The pure pleasure of play is a true antidote to all the mundane
duties ofadulthood, especially that most tedious of tasks, maintenance of
Self. But we have a hard time allowing ourselves the purposelessness that
is absolutely fundamental to the relief we crave.
Pity in the baseball fan. the strike may be over, the season under
way, but the memories of the bickering and greed have forever marked our
"national pastime" as Big Business. Gone, it seems, is the game's
romance; the sweet blend of illusion and innocence. Gone, too, is the
sense of play. Indeed, if the strike taught us anything, it's that
professional sports now have little to do with playing. Play is something
we do for fun, the outward expression of some deep, presumably joyful
urge. Yet today's sports starts, with their grave expressions, steely
glances, and rehearsed post-game patter, seem about as joyful and
spontaneous as a White House press release.
"What's disillusioning is that the element of play has completely
dropped out," laments psychologist Margaret Carlisle Duncan, Ph.D., an
expert in leisures studies at the University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee and
president of the Association for the Study of Play. "All we see now is
the professional aspect: what drives the players has become invisible;
reduced to dollars and cents."
In many ways, our rising ambivalence about professional sports
reflects a larger and deeper confusion in our conception of play itself.
Americans, by almost all accounts, crave play. We work hard so that we
can play hard. We spend lavishly on leisure and diversions--hundreds of
billions of dollars a year. We idealize play, admiring "playful"
personalities, envying others who manage to keep play in their
lives.
And no wonder, for play--true, unadulterated play--is pure
pleasure, an activity undertaken solely for enjoyment. Play is intense,
absorbing, and invigorating. It can override consciousness, displace
anger, anxiety, and fear. It can produce illusion and make-believe,
clouding our sense of time, place, and identity.
Play isn't simply the antithesis of work: Its an antidote to all
the mundane duties of adulthood, from partnering and provisioning right
down to the tedious maintenance of Self. Little surprise that researchers
link play and playfulness to such positive outcomes as healthy
relationships, strong families, creativity, spiritual growth, and
personal confidence.
Yet even as we idealize play, we're finding the ideal is elusive
and depressingly complex. For all its rejuvenating powers, play--or
"flow," as University of Chicago psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
Ph.D., calls it--can also be disruptive, dysfunctional, even addicting.
"Flow isn't necessarily good," he says. "It's like electricity: It can be
used for a toaster or an electric chair."
More important, playfulness, even in its healthiest sense is
becoming increasingly difficult to achieve. Not only do we have less time
for play, but we've begun to blur the boundaries between our work selves
and play selves. More and more, we work at playing, larding our leisure
with labor-related terms and themes: efficiency; perfectionisms; results.
"Today's tennis players use terms like 'stroke production,'" grouses
Geoffrey Godbey, Ph.D., a professor of leisure studies at Pennsylvania
state university and author of The Sociology of Leisure. "That's not
playing; that's work."
Indeed, in our drive for efficiency, we've even begun making our
play do work, using it as a means to other ends--stress reduction,
therapy, fitness, the never-ending process of "self-actualization." We
may be fitter and faster, but we're also undermining the purposelessness
that is so fundamental to play.
The harder we play the less playful we're becoming--and the more
vulnerable we leave ourselves to the very things play is supposed t
prevent: tension, stress, anxieties, discordant relationships, poor work
performance, even depression. "Are we as late-20th-century North American
adults at a crisis point?" asks the university of Wisconsin's Duncan.
"Speaking as contemporary North American adult, I'd have to say
'yes.'"
a state of grace
What is play? Like love or happiness, play is a concept that
resists explication: You know it when you feel it. In fact, play is now
studied under so many diverse disciplines, from psychology and sociology
to literary theory and theology, that definitions run the gamut.
Nonetheless, many researchers agree that play can be described by four or
five basic characteristics.
For example, true play is its own reward. It is undertaken
voluntarily. It is often a form of self-expression and is always
pleasurable. Finally, all play, whether experienced directly (through
participation) or vicariously (through observation), is completely
absorbing.
Why humans need such experiences is a far more complex and
long-standing question. Since classical times, scholars have recognized
that play is universal, and not simply within the human sphere. All
higher animals, from the two-legged variety right down to fish in the
ocean, exhibit some degree of play activity--that is, mental and physical
action not directly related to survival. Play was, therefore, not simply
a by-product of the mind: It dearly had some cruder biological
end.
