that 'play' can be both fun and serious work. I began playing sports for recreation, like most children, and gradually grew more serious about the pursuit as I played at a more competitive level, finally becoming the kicker for the University of Miami. Professional athletes commanding salaries in the millions must play their games with even more deadly seriousness, while nonprofessional athletes consider the same sporting games a fun way to unwind after a hard day. No one is a 'recreational' doctor or lawyer, but you can be a recreational athlete. Yet playing activities like playing a sport can be a job, or feel like work, and sometimes working on a challenging problem at a job can feel like fun.
This uncertainty of what it means to play is evident in the title of Brian Sutton-Smith's essay on "Play and Ambiguity." Sutton-Smith suggests there are different kinds of play 'scripts,' what he calls seven rhetoric types of play. Sutton-Smith says that one type of play is "play as fate," which is playing a game of chance, like the lottery. This is not necessarily play as fun, and certainly not play as hard work. Another type of play...
Then there is "play as identity," like celebrating a family or a religious ritual. Celebrating Christmas as a family is not just fun, it is a way of coming home and saying 'I love you' to your relatives. In contrast, "imaginary play' is a kind of escapism, like reading a book or watching television in a way that takes you out of your sense of personal identity.
There is also play "applied to the self," or totally escapist play like engaging in a personal hobby and totally "frivolous play," like playing a joke on someone. But the question arises, however, what do all of these kinds of play have in common? What does watching television have in common with playing blackjack? Perhaps the only uniting idea is all these types of play allow the player to temporarily escape from the mundane realities of life. One of the reasons that people find sports entertaining is that the game has nothing to do with their work, school, or family lives. The rules are clearly defined, as are the winners and losers. No matter how seriously you take the game, there are no consequences to your actions that extend beyond the playing field, unless you are a professional or college athlete, when your salary or scholarship is on the line. That is why these athletes are not just players, but workers.
Play demands intense focus and concentration, but it can be abandoned after the end of a set time. Perhaps this is why people who 'work' at play, like professional athletes, might take up a fun sport that they know they do not shine in, to unwind from the pressures of their playing arena. Michael Jordan used to enjoy golf, for example, when he was still a competitive basketball player. Play ceases to be play when it has life-threatening consequences. Sports fans that riot…
