# Play Matters  Author:: Miguel Sicart  ## AI-Generated Summary None ## Highlights > play is not necessarily fun. It is pleasurable, but the pleasures it creates are not always submissive to enjoyment, happiness, or positive traits. Play can be pleasurable when it hurts, offends, challenges us and teases us, and even when we are not playing. Let’s not talk about play as fun but as pleasurable, opening us to the immense variations of pleasure in this world. ([Location 132](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BT1JL9M&location=132)) > Play can be dangerous too:8 it can be addicting and destructive and may lead to different types of harm—physical injuries, lost friendships, emotional breakdowns. Play is a dance between creation and destruction, between creativity and nihilism. Playing is a fragile, tense activity, prone to breakdowns. Individual play is a challenge to oneself, to keep on playing. Collective play is a balancing act of egos and interests, of purposes and intentions. Play is always on the verge of destruction, of itself and of its players, and that is precisely why it matters. Play is a movement between order and chaos.9 Like tragedy, it fulfills its expressive purpose when it manages a fragile, oscillating balance between both. This echoes the concept of dark play,10 exploring the boundaries between play and not play, between performance and secrecy.11 Dark play, with its potential dangers and exhilarating results, is another example of the nature of play as a way of being in the world—a dangerous one. ([Location 135](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BT1JL9M&location=135)) > Play is carnivalesque too.12 Play appropriates events, structures, and institutions to mock them and trivialize them, or make them deadly serious. ([Location 145](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BT1JL9M&location=145)) > In fact, play is a fundamental part of our moral well-being, of the healthy and mature and complete human life. Through play we experience the world, we construct it and we destroy it, and we explore who we are and what we can say. Play frees us from moral conventions but makes them still present, so we are aware of their weight, presence, and importance. We need play precisely because we need occasional freedom and distance from our conventional understanding of the moral fabric of society. Play is important because we need to see values and practice them and challenge them so they become more than mindless habits. ([Location 173](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BT1JL9M&location=173)) > Play is contextual. ([Location 192](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BT1JL9M&location=192)) > Play is also an activity in tension between creation and destruction.35 Play is always dangerous, dabbling with risks, creating and destroying, and keeping a careful balance between both. Play is between the rational pleasures of order and creation and the sweeping euphoria of destruction and rebirth, between the Apollonian and the Dionysiac. ([Location 236](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BT1JL9M&location=236)) > Lego provides an example of this tension. When building something without following any plans or instructions, I sometimes feel the temptation to build the tallest possible structure, just to see it fall. I pile pieces on top of pieces, in precarious balance, just to reach the highest possible point. I then look at my oeuvre and push it. The pleasure of the wasted time, of the pieces scattering as they hit the floor, is the pleasure of destructive play—the Dionysiac ending to my Apollonian world building. ([Location 248](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BT1JL9M&location=248)) > Play is carnivalesque. ([Location 281](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BT1JL9M&location=281)) > Play is appropriative, in that it takes over the context in which it exists and cannot be totally predetermined by such context. ([Location 283](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BT1JL9M&location=283)) > Play is disruptive as a consequence of being appropriate. When it takes over the context in which play take place, it breaks the state of affairs. This is often done for the sake of laughter, for enjoyment, for passing pleasures. But like all other passing pleasures, play can also disruptively reveal our conventions, assumptions, biases, and dislikes. In disrupting the normal state of affairs by being playful, we can go beyond fun when we appropriate a context with the intention of playing with and within it. And in that move, we reveal the inner workings of the context that we inhabit. ([Location 317](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BT1JL9M&location=317)) > Play is autotelic—an activity with its own goals and purposes, with its own marked duration and spaces and its own conditions for ending. ([Location 340](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BT1JL9M&location=340)) ### 2    Playfulness > The case of smart phones illustrates not only the malleable nature of toys as playthings, but also the capacity for some objects to afford playful behaviors. ([Location 390](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BT1JL9M&location=390)) > The main difference between play and playfulness is that play is an activity, while playfulness is an attitude. ([Location 428](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BT1JL9M&location=428))