Defining Play

¶ … 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 is "play as power" where play shows someone's status -- for example, by being the best on a particular team gives someone status, even if the individual is not having playful fun at the moment. 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 during a game out of anger are no longer described as playing, enjoying the escapist pleasure of "play applied to the self." Instead, they have invested play with something larger than the meaning of the game itself, like people who use a win or a loss by a favorite sports team as an excuse to loot and rob or to protest the injustices of their community. When someone gambles away his salary, or her life savings, that person is no longer called a player, but an addict, someone whose conduct at recreation has had a negative impact beyond the immediate playing grounds where the activity takes place.

However, although play may have no consequences, according to Richard Schechner's definition of "Play," play must have some rules. To act in a play, a player must remember lines; otherwise the progress of the play will be disrupted. A player who ignores the rules of the game will cause the game to end, as people will not want to play in a game where everyone can do what he or she pleases. The score begins to seem meaningless, and the activity, however much taken up in fun, no longer feels like fun.

Even during the festive type of play, family and personal celebrations have certain rules. Families eat certain foods, mark certain days as special, and obey certain rituals. These are the collective rules of play, like having turkey on Thanksgiving, or Christmas on December 25th. Trying to change the day for the ritual often feels strange, and somehow 'not right.' Also, families have certain rules for play, like how certain relatives should be respected, and the fact that everyone has to come home for the holiday. Communities and families keep to the rules of play, and just like a game creates a common, intense bond between all of the players, everyone "at play" during a celebration feels a sense of community and unity not present during their individual ordinary lives.

Practicing for a competitive sport is defined as "working out" or "drilling," the language of effort is used rather than "playing a game." And even though when I was a kicker at the University of Miami, and I felt that all eyes were on my performance in a way that sometimes made me feel filled with tension, I still also felt a kind of release from playing and a bond with my teammates that I did not get when I was lifting weights alone in the gym, and kicking balls in practice across the field. Working out alone, the individual makes the rules in solitude, thus he or she is not engaged not 'play,' not even the imaginative play of reading a book according to the 'rules' of the alphabet.