Playing For Keeps
Are play and delight footnotes to world history? Or do they deserve their own chapter?
One of the things you wrestle with as an author when you set out to write a book organized around an idea — and not an actual person, or a specific event, or a clearly demarcated historical period — is how much time you want to spend up front defining your terms. My new book Wonderland is one of those books; its argument connects dozens of historical figures working and playing in many different fields all around the globe, starting with our Paleolithic ancestors making musical instruments out of vulture bones forty thousand years ago, leading up to present-day debates over artificial intelligence and globalization, all gathered together under the umbrella term of play, as in the book’s subtitle: how play made the modern world.
Play turns out to have a number of almost-synonyms in the book: delight, leisure, wonder. I spent a long time debating whether “play” was the right word to use in the subtitle, given that it had connotations of both games and childhood that were more specific than the meaning I had intended for it. In the end, I settled on the fusion of two words that were active in the full title of the book: wonder and play. And I spent a few paragraphs in the introduction explaining what I meant by the category. But ultimately I decided not to spend a lot of time throat-clearing at the beginning, anticipating objections that people might have about my terminology. It seemed better to jump into the stories, and make the case for the importance of this concept of play by showing, not telling.
But two reviews that ran this week, one by Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times and one by Steven Poole in the Journal — two writers I admire — have made me wonder if I should have spent a bit more time up front defending the concept. Heffernan’s review is overwhelmingly positive (the book is “a house of wonders itself”) but she does sound one note of skepticism about the book’s definitions:
“Play” here designates by turns novelty, delight, sport, games, prettiness, music of any kind, gambling, magic shows, spectacles, illusions and fashion. The word slips and skips like a pinball. If Johnson can show that the primary purpose of some pastime is not, strictly speaking, money, war or sex, he labels it play and closes his case. His pinball manages to light a lot of stuff up, so it’s hard to begrudge him this sometimes reckless game.
Now, it’s true I did allude to money, war and sex as examples of forces or drives that were excluded from the category of play. But that was by no means an exhaustive list. There are many other conventional agents of historical change that are also not part of the story: the quest for power; tribalism and nationalism; religious belief; the drive for personal or collective liberty and freedom; the familial attachments of dynasties; the scientist’s attempt to understand the mysteries of the universe and of life on earth; entrepreneurs and inventors tackling non-frivolous problems; advances in medicine and public health. Those are the forces you likely read about in your high school World History textbook, and they are profound forces indeed. They deserve their place in the pantheon. But Wonderland makes the argument that another force deserves to be seen alongside them, a force that usually only shows up as a footnote or an after-effect of those Prime Movers: the force of delight and play, of things people did for no good reason other than the fact that they were amusing or surprising in some way.
Poole’s review also has nice things to say (I have “excellent facts,” for starters) but he’s less willing to forgive what he considers an all-too-miscellaneous definition of play:
To make his case, he assumes that the concept of play encompasses all the following: a desire for novelty in clothing (which led to the automated spinning machines of the Industrial Revolution); a taste for spicy foods (which inaugurated global trade); the invention of musical instruments (some of which, like player pianos, were among the first programmable machines); the thirst for ale or coffee (which encouraged the intellectual ferment of the Enlightenment); and, least implausibly, the need to win at gambling (which prompted the development of the mathematics of probability and statistics).
Yes, they do sound quite different from each other when you put them that way. Yet even still, I think there’s a clear common denominator: they’re all things that people did for fun despite the fact that the activities offered no real utilitarian value. (As Brian Eno put it in his similarly generous definition of art: they’re all things that we didn’t have to do.) It is undeniably true that when you organize the world that way you get some strange bedfellows: cinnamon next to bone flutes next to automated dancers. But think about one of those traditional agents of historical change: the quest for liberty and freedom, for instance. A history of that drive would reasonably include the signing of the Declaration Of Independence; the invention of the washing machine and other labor-saving devices that liberated women from the tyranny of household chores; and the gay bars of New York or Los Angeles that played such a central role in the early days of the gay rights movement. One is an act of applied political philosophy; one is a household appliance; the other is a gathering place for people of like-minded sexual orientation. And yet they all have a meaningful role to play in the long arc of our expanding liberties.
In the end, I think I agree with Poole and Heffernan that the book doesn’t quite build the foundation that it should to support the definition of play itself. But I think they’re wrong to suggest those various elements don’t belong under the same conceptual roof. Because they have been ignored for so long, the many faces of play and delight are easily lost in the mix. Isolated from one another, they become footnotes, sidebars.
If you put music off on one side, and fashion off on the other, and gameplay somewhere else, you end up with a kind of Balkanized version of the mental map of historical change: all the playful experiences are split up into smaller units, while the Great Powers of religious belief, military conquest, nationalism, and the others dominate the terrain. But when you put the confederated states of play together, you begin to realize just how important the capacity for delight and amusement has been to our species. That drive has many diverse manifestations, but so does the drive for tribal unity or the quest for power; we’re just so familiar with those categories that we take it for granted that they can incorporate a wide range of human experiences. Wherever you put it on the map, play deserves the same latitude.
This post is one of several about my new book, Wonderland: How Play Made The Modern World, now on sale from Riverhead Books. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to be discussing the book here at Medium, in a special book club brought to you by Heleo. Related reading:
