Play, a Tentative, Operational Definition

Introduction

In sanskrit the word ‘maya’ at one and the same time means ‘play’, ‘magic’ and ‘to discover (or create) the world’ (1).

Play in other words regards the access of man to the phenomenal world, and great philosophers from Plato (2) to Nietzsche (3) and Wittgenstein (4) reflecting on the basics of epistemology and the fundamentals of existence repeatedly have been forced to reconsider the category of play. Thus, in H.-G. Gadamer’s ”philosophical hermeneutics”, play is the key category (5) through which human beings are brought on terms with the world and to mutual understanding. Hence, understanding, must be seen not exclusively as a linguistic phenomenon, but even more as a bodily project, and the embedding of play changes from a pedagogical, functional- to a basically existentialistic context. The German philosopher Eugen Fink, Husserl’s close collaborator, states that play is not just a means against central disturbances in the life of modern man, play is the undisturbed centre of life. (6)
Although the authors themselves are not unambiguous, two receptions have evolved, the fathers of which are John Locke (7) and J.J. Rousseau (8): A functionalist and a romantic.

The functionalist point of departure looks for the educational aspects of child behaviour. Childhood is seen as a time for learning, and the task is to put children’s natural energies into useful and virtuous frames, where -- with due respect to the child’s motivation and ability -- you can teach it a sense of duty, obedience, cleanliness, frugality and precision, and where you also can use the child’s innate curiosity to teach productivity, dexterity and the virtues of tradesmen.

The romanticist view sees childhood in itself as a valuable state. The viewpoint is developed particularly by the end of the 18th century in the showdown against absolutism. All features for which the sovereign could not take credit were praised:

Feeling, presentiment, the myth, history, the supernatural, but also the ”natural” in the shape of the simple tradesman or the artless milkmaid. Especially childhood is highly evaluated, because the unspoiled child is seen as closer to nature than the affected adults, spoiled as they are from the norms and standards of absolute society.

From a play and sports perspective the two diametrical oppositions are extremely relevant.

On one hand, the child’s own play can be seen as a spontaneous and natural value in itself, while the modern sport education can be regarded as an assault on the child’s own culture and potentials of bodily expression, which through sports are staged, narrowed, and accelerated in a particular one-sided way.

On the other hand adult sport activity can be seen as one of the few possibilities for grown-ups to escape from daily needs and demands for efficiency, goal oriented and functional behaviour into a field of bodily presence, expressions of life, feelings, fun and irrationality, where the only limits of freedom are set by the hidden agenda of the working-life matrix.

Thesis
When the process is taken more seriously than the result, people play, or contrary, when the result is the more important, they work. Expressed in simple formulas, P being the process and R the result:
P/R > 1 = Play; p/R < 1 = Work.

This definition of play vs. labour is surely incomplete. In some instances it might come short, and in others it might be disputable whether it includes phenomena that cannot be considered play, but it is simple, and it grasps something essential in the field of play, and as an operational tool it is well apt for discussions about what is included and what must be ruled out.

Importance-games
A major issue is formed by the question whether sports, and in particular modern achievement sports, should be considered a kind of play. Certainly achievement sports are goal-oriented. In fact results are the very constituent of achievement sports. How can the process be the more important?

Bernhard Suits (9) points out that games are also constituted by the choice of means that are inefficient. The objective is not to win, but to win (or to achieve certain goals) under the observance of restricting and regulating rules, which draws the attention to the technical performance - to the process of overcoming the obstacles formed by the rules. On top of that, one will often find aesthetic criteria linked to a given performance: The play most be entertaining, amusing, fair, beautiful etc.

In ”Tour de France”, for instance, the participants must use a bike, not a motorcycle. They must abstain from a wide range of drugs, and in terms of aesthetic they are expected to display heroism. In soccer, the legal ways to conquer a ball from an opponent are limited. If an opponent is just punched, or other illegal means are engaged (and observed by the referee), appropriate kinds of penalties will be given. Also the players are expected to play in an entertaining manner, but the only sanction for breaking that ”rule” might be the scorn of the spectators.

