A philosophy of play (I): Life
It’s a question I’m often asked, and every time someone asks it I try to avoid simple or automatic answers: “How come you settled on studying videogames?” It is often asked by very intelligent people with great respect and curiosity, and I take it to be more flattering than patronising — arousing intellectual curiosity is no easy task, after all. Answering it is, then, a huge responsibility, especially because it’s posed in a personal manner: not “why study videogames” but “why do you study videogames”. One can’t reply with cold, neutral statements or platitudes. So, why did I decide to study videogames?
It used to go something like this: as a student, I realised I found as much pleasure in analysis as in creation, if not more. Of the cultural forms I enjoyed (literature, cinema, comic books), all were more or less covered but one: videogames. Focusing on them as a scholar, then, was not an attempt to defend them or make any grand statement but a way to explore to uncover the theory I couldn’t find. I kept learning about cinema by reading on it, and about videogames by writing on them. A different way of intellectual mapping, if it makes sense.
While ideating my last book, Cine Ludens (an exploration of play, in the widest of sense, through cinema), a gradual change happened. It started with a realisation that the focus on videogames had become too narrow, that digital games (and their study) were blinding me, that I was touching too little of the elephant to understand it. In addition, I have to admit the arrested development of videogames had already started to frustrate me. I shifted from videogames to play: boardgames, toys, creative games, theme parks, playful societies… Writing it became an exploration, much more fruitful when it was goalless, another kind of mapping. Not a mapping of an exactly uncharted territory (in academia, when one finds a lack it’s often a lack of personal knowledge, not of previous research), but an exciting and adventurous one nonetheless.
By the end of my writing process, my inquiry of play took me to an unexpected place: to the idea of play as part of human nature and the human condition. (I know some take problem with the idea of a fixed “human nature”, but I understand it the Stoic sense of having a certain kind of intelligence that produces needs and responsibilities. I don’t see that as inherently incompatible with the Sartrean “human condition”).
And so, my answer to the aforementioned question changed: I started by studying videogames and that led me to the source, to play as a universal mode of thinking. And that’s where I was now, interrogating my object through the philosophy of play. Again, not exactly original (and I took effort to cite and explain my references in the book, as one should), but not yet fully explored lands. I still focused mostly on videogames, of course, but always with an eye on the vastness of play.
That’s not the answer I would give now. Not exactly. My own becoming has led me to a slightly different perspective: I study games because I am interested in life. While writing (and reading, and thinking for) Cine Ludens I started to see play and games as a vital condition for the good life, in a traditional, philosophical sense — not only a pleasurable life, but a flourishing one. Martha Nussbaum is very on point when she lists play as one of her ten Central Capabilities for a life worthy of human dignity (something I explore in part II of this series). Moreover, play is the perfect example of the mess of life, of its orderly chaos, the personal navigation of chaos that is life — as clearly expressed, for example, by Miguel Sicart or Bernie De Koven.
What helped me articulate my (current) answer came from an interview with Mark Rowlands, one of my favourite moral philosophers. When asked by philosopher Nigel Warburton why he favoured autobiographical writing, he replied:
It depends I suppose on what you think philosophy is supposed to do. I’m glad you pointed out Descartes, because that’s the example I always use when people say “why do you write autobiography?”. I mean, Descartes did it. […] I’m fascinated by life. It’s true that philosophers have not really been engaged with life in that sense very much. I suspect it’s partly to do with the professionalisation of philosophy. I think it was Julian Barnes who once said “we’re all amateurs when it comes to our own lives” and so the casting aside of the focus on the analysis of life was part of the sort of perceived process of becoming a professional discipline. I think that’s a mistake. I think philosophy should be concerned, fascinated by life.
Rowlands, who defends running as a form of pure play, also had this to say on the nature of autotelic activities such as that:
The more you’re in touch with that kind of thing, the more you’re in touch with the doing of something just to do it, the more you’re in touch with the intrinsic value of the good in your life.
I too am fascinated by life. (Isn’t Ikiru, 生きる, or Japanese for “to live”, one of the most beautiful words in any language?) And while there’s plenty of excellent writing on life as games (Huizinga, Alan Watts, James P. Carse) and of games about life (or that attempt to codify life as a game, like The Game of Life boardgame or the Super Jinsei Game series), I’m more interested in games as life — which is and isn’t the same as to say games as lived. Games as part of the interplay of time, feeling, humour, the body, thought, autonomy, interbeing, as another element diluted in what Cornel West calls “the funk”:
So, it [the love of wisdom] is a way of life, a set of practices, no doubt, but, at the same time, I call it a kind of focus on the funk. And what I mean by that is — you remember that wonderful letter by one of my great heroes, Samuel Beckett, where he says “Heidegger may talk about being and Sartre may talk about existence, but I talk about the mess. And my fundamental aim as an artist is to try to find a form that accommodates the mess?” Well, Beckett’s mess is my funk. And by funk, what I mean is, wrestling with the wounds, the scars, the bruises, as well as the creative responses to wounds, scars, and bruises — some of them inflicted because of structures and institutions, some of them being tied to our existential condition, in terms of losses of loved ones, in terms of diseases, in terms of betrayals of friends, and so forth; all of these are wounds and scars and bruises.
Games as life because games are life, not different from it, not separated from it, but a vital piece of our lives, of our projects and habits and flourishing. This is to do with gamemaking as much as with gameplaying, with thinking about games and thinking through games. This is life as I find it in De Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity, in Dôgen’s Zen, in Schopenhauer’s musings, in the fiction and non-fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin, in Comte-Sponville’s goût de vivre, in philosophical Taoism: thinking life from within, examining life from life. Beyond abstractions and universals, closer to what Roberto Mangabeira Unger calls, in his political philosophy, “deep freedom”, which is all about allowing life to enhance itself:
If the self remains in its citadel, anxious to control and heavily defended, it declines in the sources of vitality. To lay the citadel open, however, is to court danger: a danger inseparable from the enhancement of life.
Why am I interested in games? Perhaps my first answer to this question was clearer, more impersonal, more scholarly, but as I find myself drifting apart from videogames, their industry, their marketing, and their players, this last one (as vague, ambiguous, and even corny as it may be) seems to me much more comfortable and, at the same time, more risky, more stimulating: I love games because they’re a way of being in the midst of life, of inhabiting it. Games are life with all its vertigo and warmth and mess, life that can turn on itself (one needs look no further than “videogame Twitter” to see that) as much as it can produce its own enhancement.
