Last night I had a dream. I was throwing a ball around with some people in a swimming pool and someone suggested we play a game of water polo (I’m half Hungarian, so it’s in my blood…weird that a land-locked country would have such a history of obsession with water polo). An argument thus arose over whether imposition of rules would detract from the fun we were having or not.
In my dream, we decided to continue with the unstructured play rather than transition into a game with formal rules. That’s what we explicitly decided on, at least. In my dream-reality, however, what I realized (in retrospect) we decided on was to simply keep the status quo in terms of our understanding of the implicit rules in what we were doing. For instance, clearly it’d be against the implicit rules of behavior we were operating under to just toss the ball in the air repeatedly (playing catch with yourself). We’d be annoyed if someone violated that rule.
In other words, it wasn’t a choice between structured and unstructured play: There is no such thing as unstructured play. There’s always a structure involved in play, whether it’s pretending that you’re a fireman rescuing people from certain death or a kid playing catch with his dad.
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January 20th, 2008 at 6:28 am
Jetamo
Wow. Deep.
January 20th, 2008 at 10:33 am
Eric Lamy
This plays into a similar philosophy on the nature of freedom. When we consider the extent to which certain impositions against our “natural” freedoms actually enable us to live a much more fulfilling life, it becomes obvious that the freedom we espouse to desire is ultimately based in a limited degree of restraint. This concept of freedom found in restraint is echoed throughout our sensual experiences, in the understanding that certain forms must be adhered to that engage us in a fulfilling fashion.
“Play” is really just an imposition of a different set of restraints than otherwise apply. Childhood make-believe games impose restraints on the type of persona you take on, whether a cop, a robber, an Indian or a cowboy. Modern role-playing utilizes similar concepts, though generally with a wider set of imposed restraints. But even in sports, or in games played with cards or boards and game pieces, there can be no true concept of play without the imposition of a set of restraints that differ from those of common experience. It’s the definition of those restraints, the “rules of the game”, that permit those engaging in play to be entertained, providing the ruleset is sufficiently organized to provide a game-situation whose restraints mirror moral concepts that are mutually agreed upon, primarily ensuring some sense of “fair” play.
Not all play needs to adhere to a sense of fair play, though most games do ultimately depend upon it. In those scenarios where some concept of balanced opportunity is sacrificed in favour of one party over another, it is generally only done within a wider ruleset that has been agreed upon in advance by all involved parties. So ultimately even in situations where general moral standards are not adhered to, it is the mutual agreement of the involved parties to establish restraints on those standards that enable the situation of play to operate with success.
January 29th, 2008 at 3:03 am
Lavant
If we take unstructured play to mean that which is not formally organized in a set or conventional pattern, as typical definitions of the concept hold, then we can have unstructured play. It is a type of play that defies classification. Now we could have different levels of structure to an overly unstructured/ improvisational environment/game, but it is a measure of degree. Now if you posit that anytime structure>0 in a strictly mathematical sense then ok you can find some structure to an overly unclassifiable game. Yet what I find interesting are these anomalies that make the game hard to classify and your dream interesting from a social gamer’s perspective.
February 3rd, 2008 at 10:40 pm
Pentharian
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/02/play-a-multiplayer-online-game-while-surfing-the-web-pmog/
Now even just surfing the web can be an MMORPG in a sense.