Let's Play a Game: How Play Has Made Me See The World Again

My favorite feeling when consuming a piece of media is when it makes me see the world, my life, or the people around me in a different light. I think this is a pretty common experience amongst most people. But some examples that come to mind immediately, in no particular order, with limited surface level notes of some of my takeaways, slightly favoring more recent things:

1. Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer - Read when I was in high school, still think about it today. Considering humans as interconnected stewards of an ecosystem centering the practices and knowledge of indigenous people.

   
   

2. Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin - Reading right now! Beautiful, beautiful meditation on love and queerness. Lines that I have saved that make me think about how love and care manifest.

   
   

3. Suspiria (2018) - Finished watching literally an hour and a half before writing this blog post. Changed how I think about dance and the visceral beauty of the human body, how it conveys emotion and story through movement

   
   

4. Tunic - Played over the summer. Reframed puzzle games to me and what it means to build a compelling video game beyond genre. I thought I didn't like Souls-like games or puzzle games, but turns out I like both if its Tunic.

I think it comes as no surprise when I say that media changes the way we think. Reading books, watching movies, playing games--My favorite ones reframe my world.

But to finally get to my half-baked thought, I think that I've experienced something slightly different with learning about games, particularly games studies and game design than I did with learning about other critical media studies and how to write a story or how to write a script.

With games, learning how to make them has made me fundamentally change how I approach the world in my everyday life, almost at every waking moment, and not just necessarily when I play a boardgame with my friends or when I open Stardew Valley. Learning how to make games, and in part also being around likeminded people, has made me feel as though I've recentered and rediscovered "play" in my life, something that I think people largely end up losing after childhood.

I recently read a bit of "Play Matters," by Miguel Sicart, which I think puts into words a lot of the thoughts I've been having about the nebulous, slippery concept of "play" recently, which I'll use to structure my ideas a bit. The following sections are quotes from the first chapter, "Play Is."

"Play is a dance between creation and destruction, between creativity and nihilism."

Let's start with this one, which I have often seen quoted in other games literature. Sicart's description of play is a deeply romantic one that I believe reflects its intrinsic nature in humanity. Maybe some find it too slippery, but I've found thinking of play as a "dance between creation and destruction" gives it a gravity as well as a lightheartedness--It gives the terrible act of balancing creation and destruction to a dance. How lovely is that? Maybe I'm still thinking of Suspiria.

"I see play as a portable tool for being."

Now to get more into how I've centered play in my own life, I like to think of this quote. I like thinking of play as a "portable tool for being" because it gives a visual for what I mean when I say I've recentered "play." In other words, when I'm in the world, I'm thinking "how can I play?" which is slightly different but often a good segue into "how can I find joy?" When I wake up to my alarm, tired, I play by bothering my partner awake in new and novel ways. When I drag myself out the door into the below freezing temperatures to walk to the bus stop, I play as someone in a sweltering desert, dancing my way across hot sand instead of dirty snow. These are my tools for being--For making sense of the world, and for seeing my place in it as something other than a repeat of just the day before.

I also like the idea of play as a "tool," because I've been thinking of microgames a lot (I had an assignment about them), and after coming up with a bunch, I also think of them as little instruments I carry in my belt (the ones that I like at least) to reorient and reframe my world with whimsy instead of monotony. One example that I think has been really prominent in my life has been a game I've been calling Reverse I Spy.

Here's how I play:

1. Do a mundane task or be in a transitory state with your partner (or someone you laugh with). It's usually walking to the bus stop, or walking home from the bus stop. One time it was during a lull in the conversation at breakfast.

2. Stop talking.

3. Come up with a category in your head. For less experienced players, you might start with something easy, like "things that are green." For more advanced options, you might consider, "things that could hold liquid," or "things that are man-made."

4. Silently point at different objects. The first time, perhaps explain the game, but every other time, just start pointing at things. It's fun to point at things.

5. Your partner will realize the game is happening and probably say something like "oh no, not this again." It's okay because it's an ongoing bit between the two of you.

6. Your partner guesses your category to win.

You might be surprised how much mileage I've gotten out of a game as stupid as this, but I think there's something so gleeful and almost mischievous in starting this game, and in general with the phrase, "let's play a game." It reminds you of joy. It reminds you to laugh. It grounds you to focus on just one thing, rather than the one million things in the world these days that demand your attention.

"This is a theory that acts as a call to playful arms, an invocation of play as a struggle against efficiency, seriousness, and technical determinism."

Speaking of grounding yourself, I think that this final idea from Sicart encapsulates how play has infiltrated my inner philosophies. Sure, play is good and fun, but I think on a larger scale that a world without play is a terrible dystopia that has not yet come to pass, despite people's best efforts at being serious.

And of course I think this quote touches on anti-capitalist ideals, especially I think in terms of pushing back against endless efficiency and production to the benefit of the upper crust and at the cost of the workers behind it. All work and no play, etc etc. After all, play deliberately requires us to follow arbitrary rules that make goals harder! When "play" becomes a way of being rather than a privilege or a commodity, it allows us to see happiness, not as an eventual biproduct of working hard all the time for the potential of reward, but rather as something perhaps readily available through the tool of play. I'm sure others have delved into a Marxist critique of play before, and certainly with more rigor, and I'll probably check them out and report back at a later moment. But for now, I'll conclude with this: Without play, we live in a world where a bush is just a bush and not a clue in a silly game of Reverse I Spy. Where walking to the bus stop in the morning is just a grey miserable trudge in the cold. Where waking up feels the same everyday. So yes, I've centered play in my world, "an invocation of play," to call upon because it's one of the most surefire ways I've found joy.