Hard fun and work-play
On a train between North Wales and London, I read the first 100 pages of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow, the most famous psychology book on happiness and enjoyment [to pronounce his name, if your Hungarian is rusty: Cheek-sent-me-high]. It's a foundational text in game studies, because the mystery that sits at that discipline's core is: why play? The simple answer, "because it's fun," does not offer a terribly good explanation. For one, we inevitably spend some/most of our playing time completely frustrated, disappointed, or bored—you're losing, you're trying to build necessary skills but it's boring, you don't know what to do next, you're panicking because you know you *should* be having fun but you're not, etc. For another, plenty of other activities are very fun, and much more accessibly so—if all you want is to feel pleasure, it's much simpler to eat your weight in chocolate fondue, sleep for 10 hours, and masturbate all day. Why play, when play is so often miserable and hedonism is so delicious?
It turns out, per Csikszentmihalyi, that all leisure is not created equal. "Pleasure is an important component of the quality of life, but by itself it does not bring happiness. Sleep, rest, food, and sex provide restorative homeostatic experiences that return consciousness to order after the needs of the body intrude and cause psychic entropy to occur. But they do not produce psychological growth. They do not add complexity to the self. Pleasure helps to maintain order, but by itself cannot create new order in consciousness." (Flow, 46) So, answering physiological needs might make us feel warm and safe, and is certainly necessary for a good life, but the most they do is keep you in stasis. They don't complete you as a person, force growth, enable maturity, etc. And as a result, they can feel empty if you do them too much. That fifth donut is not as delicious as the first; that 10th binged episode of Parks and Rec does not comfort as much as the 2nd.
And to the first question (why play, when play is often miserable?), Csikszentmihalyi has a great answer as well, and it looks like this:
Flow is the goal. Flow is the feeling where you're challenged but calm, engaged but not frantic, powerfully and fully immersed in an activity. Csikszentmihalyi lists 8 prereqs for a task to be a flow activity (or at least have the potential for it). There must be:
1) A chance you can complete the activity.
2) An ability to concentrate on it.
3) Goals.
4) Immediate feedback.
5) Deep but effortless involvement, so you're not worried about everyday life.
6) A sense of control.
7) No concern for the self (although your sense of self afterwards is stronger).
8) A shredded sense of time (dilation, expansion, you lose track of it).
It looks a lot like a game, doesn't it?
Combine these qualities and you have a task that can possibly propel the actor into a state of flow. The trick is to stay within the flow channel, as depicted in the graph above. If the task I set for myself is winning Wimbledon, there is no chance I could achieve flow. Setting such a task would put me high in the top left quadrant: it's high challenge and I have low skill, so I'm far from the flow channel and deep in the anxiety zone. On the other hand, if the task is folding in half one napkin after another, I will likely migrate quickly to the lower right quadrant: low challenge and high skill (being, as I am, already quite competent at folding napkins in half. Though I suppose I could be better).
As you start an activity, you're likely to be in position A1—low difficulty but low skill, so it's possible to find flow. But soon, either the difficulty increases and you don't have a corresponding increase in skill, rendering you anxious (A3), or the difficulty does not increase and, as your skill increases, activities that were previously challenging become boring (A2). In order to get back to flow, you need to up your skills or the challenge, respectively. Game designers thus try to make the levels of their games correspond to the flow channel, an approximation that looks like this:
So. Why play when play is so often miserable? Because only by ricocheting between boredom and stress can we stay in the desirable flow channel. And flow, says Csikszentmihalyi, is what really makes us happy—the deep, soul-quenched, sun-drenched happiness that makes being alive worth it. This is hard fun; it builds you as a person. Games, art, music, literature, and sports are leisure activities carefully calibrated to deliver hard fun, but it happens in the rest of your life too. If you think back on particularly formative experiences and memories—a course that pushed you in a new direction, a creative project, a relationship—they were probably some version of hard fun.
Today, everyone wants to have hard fun in work as well as play. We don't want jobs just for the sake of having jobs; we want to grow and achieve flow in our work. This has led to a curious imbrication of work and play—we don't distinguish clearly between our them, expecting one to bleed into the other (the "we" I meant here was millennials, but it could easily be academics, or freelancers, or start-up techies, or artists). It leads to lives in which you never stop working, but also you never stop playing. Take my job: I spend way more than 40 hours a week working, but my work consists of reading, writing posts and articles and book chapters, creating syllabi and lesson plans, meeting up with colleagues to discuss work, designing games, beating my head against code that doesn't work, basically trying and failing at a lot of different activities. It's all hard fun—sometimes miserable, but all flow-possible.
Video games, argues Matthew Kenny in a fascinating essay, are situated at the crux of this "reconfigured work/play/subjectivity interrelation" due to the "self-modifying practices that players must undertake during gameplay" (Kenny, Matthew. “The Game of Politics: Examining the Role of Work, Play, and Subjectivity Formation in Papers, Please.” Games and Culture. 2015. Pp.1-20.)
To understand what the hell he means, we need to make a brief jaunt into game history. Broadly speaking, video games developed because nerds at MIT and elsewhere repurposed military-grade computer technologies for play purposes (the first video game, Spacewar! in 1962, shows this patrimony clearly). It was dorky grad students stealing time with a military computer and reprogramming it for fun. Video games were and are the ludic shadow of the military-industrial complex, created using the same technologies put to different uses. As Kelly explains it, "video games exist as a manifestation of the tension between technological apparatuses of Western authority and a playful rebellion against hegemonic, elitist, or oppressive systems" (5).
(Spacewar! 1962)
This dialectic of playfulness and murder, says Kelly, is "representative of a new relationship between work and play within networked societies." It's hard fun to play Spacewar!, but, in a flow sense if not a moral one, it's also hard fun to plan real wars. The boundary between work and play evaporates. And while it seems chilling in this context, it's kindof great in general, because people wanting flow in their work leads to individuals who feel more happiness and soul expansion in their lives.
Morally, it's another (but equally fascinating) story. If the same technologies are used to kill people for real and "kill" pixels for fun, morality gets real blurry. If you're having hard fun in your work, it might be wonderful for you personally, but when your work is murder, then, well, that's not great for other people. More, games (and other flow activities) are subjectivity creators. Games in particular Kenny calls "subjectivity machines." In order to win a game, you have to get inside it, take on its its mode of thinking. Its morality is baked into its code; what it asks you to do is what that particular game is calling moral. And by playing it, you're co-creating your subjectivity, flowing with the game and experiencing all that lovely soul growth afforded by flow activities.
(Performance Studies note for later: I'm not real sure how this is so different from any other war game, or from Schechner's analysis of theater/ritual as two sides of the same cultural desire. We always want to be most playful about the things that are very important, and, as Salen and Zimmerman among others suggest, it's impossible to play without taking it seriously. But this post is already way too long, so let's put a pin in this.)
