Why play is at the core of a meaningful life
One of the most gloriously oddball texts in contemporary philosophy is Bernard Suits’ The Grasshopper. Remember the parable of the ant and the grasshopper, where the ant works all summer and the grasshopper lazes about and eventually starves? In the traditional version, the ant is the hero — the ceaseless hard worker — and the grasshopper is the object lesson in the perils of laziness. Suits flips the story. In his book, the grasshopper is the hero; he is the embodiment of play.
The Grasshopper begins as a parody of Plato’s Crito, the story of Socrates’ last days before execution. In Plato’s dialogue, Socrates has been condemned to death and waits for execution. His students visit him, begging for him to escape, but he refuses. He would rather die for his commitment to justice than be a coward. Suits’ book is also a dialogue, which begins with the grasshopper dying of starvation, surrounded by his disciples. They beg the grasshopper to let them feed him, but he refuses. He would rather die for his commitment to idleness and play than force his disciples to become ants.
The book was initially ignored when it was published in 1978, probably because of its unconventional topic and joyous style. But it has slowly gained an ardent following. Suits spends most of the book attempting to provide a rigorous philosophical definition of the concept of “a game”, which turns out, in the end, to be about the meaning of life. And it ends with one of the most delightfully unhinged arguments I know of, in all my years of teaching philosophy.
Imagine, says Suits, utopia — some future paradise where technology has solved all our practical problems. We have perfect medicine, unlimited energy and boundless resources. What would we do with our time? We would play games, says Suits, or we would be bored out of our minds. And if playing games is all we do in utopia, then games must be the meaning of life.
I sneak bits of The Grasshopper into my Introduction to Philosophy classes when I’m feeling feisty. The students are wildly divided. Some of them love it passionately. It justifies, to them, their deepest instincts about what truly matters. Other students despise it as the peak of stupidity. It seems, to them, an unserious argument in praise of a thoroughly unserious life.
But Suits meant it very seriously. The book is an argument for the centrality of play. For him, play is not just a side dish for the main meal of work. Play is at the core of a meaningful life.
Underneath the hood, Suits’ argument is Aristotle to its bones. For Aristotle, a good life — a truly meaningful life — lay not in the creation or accumulation of stuff or the achievement of outcomes, but in the process of doing itself, in the rich exercise of our full human capacities. (Suits was, among other things, an Aristotle scholar at the University of Waterloo and a fervent Aristotle fanboy.)
Suits found the deepest illumination of Aristotle’s point in the simplest human activity: playing games. Suits provides, and defends, his definition. To play a game, he says, is to voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles to make possible the struggle to overcome them.
To play a game, therefore, is to be inefficient on purpose. When you run a marathon, you are trying to get to a particular spot in space, but you avoid the most efficient ways to get there. You do not take a subway or a taxi or a bicycle. You force yourself to run, and you try to run as quickly as possible.
Which means, for Suits, that the struggle must be an essential part of the true value. What you care about can’t just be the bare outcome by itself. You can’t just care about being at that spot in space. Otherwise you’d just take the most efficient path. But if you took the subway then it doesn’t count — not for the game of marathon-running, anyway.
Games sculpt a particular way of doing things. Football tells you not to use your hands, so you learn how much grace and control you can get out of your feet. Rock climbing tells you to go up, but forbids the standard human tools. No ladders, no helicopters, no grappling hooks. You are devoted instead to balance, bodily precision and delicate movement.
While I was reading Suits for the first time, I was also learning to fly fish. I had moved to Utah and wanted to spend more time in the mountains. I needed some structure to really engage with the mountains. I could hike up to that clear, high mountain lake and attempt to soak in the beauty but, with my unruly mind, after about 10 minutes I’d get bored and check out.
Fly fishing changed that. Search the water, intensely, for trout. Look for their shadowy forms. Look for subtleties in the water, where the rushing fast water drops away into slightly slower, deeper water, where the trout are likely hiding. Look at the bugs. Look at their size, figure out what the trout are eating and where in the water they’re eating it. And then match that bug with a fake insect that you hopefully tied yourself.
Fly fishing is wildly stupid. It is the dumbest way to catch a fish. Much more efficient would be a net or maybe some dynamite or at least some bait on a hook, for God’s sake. But fly fishing forces you to adopt arcane and inefficient methods. This is especially true for my favourite form of fly fishing: casting a dry fly to a visibly feeding trout. You take an artificial concoction — a bit of feathers and fur, tied to a hook — and drop it delicately in the right place, at the right moment, to look like the insects sitting on the water. If you do it just right, a trout rises up and sips it off the surface.
It is stupidly hard. If you want a fish, almost any other method is easier. (Hell, if all you want is a fish to eat, you can just buy one at the market.) But that wouldn’t count. When you fly fish, you don’t just want a fish. You are playing a game: you want to get that fish by a specific, difficult and fascinating technique.
Games rub our faces in the value of difficult struggles, for their own sakes. If all that mattered in life was the bare outcome — the product, the money, the extractable good — if human action was just a means to some independent ends, then playing games would be utterly irrational.
Or you could think: games are important, and the mindset wholly devoted to outcomes and extractable products has missed out on the centre of human life.
To understand games, distinguish between two things: the goal of a game and your purpose for playing it. The goal is what you pursue inside the game; the purpose is why you played it. My philosophy mentor, Barbara Herman, put it this way: when you invite your friends over to play cards, the goal is to win, but the purpose is to have fun. You have to try to win to have fun, but winning isn’t the point.
Not all of us approach games in this way. For some people, the goal and purpose are one. They want to win, period. Call those people achievement players. The Olympic runner wants to win the marathon by running it — but they do truly care about winning it.
