against play

[droqen]

[AB]

[droqen]

when i bring up kill gameplay, a common response that i haven't yet found a way to deal with is "but what about play?"

i have found myself irritated by these lines of conversation more often that not. indeed, what about play?

the word itself held in such high regard, to question it seems ridiculous. it is very attached to the idea of a thing "done for its own sake," which is another conceptual construction i encounter frequently and which irritates me more overtly.

what could possibly be a less useful tautology than claiming a thing is done for its own sake?

it is not.

[droqen]

my starting point is that play is endemic of freedom. to question the value of play, then, unexamined, is to question the value of freedom, which is not my position.

(i do think an open approach to the possibility of its asking—what is the value of freedom?—could yield interesting results, but it is not what i am doing at present)

my claim is that seeking to manufacture play undermines the very environment which gives birth to the thing we value itself.

[droqen]

this is of course what modern science & technology does in nearly every arena, as i have known it:

find something valuable and seek to understand it and its context as little as possible: isolate, isolate, isolate.

our great big machine enables and rewards such an impulse.

[droqen]

so, as with "kill gameplay," i am in danger of making another on its face absurd and too-extreme claim, which upon examination unfurls into something with more nuance — is the sharpness, or perhaps the bluntness, necessary?

i am not opposed to the concept at which the word "play" seems to point, but i am opposed to such pointing, and its consequences.

[droqen]

so, to attempt a restatement, i am against the fetishization of play, not the act itself or its actors. if we are to obsessively fetishize over some aspect of the human experience as self-evidently worthwhile...

well, perhaps there is no good pick. but play would not be my choice.

[droqen]

play is the aesthetic of freedom.

[droqen]

to "play" in this sense is not to be free or to pursue freedom, but to display freedom, to oneself and to others.

[droqen]

this "play" is the conspicuous consumption of free time.

it is the proof and yet also its contradiction.