However, desires for ranks, money and records always form obvious temptations to cheat in ways not controllable for the officials, and to pay more attention to efficiency than to beauty.

Circumvention of rules in order to attain a higher degree of efficiency is infinitely attempted. The breaking of game rules however, implies more than just a fault. To the degree the rules are constituent, the breaking represents a threat to the game itself: If you do not play the game, there is no game (depending in praxis, of course, of the amount, the seriousness and the degree of bad will in the offence). - If a mountaineer uses a helicopter to reach the summit, he is certainly not mountaineering. - The English ”this is not cricket” indicate that even aesthetic criteria could be constituent in sports games.

All this means that there is a very delicate balance between rules and achievement, which affirms that winning is not all.
Minor leagues, school sports etc.

When we talk in categories like school sport, sport for all, leisure sport, voluntary amateur sport etc., it is easily agreed, that the results seen from a bird’s perspective are unimportant. The press and the public don’t remember and don’t care. And even those involved will often forget the result after a day or two. A series of interviews with youngsters involved in low-level amateur basket ball tournaments revealed that the boys were very precise about ranking and team results and the potential of the different teams during the whole tournament. Many girls, however, would not have any idea about the ranking of their team. Nor would they remember the name of opposing teams, the score of their matches, and in many cases not even if they had won or lost (10). Undoubtedly there is a gender specific component in this, and the result draws the attention to the social construction of importance and prestige. For a teen-age boy in Denmark reality was constructed to give a win in his match a lot of importance, prestige and meaning. For a young girl this was not the case, - at least at the time, when the interviews were made.

It could be argued that the importance of such results is a matter of maturity, and that the boys eventually will learn to put such events into their ‘right proportions’, but would that be fair to a huge number of adult male low-level sportsmen and a similar number of proud fathers fencing the pools and soccer fields all over the world? What are ‘the right proportions’? Shouldnt the result of a match in which you are personally involved be more important than the result of a televised game, no matter how strongly you identify with your favourites?

We are facing a true dilemma, which could be expressed in the following statement about the immaterial values of sport: ”What do you lose, and what do you win, if you try to win at any cost?”

It is maintained that the process, which leads to the win must be more ”valuable” than victory itself, if the ongoing event should be characterised as play, but how do we make the account? How do we specify the values of the process, respectively the values of the win? We are dealing with entities that are vague, subjective, indefinable and incommensurable. Nevertheless, we expect a well integrated person, with a healthy sense of proportion, within his own cultural context to be able to judge whether a sports event is play or not. And, judging, he participates in the social construction of certain sportive activities as either play or not. The decision is not arbitrary, but refers to the qualitative and quantitative amount of rule violation tolerated in the achievement of the objectives of the game, but it is also connected to a set of less definable rules of expectation concerning aesthetic qualities: Are the players doing their best, are they showing the right spirit and grace etc. And it is connected to individual sensuousness of pleasure or frustration, but also collectively related to compassion and the ability to identify with the pleasure or frustration of others. Furthermore, the decision does not exclude that it is part of the play, to play that the result is of immense importance and reign supremely. But if the ends sanctify the means and methods, play has vanished.

Top Sports
At first glance the relevance of a definition of play in relation to extreme and high-level professional sports seems to create new problems.

Top-sports events are commercial show-commodities, living a parasitic life, deeply indebted to amateur sports in the good old days, and produced by means of hard work based on a sporting labour force, which seem to be severely exploited in respect to health, labour conditions and economy, -- the latter with the exception of a number of stars? The results are of immense economic importance, and there is no room for play.

