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A
I'm trying to figure out what "playing" is but it's impossible to pin down.
E
What have you tried?
A
Well at first I thought it had to do with games...
E
That makes sense - after all, games are the archetypical object of the verb "play".
A
Right - so you'd think that playing is like competing, or engaging, or taking up the rules of the game in a sportsmanlike way. Bernard Suits uses the phrase "lusory attitude", which I liked a lot.
E
So what's wrong?
A
Well Suits also says that games are fundamentally about constraints - he even calls it the practice of doing things deliberately inefficiently. I can buy that games have goals and rules, but my intuition about playfulness isn't as structured.
E
A little structure never hurt anybody!
A
Actually it's worse than that. I can imagine coming at this from a different direction and coming to the opposite conclusion: that playing is actually about breaking or subverting rules, not following them. It feels as related to mischief as it is competition.
E
I guess you see that in usage too: "a playful disregard", "playing tricks", "getting played", and so on.
A
Right - those aren't about abiding by constraints at all.
E
So if I understand you right: you think that playfulness is only partially related to games, and partially related to... subversion and mischief? It's hard to believe in the latter without a concrete name for it.
A
I think we actually invented one recently: "hacking"!
E
I thought hacking meant doing computer crime?
A
Not originally! At first it was MIT campus slang for "prank", but has evolved a lot since then. The jargon file http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hack.html is the canonical reference for this; the definition there that I'm using is "to interact with a computer in a playful and exploratory rather than goal-directed way".
E
So not computer crime.
A
No, although I do think the word is more entangled with those darker overtones than its modern defendants want to admit. The essence of hacking does ultimately have a sharp, ungovernable edge. Safety not guaranteed.
E
I have a contention.
A
I love that for you.
E
Couldn't you argue that hacking is just a different game, played out on a different level? The hackers probably have their own code of conduct and aesthetic taste that constitute what Suits would call constraints and goals.
A
I understand what you're saying - that hacking is playing "with the rules themselves" or "playing the game of being a good hacker" - but it's not satisfying. It's too clever by half, and meta stuff like that is never very sound in the end.
E
That's a very abstract complaint for someone who claims to distrust abstraction.
A
Fair enough. For one, it's not only this specific community. Hackers embody this attitude of doing things outside the box, or elevate and center it, but I feel like it's embedded in our everyday sense of "playfulness" too. And for another, just because you can contort a situation to match a model doesn't mean it's actually a good fit. Some models are too general for their own good, like epicycles or "utility maximization", and can give you a false sense of confidence about applying them everywhere.
E
I suppose if you go around framing everything as a game, then the act of doing so loses some weight.
A
Exactly. There's an explicit contrast between playful hacking and presumably non-playful goal-orientation - of course you could stick to your guns and contrive a more abstract thing to be the goal, but then you'd overlook the very real distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations.
E
So then is play just "anything intrinsically motivated"?
A
I think it's relevant but not that simple. The classic examples of intrinsically-motivated activities are like... climbing mountains and running marathons. Those might be enjoyable, but don't strike me as necessarily playful.
E
You're very focused on the immediate, everyday connotations of "play".
A
That's the important part! There's still some missing element of invention, creation, or interaction. That's the part of Suit's idea of games that I did resonate with: the "lusory attitude", an eagerness to engage.
E
The mentality is what's important.
A
I think so. And maybe it's only possible in an environment that is for whatever reason sheltered from external pressures - the innocence of childhood or the abstraction of a game - but playfulness itself is something more that blossoms in that space.
E
The longer we talk the more amazed I am that we have the word at all.
A
Yeah - it's such a basic, foundational word, and at the same time is so hard to relate to anything formalized. That must be significant.
E
Maybe a simpler definition is just "it's what kids do".
A
That's interesting! That's probably its realistic origin, why it feels like such a primary "vocabulary 101" word, and why it's so hard to pin down. It's a blanket term for the shit that kids get up to when they have unlimited free time, and so it ends up describing something elusive and sacred about being alive.