“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
“All art is the result of a coevolutionary historical process between audience and artist—a coevolutionary dance between display and desire, expression and taste.”
— Richard O. Prum, The Evolution of Beauty
Play is essential to life. Without play, life would be pointless. We play for our own pleasure.
We build sandcastles knowing that they will one day be washed away. If we are too serious in building sandcastles, we are setting ourselves up for disappointment when they get washed away.
When we play, time becomes boundless. We lose track of time. We are present to the eternity of timelessness.
When we play, people are our friends. They are partners with whom we can play with. The purpose of play is to continue playing. When one game ends, another begins.
Boredom and seriousness are the enemies of play. If we get bored or take the game too seriously, the game is no longer fun—we have ceased playing. So the most important thing to play is to not get bored or to take the game too seriously.
Humor is a useful tool to prevent seriousness and boredom. Humor disrupts our sense of normal. Humor breaks rules. Humor destroys the old to make way for the new—new ideas, new values, and new modes of play.
It’s hard to play without partners. A single-player game eventually gets boring. There is only so much play that we can engage in by ourselves. Everything becomes predictable and predictable is boring. So the key to play is to find partners who want to engage in play with us.
To find partners in play, we must view life as a positive-sum game. Positive-sum games encourage cooperative behavior amongst players. Meanwhile, zero-sum games encourage competitive behavior. Zero-sum games discourage play since potential partners stop wanting to play with us since only one of us can win. Positive-sum games encourage potential partners to want to play with us since all of us can win.
When we play with others, there’s a dance going on. We build sandcastles together. We know that one day the music will come to an end—that the song will end. And yet we make our song together and we dance together to the tune of our song. We play.
“A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”
— James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games