However, this is only part of the picture. Many pro-disciplines do not pay off. Many top-sports disciplines are not spectacular and might only have media attention every four years, when they appear at the Olympic programme. Many sponsors and club owners lose a lot of money on their love for the sport, and most sport stars, when interviewed, declare that they are going to stop the very second they do not think it is fun anymore. Furthermore this fun and love, with exceptions, come from the process and not from triumphs or money, and it creates a paradox for our definition as high skill and extremely hard, goal-oriented work for the top athlete often seems to lead to the highest degrees of pleasure, excitement and perhaps play.

Furthermore, professional soccer players continue to play for fun on an amateur level, when they have finished their career, or, if they are too injured, they might start as golfers. Professional yachtsmen continue as leisure sailors.

I am not trying to paint an idyllic scenery. The real motives can be hard to explore. Of course financial and bodily exploitation, lack of freedom, corruption by success, money and desire to win, and dilemmas about health and achievement, impossible to solve for those involved, is part of the picture. But the general impression is that of motivation, commitment and pleasure, regardless of the fact that many elite athletes might be able to earn more money and perhaps even more prestige in more secure fields. We must conclude that a primary motivation for participation in top-sports is aesthetic, neither rationally connected to the brain, nor morally connected to the heart, but located somewhere in taste and stomach. This binding even seems stronger for the top-athlete than for the average (not to mention the spectators) where hysteria about results and strange behaviour during the process seem far more frequent.

HRA
When it comes to extreme sports, particularly high risk activities, where the performer puts his life at stake according to calculated risks, the relation between process and result is even more complex. From one point of view it could be stated that no play enterprise is worth a life-risk, meaning that whatever you do, when the activity is called playing with death, you do not play. According to definition it is congruent with the idea, that the result is so important, that no process, no life-experience, could be more important or valuable.

From another point of view extreme sports present the athlete to thrills and fears that reminds him or her about the preciousness of life. To play with your life could also be considered the essence of play - a statement about the importance of putting the process above the result in an absolute appreciation of life: To live is to risk life.

The important tool

Therapies
From an evolutionary -, a therapeutic - , a pedagogic - point of view, the definition is problematic, because play in order to be relevant in these contexts must have a purpose and must be seen as a means whether for the development of the species, for health and hygiene, or for the individual adaptation of social, physical or psychic skills. The pedagogue or the therapist may call an activity ”play” but will, simultaneously, work with a hidden agenda about the results to which the ”play” is supposed to lead. Also, from the agent’s point of view, if play-exercises are done in order to achieve certain goals, they might involve some fun, but if the goals are sufficiently important play and fun deteriorates into hard labour.
 
It must be held in mind that the player’s own motivation for play very seldom is consciously and primarily rooted in the desire to grow up and survive, to gain health or to acquire social, psychological or physical skills. If such desires were to be part of a definition of play, counterproductive examples, where the activity would be anything but play, could easily be mentioned (11).

Of course, this does not mean that therapeutic, evolutionary or pedagogic aspects of play are irrelevant. Only that play unspecified and per se does not automatically serve these purposes. Carefully selected and organised, plays might be used as tools that hopefully would realise these potential additional benefits of play activities. At least the fascination of play is often so strong that the instrumental use will make the object of a given therapy swallow many a bitter pill without any harm done.

Outing
But is that always the case? In for instance adventure sports, selection seems to be based more on fashion than on knowledge when border crossing tends to be a therapeutic mantra used to solve any kind of problems for children with social troubles. For these children the horrors of an unknown nature might be put on top of their social indisposition. It could seriously be considered whether border crossing or security is the need for a child whose personal limits are affronted on an everyday basis. For a well trained ranger, play, and fun are not of the same dimensions as they are in the eyes of a 12 year old city girl.

What expertise is available when it comes to the setting of challenges? What is the relation between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (12)? Only when the process in the child’s perspective is the fascinating part, the therapist’s work it is entitled to the name of play instead of dominance.

Sex
Another example that might evoke a reflection on the relation between process and result is sex. From an evolutionary point of view, sex is very important. Still a lot of people perform sex just for the fun of it and would rather in these cases not serve evolution. They play. But other couples might deeply want a baby without being very successful in their projects. As time goes they might employ all kinds of techniques with the result that fun fades and hard work takes over.

