Viva La Playvolución!
“It is an activity which proceeds within certain limits of time and space, in a visible order, according to rules freely accepted, and outside the sphere of necessity or material utility.”
-Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens
“In imagining a society in which each man is free to create his life, to give it shape according to his deepest aspirations... Our social model will be, indeed, fundamentally different from preceding models; it will also be qualitatively superior.”
-Constant Nieuwenhuis, New Babylon
Almost anyone who has been a child in the US knows that the first person to say “shotgun” before getting to the car, gets to ride in the front passenger seat. Likewise, the last person to put their finger on their nose has to do the task, whatever it is. There exists, in the experience of many adults, a “no swearing zone” in an earshot radius around children. In some places, seeing a VW Beetle gives you permission to punch someone near you. When you set the table, forks go on the left, and spoons and knives go on the right. If someone tags you and says “you’re it”, it’s your turn to run after them, or whoever else is nearby, to pass on the “it”ness. A gentleman must always hold the door for a lady. Bishops can only move on the diagonal. Snitches get stitches.
Through play, children come to understand what rules are, how they work, and what it means to operate within, or outside of them. They learn to navigate behaving by a set of rules, and learn to create and change rules to better suit themselves and their circumstances. Fundamentally, rules are rules; there is no difference between the rules of a game of tag, and the rules of behavior, for example, in church. In Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga argues that cultural norms and behaviors arise out of play. I would argue that these social norms and play are nearly indistinguishable from the outside. Children play with the same earnestness as adults following the social norms of their society. When a child is being a princess or a policeman, they expect to be treated as such, whatever that means to them at that time — their idea can be vastly different from that of an adult, but to them it can be no less real than the identity of princess or policeman would be to an adult.
There are two important ways in which social norms and playground games are different. One is that playground games have a much smaller sphere of influence. Huizinga calls this sphere the “magic circle”. Adults often disregard children’s play because they can easily place themselves (or the children place them) outside of the children’s magic circle. Social norms have a much larger magic circle. That is, the rules have existed for much longer and apply to a much wider group of people. When everyone you meet is playing by the same set of rules, it is much harder to disregard them and see them from the outside. This is generally because of more widely excepted and enforced consequences for breaking the rules, be they social stigmatization, physical imprisonment, or even death. Among children there are also consequences to breaking the rules; you may be not allowed to play, you may lose friends, or there may be any number of other consequences.
Play is the freedom to create, take part in creating, or freely accept a set of rules or expectations — to define the magic circle and craft the rules that apply within it. In this way, play is fundamentally radical and revolutionary; it allows and empowers us to reimagine and recreate every aspect of the socially constructed world around us and reexamine and explore all of our preconceptions and assumptions. All radical social movements that reimagine what the world could be and seek to bring about that reality are in essence playing, for to imagine and to put into effect a new set of rules is play as much as it is revolution. Play is in it’s nature exploratory, evolutionary, and iterative. Play is conscious change.
The resistance that radical social movements feel from the mainstream is really a larger scale version of the resistance an individual feels when they play. Playing with the way you dress or behave, changing your career, or exploring other life choices, are all challenging because they are new. Unless friends and family are radically and unconditionally accepting, it will be difficult for them as well, just as it is difficult for a society to accept a radical social movement which seeks to challenge their assumptions (their magic circle) of social norms, conventions, and rules.
The other main difference between social norms and playground rules is that children are almost always aware that they are playing. I have had many experiences playing with children who are not used to adults accepting their rules so fully. These kids will often make sure I know that we are “just playing.” Adults, on the other hand, will almost always understand social norms and rules as fundamental and unchanging parts of reality. To adults, they are like the physical laws of the universe. In the United States, we use the imperial measurement system, not the objectively superior metric system because that’s just the way it is. One doesn’t make polite conversation with strangers on public transportation, because it’s simply not done. So much do adults assume their social conventions are universal, that they are often shocked and sometimes disgusted when they learn that other societies in our own world have a different set of basic rules and assumptions. Children are able to imagine new ways of playing, new games to play, and new rules within which to behave. They are constantly negotiating the rules of the games they play with each other. The rules are always in flux, in question. If adults knew that the social rules they follow could be a dynamic, changing magic circle, it would be much easier to imagine, construct, and live by entirely new sets of social codes and norms.
On this deeper level, truly free conscious play is a challenge to the very foundation of our culture — the belief that our culture and our social norms are fundamental, the belief that life must be the way it is. Play at it’s core challenges, contradicts, and ultimately disproves the notion that “That’s just the way the world works.” When we truly play, we challenge that belief and rock the very core of our society. When we collectively and intentionally hold a space that accepts a different and dynamic set of norms, we are playing.
Constant Nieuwenhuis, in his New Babylon project, describes a radical anti-capitalist society in which all work is automated and everyone’s basic needs are met, freeing people to spend all of their time engaged in creative endeavors. Nieuwenhuis says that this leads to a society that cannot be described or drawn in detail, because any depiction would be only a snapshot. Society would be constantly changing because everyone has the freedom to change their environment to their desire. The dynamic evolution of society is rapidly accelerated.
The deepest sort of play, and the most radical form of social change, is one that creates or seeks to bring about a society that radically embraces the idea of change. Rather than adopting one static set of norms, we must embrace the constantly changing norms of a radically playful society.
In today’s world, it is important to fight for acceptance of new norms, but we must also fight for the ability to change those norms fluidly, as our cultural needs and our understanding of what is just and right change. We should fight to create a world that has rules and social norms that are according to what we believe is best, and simultaneously not become too attached to any one image of what that means or looks like. Rather, we should constantly seek to understand more fully what rules should be in place, and put them in place as our understanding deepens. This is not easy, and we will certainly make mistakes. But that’s in the nature of play, and indeed, when we do make mistakes, in such a radically flexible and playful society, we can always try something new.
