you can play football or play the guitar. you can play around, play on, or play with someone in bed. you can go and see a play, and there is play in flexible material. do these different uses of <u+201c>play<u+201d> add up to a single phenomenon that uniquely illuminates the modern world? two authors of new books think so. oddly, however, they disagree profoundly about what play actually is. and any given reader might disagree with them both. in <u+201c>wonderland,<u+201d> steven johnson argues that, as his subtitle has it, <u+201c>play made the modern world.<u+201d> 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). by steven johnson riverhead, 322 pages, $30 by ian bogost basic, 266 pages, $26.99 the best gifts for foodies, art lovers, science buffs, design enthusiasts, sports fans and everyone else. mr. johnson<u+2019>s narrative is crammed with elegantly told vignettes from the history of ideas, beginning with the remarkable automata described in medieval islamic texts and radiating outward in all directions<u+2014>to the 20th-century austrian socialist who invented the shopping mall, back to the stone age humans who created bone flutes that played perfect fourths and fifths. the book is full of excellent facts. why didn<u+2019>t the greeks discover probability theory? probably because they didn<u+2019>t have mass-produced dice that were sufficiently random. and your laptop <u+201c>keyboard<u+201d>? it<u+2019>s called that because the earliest writing machines were modeled after keyboard instruments, such as a mid-19th-century <u+201c>writing harpsichord.<u+201d> but what do all these subjects have in common? by the end, mr. johnson is invoking the brain<u+2019>s dopamine system in a neural pseudo-explanation; his conclusions seemingly reduce the idea of play to a simple desire for novelty, driven by something he calls <u+201c>the surprise instinct.<u+201d> all the heterogeneous things that the book mentions, he explains, <u+201c>were surprising when they first appeared.<u+201d> well, yes, but so were nuclear weapons, donald trump <u+2019>s presidential victory and swine flu. at the book<u+2019>s core is a more focused but slender history of its titular <u+201c>wonderland,<u+201d> defined as a space designed for leisure or entertainment: bars, department stores, cinemas, public parks and so forth. they are indeed, as mr. johnson argues, of surprising recentness and surely a boon. (leisure here is not so much a commodity, he writes nicely, as <u+201c>a kind of environment for sale.<u+201d>) but much of the book<u+2019>s material seems to be thrown in merely because it is interesting (which it is), and the ambition to link it all under the conceptual umbrella of <u+201c>play<u+201d> doesn<u+2019>t work. most of the examples that mr. johnson considers could easily be explained not so much through the concept of play as he defines it (a kind of slacking-off in favor of the pursuit of delight) as through a combination of entrepreneurship and sheer hard work. for ian bogost, in <u+201c>play anything,<u+201d> play and sheer hard work are not at all incompatible; indeed, they are deeply interlinked<u+2014>which is a profound truth. charlie parker put in thousands of hours of brutal and tedious work practicing scales before he could <u+201c>play<u+201d> his sax like that; modern chess grandmasters <u+201c>play<u+201d> the game at an exceptionally high level of cognitive work and concentration. and mr. bogost wants to convince us that we can play more things than just board games or saxophones. his central point is that play depends on restrictions and limitations: the rules of a game, or the boundaries of a field, but also the conventions of musical harmony or the form of a sonnet. what if we took the restraints in common life situations and experienced them not as boring or frustrating moments to be endured but as opportunities for play? while the author is dragging his daughter around a mall on a tedious errand, she is skipping along happily, intent on not stepping on the lines of the floor tiles. in the same situation, she is playing and her father is not. why can<u+2019>t we all be like her? play as mr. bogost defines it, then, is a kind of deliberate acceptance of one<u+2019>s current situation. instead of wishing it were something else, one devotes to it a rapt attention and finds in it unsuspected possibilities. here, too, the question arises whether, once you have defined <u+201c>play<u+201d> so broadly and vaguely, it retains any use as an analytical concept. either way, the author promises that such an attitude can cure our modern anomie<u+2014>supposing, that is, that the reader is suffering from anomie. this is one of those books that overuses the first-person plural, constantly claiming that <u+201c>we<u+201d> fear this or that, or that <u+201c>we<u+201d> have this or that wrong-headed idea, or that <u+201c>we are also miserable and bored.<u+201d> (<u+201c>speak for yourself,<u+201d> the cheerful reader mutters.) <u+201c>play anything<u+201d> is nonetheless an erudite and often amusing book, not so much an extended argument as a series of variations on a theme, with a wide range of reference, from jacques derrida through david foster wallace to the decluttering queen marie kondo. the author<u+2019>s best chapter draws fruitful parallels between oulipo, the group of experimental 20th-century french writers who imposed ridiculous constraints on their work (most famously, a novel composed without using the letter <u+201c>e<u+201d>), and computer programming or the truncated constraints of social media. less successful are the book<u+2019>s aspirations to being a self-help manual. its concrete examples of how the <u+201c>play<u+201d> attitude that it recommends might improve our lives are few, and they are rather surprisingly unsurprising. are you on a plane preparing for the boredom of flight? why not try, mr. bogost counsels sagely, observing closely the actions of your fellow passengers while they are boarding? it sounds as though the author believes he has invented people-watching. where the book functions best as a critique of modern culture is in its insistence that we moderns are too self-obsessed and inward-looking, with our meditation and our fitness trackers. <u+201c>instead of seeking greater happiness within ourselves,<u+201d> mr. bogost advises, <u+201c>we should pursue a greater respect for the things, people, and situations around us, learning to take them for what they are rather than for what they lack.<u+201d> though he mocks the modern west<u+2019>s appropriation of buddhism, this piece of advice hardly seems incompatible with it. note, however, that if everyone were to follow religiously the path of <u+201c>taking things for what they are rather than for what you wish them to be,<u+201d> there would never be any inventions or technological improvements of the kind mr. johnson celebrates. doesn<u+2019>t the idea of simply paying attention to things in the moment sound rather familiar, though? mr. bogost writes as if the current western fad for <u+201c>mindfulness<u+201d> were a kind of solipsistic navel-gazing, yet mindfulness is often defined as the close, respectful attention to quotidian things that he himself recommends as a modern panacea. in other words, as he implicitly acknowledges when expounding on the ancient greeks, the book<u+2019>s modern wisdom is very old. which is likely a reason to trust in it all the more. as plato wrote: <u+201c>man is the plaything of the gods, and that is the best of him; and so we should play the noblest games.<u+201d> <u+2014>mr. poole is the author of <u+201c>rethink: the surprising history of new ideas.<u+201d>
playing is serious business - wsj
noauthor