Finding the Playful Self at Play

"Call to mind sedentary, intensely engrossed grandmasters welded to their checkered boards at a tournament. They go off their feed. They sweat buckets. They lose ten pounds or more as they play their intricate, drawn-out mental game. Exhausted, stressed, win or lose, they withdraw after a match to a soak in warmed, bentonite clay, Slavic lullabies playing on the spa speakers."

"In the electronic games universe, some of the multiplayer contests are so demanding in their detail, so complex in their character relations and retaliations, and so intwined with fantasy physics that need mastering, that high-level players will lose themselves in the contests that come to seem more work-like than play-like. It's a second job, some will say, ruefully. Or traditionally, consider golf. Some adepts will become poised during a round, entering a deep, rewarding, flowlike state."

"Or Muhammad Ali, who was a wiseacre even in the punishing ring- "is that all you got, Chump?"-was even more dismissive of reporters' tendentious, tedious questioning. After joining the Nation of Islam, a Black nationalist religion, he took heat from the mainstream. Smirking reporters would ask about the prospect of multiple wives, theoretically permissible. Counterpunching, Ali would say he wanted four: one to shine his shoes, one to rub oil on"

Play and playfulness can diverge: intense competitive activities often become worklike, requiring sustained concentration, physical or mental depletion, and a loss of casual amusement. Chess grandmasters and high-level electronic gamers can become engrossed to the point of exhaustion and professionalization, treating contests like a second job. Golf can produce both flowlike absorption and everyday frustration for amateurs. Even within serious, high-stakes play, spontaneous playfulness appears: exuberant athletic acts like Josh Allen's leap and Muhammad Ali's taunting humor reveal play's joyful, performative side amid danger and social controversy.

Read at Psychology Today