The dialectics of play

I had originally titled this post, the duality of play but as I began writing, the notion of a duality can be problematic because play is neither simply about mind play (e.g. imaginary play, strategy play) nor physical play (e.g. sports) but instead straddles between the two. In this regard, play can be regarded as liminal - it is the in-between. In Hegelian terms, play involves a dialectical process. In some moments, it is enjoyable, in others, one may be frustrated, it can be serious but it can also be for fun. Thus, Sutton-Smith's (1997) astute observations on the difficulty of defining and understanding play is well-aligned with the multiple instantiations of play research such as that in biology, anthropology and sociology. In the field of learning sciences, much of play has been attributed to Vygotsky and Piaget's theories of cognitive development. In this regard, my fascination with play has always been about the processes of learning, or in some cases, why people don't learn.

From the age of 10, I have been an avid video gamer. I would go over to my friend's house just to play their Nintendo or Sega games, and just generally to hang out. When I entered secondary school, I would do the same, except it would be the computer. The interest in learning developed much later on when I first built my personal computer at 17. The family could finally afford one and it was a glorious day indeed! From playing with friends who are physically around, I then moved to making friends online by playing real-time strategy (RTS) and role-playing games (RPG). My obsession with playing games in part started out as beating the artificial intelligence (AI) or the game itself, never mind that the odds are usually stacked against you depending on the difficulty level. I was thus very competitive and strove to be the best. If one were to subscribe to Richard Bartle's taxonomy of type of players, I would place myself within the achievement camp.

Once I started playing multiplayer online games (MMOGs, though they weren't coined yet at the time), I began to notice how certain players just seem unable to learn from their past encounters in the content, no matter how many times they tried! This really baffled me - I could not understand what was so difficult about generalizing principles or strategizing moves in order to beat the encounter (be it a boss or another player). This was often extremely frustrating as well since the nature of MMOGs meant that you have to depend on other people in order to achieve your aims. Finding 39 other skilled individuals was a chore at best.

Thus began my journey into trying to understand why individuals get 'good' at certain skills while others seem to struggle. On the other hand, there were also the social rhetoric and commentary about video game vice. Studies abound were making connections between video game violence and real life violence, all the while not taking into account the complex environment that human beings live in. Growing up within the culture of 'video games are bad', I was adamant to demonstrate that this simplistic causal claim is unwarranted and unsubstantiated. I was just as well-adjusted as any other outgoing teenager. So were my friends, some of whom are dedicated parents and what society would consider 'normal'. This cultural perspective of video games frustrated me, in part because my parents were of the opinion that video games were a waste of time.

These cultural norms and ideologies reminded me greatly of how play is generally thought of. Play after all has sometimes been described as only for children insofar as it keeps them occupied. Compared to work, where the outcome is certain and one can measure productivity, play is ambiguous. It can be serious, but it can be playful. Play, as Bateson (1972) argues, involves a situation where an an act of play can be communicated at two or more levels at once. Take for instance when human beings joke with one another. At one level, there is the joke, or the fact that one is horsing around. But on another level, there may also be a serious commentary behind the joke or at least another meaning of what the joke can take on. This capacity for meta-communication means that the playing organism is able to communicate to another participant what “is” and what “is not”, which suggests that play involves paradoxical communication  (Nachmanovitch, 2009). I believe that this paradox is due to the dialectical nature of play and is  inherent in it as a construct, which could explain the different interpretations that researchers have of it and why it is so difficult to pin down. As a starting point however, play is dialectical in that it is a continuum of experiences and that each moment of play sublates the moments before it. Play, in a sense, is also a frame that we bring to a particular context which already has it own existing frame. Using Goffman's (1974) definition, a frame contains the basic elements of a situation, which consist both existing structures and is made sense of by an individual’s subjective perspective. It is thus the meeting of the two (our own frame and the current context) that creates the paradoxical nature of play. In the next few weeks, I hope to develop these ideas further and explore more of how the paradox of play relates to learning.