I loved Monday’s discussion about “playing.” I have never given much consideration to this integral aspect of human socialization and its role in culture. It is amazing that children today share something in common with children across the millennia– the enthusiasm and knack for imaginative play. The most recent conversation I have heard about play in public discourse is the place of gender roles and stereotypes in toys. Toy stores are increasingly making their toy aisles gender neutral and targeting their games to all children. This ties into a comment someone made in class about play mimicking adult societal conventions; the sign that our games are changing is perhaps a sign of a societal change.
On Monday I was also grateful for the opportunity to learn chess & play it for the first time 🙂 The calculated nature of the game as well as the inverted color scheme helped unearth an aspect of “Through the Looking Glass” that I didn’t fully appreciate at first.
I also enjoyed learning chess for the first time on Monday and was similarly struck by the calculated nature of the game. However, I spent more time thinking about some of Huizinga’s contradictions in his generalizations about play then I did about Through the Looking Glass. In his generalizations about play, Huizinga says that “play demands order and perfection,” but he also says that “play is an act of freedom.” When I was learning chess I felt a little overwhelmed at times because of all the rules that constricted how I could behave. On Monday I struggled to see how a game could demand order and require rules while also being freeing. But as I started to compare chess with other games I know like Monopoly or True American from the show New Girl, I was struck that those games seemed more freeing to me than chess, despite of how many rules they had. In a similar way that gravity is a rule that brings order to our world but (arguably) doesn’t restrict our freedom, perhaps play can be freeing because once you learn the rules that establish order? Maybe play is freeing while demanding order because you eventually don’t think about the rules and focus on ‘being free.’