Plathon

“Dad, will you come and play with us? Later, my darlings, I have important work to finish.“

We've all experienced scenes like this, where despite the best efforts of charming little ones and their pleading eyes, our sense of priorities reminds us of our obligations. The "serious" and often urgent matters that occupy us cannot tolerate the distraction of childish and futile games.

From an early age, our children learn to distinguish between study time and play time. The time for learning, homework, and work, and the time for fun, which is essential for "breathing " but not for progress. On the one hand, what is important; on the other, what is distracting, and whose primary purpose is to regain enough energy to get back to studying. Very early on, they learn to think, feel, and read the world according to such a duality. A simple duality that opposes the futile to the useful.

As young adults, when they have to choose their studies and make life choices, the society they are preparing to enter confronts them with a similar and essentially utilitarian scale of values. How many times have we heard the argument that this or that subject "is useless”? What is the point, for example, of wasting time learning German or Italian when all you need to do is speak English? As if a language were nothing more than a neutral and interchangeable vehicle for information. Whereas learning and speaking a language means bringing to life and reviving, with each exchange, a culture, a civilization, a way of perceiving, understanding, and reinterpreting the world. In this widespread value system, the cult of utility, elevated to the supreme principle for judging the value of things, actions, and people, leads to an impoverishment of curiosity, sacrificed on the altar of functionality. It values the continuous improvement of means of production through technical innovation at the expense of creation, and the rationalization of effort at the expense of intuition.

Play is seen as a superfluous distraction, an enjoyable pastime, but one that distracts from the essential and must be relegated to the few moments when we can afford to "waste time." But what if play were an essential source of humanity, one that we no longer appreciate at its true value, absorbed as we are by the injunction to be ever more useful, more efficient, more productive? A source that has dried up but is perhaps just waiting to spring forth again? Could it be that our priorities are leading us astray, that “what matters” is not what we think it is, that distraction is not what we think it is?

To play is to create

Children's ability to invent a game out of nothing is often admired by adults. A ball, a bottle cap, a piece of cardboard, three pieces of string, and suddenly they are sea captains facing a storm or a horde of pirates. I never tire of watching my own children: at the cry of “the floor is lava!”, they both run around trying to escape the imaginary lava that is chasing and surrounding them... in the living room. This capacity for invention, improvisation, and transformation offers a glimpse, albeit embryonic and tentative, of the potential fertility of the human mind.

Play allows us to escape for a moment from the realm of utility, from the rationalization of every action; it opens the door to a temporary re-enchantment, a different kind of inspiration, a renewal that can be something other than the reduction of the human being to a simple exploitable function: a mobilization of energy for a creative appetite.

Such is the miracle of “pretending”: immersing oneself, even for a moment, in an imaginary universe is not simply simulating reality, it is creating another one. Play thus becomes a demiurgic experience, a creation of new worlds, where roles, rules, and even entire universes are defined. Not by repeating what exists, but by inventing what could be.

However, this creativity only flourishes on fertile ground. It requires a capacity for wonder and amazement, which itself only unfolds in a certain state of deprivation: time, availability, and perhaps even a touch of boredom. Too often, our children are jaded by the excess of objects at their disposal, whose very abundance stifles their imagination, or by the very nature of the toys that surround them. Increasingly sophisticated, they have also become more specialized, determined, limiting, and prescriptive in their use, leaving little room for improvisation and inventiveness. Everyone probably remembers the images of destitute African children who, a few years ago, made their own toys from recycled materials, demonstrating remarkable ingenuity and inventiveness.

So there are different kinds of games. Those that inspire and those that stifle inspiration. Those that create a universe and those that create dependency, those that open us up to the world and those that separate us from it—a category in which we can include, for example, video games and gambling, despite their undeniable entertainment value.