But for other people, goal and purpose come apart. We try to win because we are interested in the struggle, and it is the struggle itself that we truly care about. Call us striving players. It’s all right if we try and we lose, if the attempt was beautiful. In ordinary, practical life, we take the means for the sake of the ends. In striving play, we take the ends for the sake of the means.
What is the point of life? Is it to make stuff? Or is it to take difficult actions, think rich thoughts, weigh subtle decisions? Is it having a pile of stuff — or does the stuff just support our quest for interesting action?
I’ve spent a lot of time in serious research environments talking about games and play. Most serious adults — even people who research play — are usually anxious to show how play is actually, secretly, useful for actual adult stuff. They are anxious to show how play encourages some future productivity. Chess teaches logic, football teaches teamwork, Minecraft builds future engineers. Or, at the very least, play is useful because it relaxes and restores you, so you can renew your vigour and get back to work.
Suits argues something different. He argues that play itself is the point, and that we work in order to survive so that we might play.
One bright, snowy winter day, I was walking along a river, looking for rising trout, when I ran into a bent-over dude, another fly angler, out on that cold day, fuming into his fly box. He muttered angrily to himself, radiating gloom.
“What a great day to be out,” I said. “How you doing?”
“Terrible,” he said. “I’ve only caught five fish today. I’m behind. I’m just not where I need to be.” He seemed desperate and miserable.
It’s tempting to say he was doing it wrong. But games are too complicated to make it so simple. Even for striving players, play isn’t all good times. For rock climbers, chess players or players of ultra-difficult video games such as Dark Souls, the frustration, rage and despair are part of the point. Failing and failing again, getting exhausted and grouchy, and then (sometimes) having a glorious moment of pulling it off. These are crucial components of the arc.
When I started fly fishing, I had no idea that I would someday become maniac enough to go out in the middle of winter, with the temperature hovering around freezing, punching through the snow crust in my boots, and sliding down the snowy banks to slip into the river, bundled in waterproof waders and two layers of thermal underwear, all to try to catch some fish. Half the point of winter fly fishing, for me, is the closeness to misery. It’s just barely possible to remain a live and moving human being in these conditions. And there are, usually, very few fish.
But it also makes me feel intensely alive. I’ve usually been cooped inside for weeks — reading, cleaning, grading, parenting — and a sunny winter day on the river is gloriously bright. You take care with every movement, every small action, all to fish on the worst days of the year, when you might be lucky to catch one fish. And if you do, you will immediately let it go.
My gut says the muttering man wasn’t in this dramatic arc. My gut says he thought he had to catch a lot of fish, that something had gone wrong if he didn’t make his quota. My gut says he was miserable, all the way down. I’d guess he had imported the work mindset into the tiny bit of his life where he was actually free to play.
What is the difference between “work” and “play”? We might think play is always light, easy and fun — but it gets thorny when you start to think about how intense we are when we play.
I’ve been trying to figure out, like a good little philosopher, a useful definition of “play”. I have some candidates from the literature, but none of them completely satisfies me. Each seems to capture a different part of the whole.
One is from the feminist philosopher Maria Lugones. She says that to “play” is to slip between different rule-worlds — to cross between cultures, professional worlds, social roles, easily and lightly. To be playful is, she says, to be willing to try on the rules, but not to hold them sacredly. The opposite of playfulness, for Lugones, is something like dogmatism.
Another definition is from Bernard Suits. Play, he says, is redirecting usually instrumental resources to autotelic activity. An “instrumental resource” is something — material goods, skills, energy — that you normally deploy to get something useful. And “autotelic activity” is a term from Aristotle. It means activity that’s valuable for its own sake.
You might take your energy to run — once used to hunt, escape or travel — and just run in a big circle around the city because it feels good. Or you might take a skill like, say, catching fish, once used to feed yourself. Suddenly you redirect that skill. You do it for the sheer joy of doing it. And that changes, a little bit, how you do it. Suddenly you don’t have to take the most efficient path, because your life and your hunger do not depend on your success. You are playing. Maybe this play requires more of you — thinking, sensitivity, elaborate movement — to get the same end. You’re trying for the sake of trying. And you tune the action not for productivity but for joy.
Rephrase Suits’ definition this way: play is wasting resources for fun. But also: the whole point is that, deep down, it’s not a waste. A truly wasted life would be one spent working hard, stockpiling goods like the ant and never using them to support joyous play. And to truly waste humanity would be to push people so hard to work productively, to make more stuff, to the point where nobody had time to play.
Let me try my own fusion of these two definitions. “Work” isn’t distinguished from “play” by difficulty, suffering or practicality. You can make pottery, knit scarves or grow a garden as play. The true difference between work and play is the reason you have, and the control you have, over what it is you’re doing and why.
Here’s my suggestion: to “work” is to perform activities to create outcomes that are set by something external. When you work, you are making what the world tells you to make. Maybe you’re gathering food, because biology tells you you have to eat. Maybe you’re earning money, because the world says you need money to buy food and shelter and medicine. Maybe you’re making products, because the world wants something specific from you — planks of wood, a ride to the airport.
But “play” is different. You still have goals and struggles, but your goals are up to you.
When I was a rock climber, I started by accepting a given goal of rock climbing: to climb the most difficult climbs. This worked for a long time. The goal helped me find sensitivity and care in my balance, and joy in my movement. But after a few years, the difficulty quest stopped being meaningful or satisfying. So I switched goals: I started trying to climb most elegantly, with the most graceful and minimal set of movements.
With games you choose the goals because they give you the kind of action you want, the kind of involvement you want. If you don’t like a game, you can switch games. You can change the rules, you can change the goals. You can make it so hard that you probably will lose. You can change the points, because the points aren’t what matters. Your own joyous action is.
C Thi Nguyen is a philosophy professor at the University of Utah. His latest book, “The Score”, is published by Penguin