Auden’s conclusion
What is so important about games of frivolous results that they seem indifferent to any reason or morality? Why is it important to play them in a way that hides the precedence of the process over the outcome? What is really at stake?
In his essay from 1948, ”Squares and Oblongs”(13) W.H. Auden gives a rather cynical answer referring to aesthetics in general, but as it suits excellently for sports and games in particular, it also points to the true nature of these activities: ”Natural Man”, he states, ”hates nature, and the only act which can really satisfy him is the ”acte gratuite”. In this he finds freedom from necessity within his own rules and conditions.

Auden distinguishes between two kinds of ”gratuitous acts”, the crime and the ”innocent game”. The quality of the game is due to the circumstance that:

”The rules of a game give it the importance by making it difficult to play, a test of skill. In this however, they (the games) betray that they are really frivolous, because it means that they are only important to those who have the physical or mental gifts to play them, and that is a matter of chance.

Granted that a game is innocent, the test of whether one should play it or not is simply whether one enjoys playing it or not, because the better one plays the more one enjoy it.”

For this behaviour, which is basically aesthetic, Auden finds the explanation in a highly moralistic ”repetitious querulous day-dream” legally pronouncing itself in the phrase: ”Why doesn’t my neighbour love me for myself?” which decoded in a silent taboo reads:

”I do not love my neighbour as myself and may Good have mercy on my soul”.

References:

1. Schecherer, Richard: ”The Future of Ritual. Writings on Culture and Performance.” Routledge. London & New York, 1993, p. 27 ff.
   
   
2. In several of Plato’s works e.g.: ”The Laws”, ”The Statesman” and ”The Republic” play is considered necessary for the character building of the citizen and also an important test of the qualities of a person.
   
   In ”The Laws”, the metaphor of man as the Gods’ plaything is found and in ”The Republic” the famous cave allegory illustrates man as partaker in a marionette-play. (360 B.C.)
   
   
3. ”When I approach important problems, I know of no other method than that of play”. ”Ecce Homo. Warum ich so klug bin” Chapter 10.
   
   
4. Wittgenstein’s theory of linguistic games. C.f.: ”Nachlass” 115, Buch XI. Philosophische Bemerkungen.
   
   
5. Gadamer, H-G.: ”Der Begriff des Spiels” in ”Wahrheit und Metode” vol. I. 1960.
   
   
6. Fink, E.: ”Oase des Glcks” In: E.W. Gerber: ”Sport and the Body”: The Ontology of Play. Lea & Febiger, Philadelphia 1972, p. 76 ff. In his important works on phenomenology Fink brought special attention to pedagogy. His statement on play must also be seen on the background that he spent several years in concentration camps during World war 2.
   
   
7. Locke, John. ”Some Thoughts concerning Education” Clarendeon Press 1989 (1693).
   
   
8. Rousseau, J.J.: ”Emile eller om opdragelsen” 1762 (da. 1962) Suits,
   
   
9. Bernard: ”What is a Game?” In: Philosophy of Science. 34, June 1967, 148-156.
   
   
10. Kempf, J., Mller, J. & Riskjr, S.: ”Idrt og holdning 15-19 rige og 40-49 rige i tal og tale”. Bavnebanke 1983, p. 77.
    
    
11. Møller, J.: ”Idrætslege - træning eller kultur?” In: ”Kompetence og demokrati”, DGI Forskning. Herning, 2000 p. 41-47.
    
    
12. Møller, J.: ”Forsvarlige Koblinger? - eller en polemik om idrættens kvaliteter.” Idrætsforsk, 2000, p. 1-3.
    
    
13. Auden, W.H.: ”Squares and Oblongs” In: ”Poets at Work” quoted after Bruner, J.S. & al.: ”Play - Its Role in Development and Evolution” Penguin Books. Great Britain, 1976, p. 638 - 640.