To play is to embody

Very early on, we become aware of the finitude of our existence, marked by the fragility of the body, the irreversibility of time, and the certainty of death. The latent anxiety and search for meaning that this awareness motivates in each of us has inspired many theologians, philosophers, and poets. Playing means denying, even if only temporarily, this condition that is ours. It means escaping our finitude for a time, projecting ourselves briefly into a suspended timelessness. Limits fade away, possibilities open up. Along with literature, play is one of the few human creations that allows us to live several lives.

One of the fundamental principles of play is that it “must not have irreversible consequences” and, in particular, that “winnings and losses are reversible, the champion must put his title back on the line.” The current resurgence of interest in war games, invented in 19th-century Prussia and back in the spotlight in French military training for the past decade, is based on this principle: learning and progressing by being able to try and retry different tactics, without the consequences on the simulated battlefield ever being definitive. Chess is known for offering the possibility of an infinite number of games that will never be the same. Certain games offer us a number of “lives,” allowing us to continue the adventure by surviving our own simulated death. Finally, role-playing games are the ultimate embodiment of “putting yourself in someone else's shoes.”

Because in all its meanings (playing music, playing a role, playing chess or another game), play is a place of “eccentrification”: I am myself while being someone else. I am still myself as an individual, with my history, my passions, my ambitions, but I also project myself into something else, into a role that encompasses and transcends me. As a player, I become the embodiment of another for a moment. Every game, even the simplest, amounts to playing a role: for the duration of the game, I am that character, that player, before being myself, and it is as such that others look at me and judge me. As a player, I am subject to different expectations in terms of behavior, objectives, and attitude.

Because that is what it is all about: playing means transcending the reality of my condition for a moment to embody an idea. It is in the theater, of course, that this embodiment takes on its greatest strength and symbolic power. Play becomes the embodiment of the spirit of an immortal character, a symbol, and the repetition of the role by generations of actors becomes the immortality of humanity's transmission to itself. In this sense, playing music, a role in the theater, or even a simple game with friends, proves to be an eminently spiritual act, an act through which I bring an existence and inspiration to life.
Play then reveals itself as a place where possibility emerges, where failure does not mark a definitive end, but an invitation to create new strategies. In play, I affirm my desire for immortality, not by fleeing death, but by creating a parallel dimension where it is defeated.

To play is to reveal oneself

In 1997, in a game that was highly publicized at the time and still remains etched in people's minds today, the DeepBlue supercomputer defeated world chess champion Gary Kasparov in a series of six games whose structure roughly mirrored the conditions of a world championship. More recently, in 2016, AlphaGo's victory over world Go champion Lee Sedol sealed the fate of the last game in which humans still resisted the extraordinary computing power of machines.

Why continue to play chess or Go if machines are now almost always more powerful than the best champions? Is there still something at stake in the game? Or is there perhaps something else at play?

"Mensch, ärgere Dich nicht!" (“Come on, keep calm!”) is the German name for “Ludo.” This very simple and universally known game is also an extraordinary test of endurance: offering the player very little decision-making power and almost no creativity, it also has the ability to stretch out far beyond the patience reserves of a normal person. This reveals the essence of even the simplest game: testing and revealing personalities. Revealing who and what we are. Audacity, kindness, calculation, memory, patience, ingenuity: each game trains, encourages, reveals, and brings out different elements of our personality and, in doing so, builds it piece by piece.

A famous chess game in 1851, between the grandmasters Anderssen and Kieseritzky, has been described as “immortal.” Not because of the calculated and formidable efficiency of one of the opponents, like DeepBlue, which would optimize every move thanks to its depth of calculation. Quite the contrary: it was after sacrificing almost all of his key pieces that Anderssen won the game after about twenty moves. It is this daring, not to say romantic, play that makes this game so exceptional. It shows us that the beauty of the game lies not in material security, risk optimization, or the reasonable calculation of each move, but in vision and intuition served by risk-taking that is not without panache.

For the real goal of the game is not to win. To play is to measure oneself, not so much against others as against oneself. It is no coincidence that a “bad player” is not someone who loses, but someone who does not know how to lose with dignity. Calling someone a “bad player” is not a judgment on their performance or effectiveness (the fact that they lost), but rather on their moral value, in a word, on their sense of honor (their reaction to failure) . We experience defeat and, in doing so, discover the meaning of confrontation, as one of the young officers participating in a war game points out.
The true value of the game is not victory, but voluntarily exposing oneself to the risk of losing. And for the champion, it is not so much a question of having won a title as of voluntarily putting it back into play at the risk of losing it. One can indeed be glorious and proud for reasons other than efficiency and supremacy. There is another type of performance besides technical performance: moral performance, the power to give efficiency to a moral and spiritual dimension of life, a source of inspiration and fruitfulness shared in a common life experience.

Building a shared world

For what is a “game” if not a system of rules to which we voluntarily submit in pursuit of a defined goal?
"What computer programming does is structure the underlying principles of an experience. Not the experience itself, but the underlying principles of the experience, and those principles can allow for thousands of different experiences that all follow those laws,“ said Steve Jobs in 1983. Such are also the rules of the game: ”underlying principles" that open the way to an infinite number of experiences.

Depending on the principles on which it is based, a game can be fair (everyone has the same chance of winning) or unfair, symmetrical (the rules are the same for everyone) or asymmetrical. From the simplest (Ludo) to the most complex (chess), not to mention the infinite variety of board games, we are accustomed to symmetrical and unfair games in our daily lives: the rules are the same for everyone, but the starting point is never perfectly fair—even in chess, the player who starts has a head start.

To enter into the game is therefore to accept the conditions for building human relationships with a specific goal and according to specific rules, rules that we strive to design as fairly as possible, without ever fully succeeding. In other words, a game is nothing more than the construction of a miniature social body for a specific period of time, the voluntary establishment of an ephemeral “social contract,” a community instituted by the free and voluntary consent of each individual, who agrees to abide by common rules. After allowing me to discover myself as an individual, the game teaches me to become a member of a socially constituted group.

When a group participates in a game, what makes it valuable is not the performance of the result, but first and foremost the fact of constructing a symbolic space where my individual “I” contributes to the construction of a collective “we.” By refusing to accept the rules that they claim to have tacitly accepted and to which others have submitted, the “bad player” we mentioned earlier undermines the underlying principles and conditions of such a shared experience, undermining the very foundations of this effort to build a “we.”

The game thus reveals itself as a catalyst for social construction through interactivity, and thereby a catalyst for each individual's dispositions. Even if we have imagination, we must still train that imagination to embrace the language of ideas, painting, or music. The innate qualities that individuals possess must find a means of realization that will ensure their fruitfulness. However, the reciprocity between humans and the world means that human qualities are learned through interaction, exchange, and shared initiative. This shared initiative, a form of interdependence that is exclusively positive, can be understood as ethical behavior that integrates the participants in a given endeavor into a whole.
Children are very good at acting out in play the way they are affected by the meanings of the world: they pretend. They play at being father and mother, war chief, they embody historical figures. They do in their own way and on their own scale what painters and great novelists reveal about their era.

So let's play!

The extraordinarily broad meaning of the term “play” (we “play” music, a role, chess, soccer...) is not an imprecision of language. On the contrary, it reflects the extent to which play is an essential element of human activity, a fundamental pillar of our societies. It is through play that our personality is revealed and forged. It is through play that our sociability is born and flourishes. We learn less the rules themselves than the principle of rules, civility, and overcoming instinct, immediacy, and brutality. A glance at some playgrounds shows that this learning process is not self-evident, and is not without conflict and tantrums. We learn to be ourselves as individuals, but also as members of a social body. And in our embodiment of an infinite number of other potential “selves,” we bring to life in our own way this universal aspiration to create and transmit, in our own small way, a little spark of immortality.

So let's play!

Romain Leroy-Castillo

The original French version of this article was published in revue "Inflexions - civis et militaires", n°57

https://shs.cairn.info/revue-inflexions-2025-2-page-25?lang=fr