I read an article about play.
It started with a father watching his kids play Catan completely wrong.
They weren’t really playing Catan anymore. They had moved the pieces around, made islands, invented bridges and basically turned the game into something else.
There was no winning.
There weren’t really any points.
They were just playing with it.
The article makes a distinction between playing a game and playing in a game. One is about following the rules, competing and trying to achieve whatever objective the game gives you. The other is much more open. You just use what is there and see what happens.
And I think adults desperately need more of the second one.
Because almost everything now has become some kind of game.
Not even in the fun way.
Everything has a number attached to it.
Your sleep has a score.
Your exercise has a streak.
Your rest has to be productive.
Your hobbies have to improve you somehow.
Everything is an algorithm.
Everything is:
like and subscribe guys, we’re almost at one million whatever.
Even the things that are supposed to exist outside work slowly become another form of work.
The article calls one version of this value capture — when the metric slowly replaces the reason you started doing the thing in the first place.
And that makes a lot of sense to me.
You start running because you like running.
Then eventually you’re thinking about pace, distance, calories, rankings and whether your watch thinks you did a good enough job.
You start learning something because you’re curious.
Then you care about maintaining a streak.
You make something because you want to make it.
Then it becomes:
Should I post this?
Will people like it?
Can I put it in my portfolio?
Is this useful?
Can I make money out of this?
At some point the thing you were doing gets buried underneath everything you can get out of doing it.
Creativity probably needs useless time
I think some of the best moments of creativity happen when there isn’t really a schedule.
Obviously there are methods that work.
Something like Sprint, where a group has one week to understand a problem, come up with something, prototype it and test it, can be useful.
As a temporary thing.
You have a problem and you need to move.
Fine.
But I don’t think creativity itself normally behaves like:
Tuesday, 4 PM: have original idea.
Most of the time the good stuff seems to happen when you’re doing something and nobody is really watching.
There is no objective.
You aren’t trying to get anything out of it.
You just start doing something because you’re interested.
And then you keep going.
Sometimes it becomes something useful later.
Sometimes it doesn’t.
I started writing these Field Notes completely on a whim.
There is no posting schedule.
At the moment basically nobody reads them.
My father has.
That’s about it.
So what exactly am I writing them for?
Who knows?
I just wanted to.
And maybe that is actually the point.
The second I start thinking:
I need to publish one every Sunday because consistency is important
I’ve probably managed to turn another thing I enjoyed into a job.
Interest and discipline
I also think people underestimate what happens when someone is genuinely interested in something.
We talk constantly about discipline.
You have to force yourself.
You have to wake up and grind.
You have to make yourself do the work.
And obviously there are parts of everything that are difficult or boring.
But when someone genuinely loves doing something, I don’t think they experience all of it as work in the same way.
A musician who is actually interested in music doesn’t necessarily reach 12 PM and go:
Right, my shift is over. I am no longer interested in music.
They might finish, get inspired again and immediately want to go back.
It becomes part of their life.
They don’t always have to drag themselves toward it.
They just keep returning to it.
From outside that might look like incredible discipline.
But inside, sometimes it’s probably just:
I really want to do this.
I think interest creates a lot of discipline automatically.
You still need to finish things.
You still have boring parts.
But there is a big difference between forcing yourself to repeatedly do something and being so interested that you keep finding yourself doing it anyway.
Maybe education teaches the opposite
This is also where I think education gets something wrong.
Obviously everyone needs basics.
You need to learn things.
Not everyone is trying to become an artist.
But not everyone is trying to become a doctor either.
A lot of education still seems built around producing people who are good at working inside an existing system.
Here is what you need to learn.
Here is the problem.
Here is the correct answer.
Here is when you need to finish.
Here is the number that tells us how well you did.
And historically there is obviously a relationship between mass education and producing people who could work inside large industrial systems.
That doesn’t mean education is some giant conspiracy designed to destroy creativity.
But I also think saying standardisation is simply necessary because there are lots of students becomes an easy excuse.
Because if you spend years teaching someone:
Here is your objective.
then eventually what happens when nobody gives them one?
Creativity often starts somewhere else.
What am I interested in?
What happens if I try this?
Why does this work this way?
There might not even be a problem yet.
Maybe you just notice something and follow it.
And I think education has a harder time dealing with that because there isn’t always an obvious outcome to grade.
The first week of an FPS
Games are probably the easiest place to see all of this.
Think about the first few weeks after a major FPS comes out.
Nobody knows anything.
Everyone knows how to walk.
Everyone knows how to shoot.
That’s about it.
Nobody knows the perfect loadout.
Nobody knows where the best weapon spawns are.
Nobody knows every map route.
Nobody knows the exact best attachment combination.
Nobody has calculated the fastest way of doing everything.
People just try things.
You use a gun because you found it.
You go somewhere because you haven’t been there before.
You discover something stupid and tell your friends.
Everyone is figuring the game out at the same time.
And that first period is usually some of the most fun anyone has with the game.
Then eventually everything becomes known.
Best gun.
Best loadout.
Best route.
Best position.
Best attachments.
Best strategy.
Then someone uploads:
BEST META LOADOUT YOU NEED TO USE RIGHT NOW
and suddenly everyone knows what they’re supposed to be doing.
People constantly ask for games to somehow go back to how they felt at launch.
And I don’t think they necessarily want the broken launch version back.
They want the time when nobody knew anything.
Before everything became optimised.
But optimisation isn’t the problem either
Then there is something like Mario Kart Wii.
People have been playing that game for years.
At the highest level, everything is optimised.
Correct bike.
Correct character.
Correct shortcut.
Correct line.
Tiny improvements everywhere.
People spend enormous amounts of time trying to set new world records.
Which sounds like the complete opposite of what I just said.
But I still think that’s play.
Because why are they doing it?
There is a tiny community that cares.
Maybe you get some recognition inside that community.
But there isn’t some enormous societal reward waiting at the end.
Most people in the world will never know you hold a Mario Kart Wii world record.
And people still spend hours and hours trying to shave tiny amounts of time off a run.
Because they enjoy it.
They want to see if they can do it.
So competition itself isn’t the problem.
Optimisation isn’t the problem.
You can take something extremely seriously and still be playing.
I think it comes down to why you’re doing it.
Maybe play is much simpler than I thought
I think play is basically:
doing something because you want to do it.
Not because of what you’re going to get at the end.
There can still be something at the end.
You can win.
You can become better.
You can set a world record.
You can finish something.
You can get recognition.
You can even get paid.
That doesn’t automatically stop it from being play.
The question is whether the reward is the reason you wanted to do the thing in the first place.
The Mario Kart player wants the world record.
Of course they do.
But if the only reason they were doing it was some massive external reward, almost nobody would spend that much time doing something that niche.
They do it because somewhere along the way they decided:
I care about this.
Even if almost nobody else does.
And I think that’s actually quite nice.
You don’t need society to tell you something is valuable before you are allowed to care about it.
A better version of “follow your dreams”
This also made me think that maybe there is a better way of saying:
follow your dreams.
I never really liked that phrase.
It sounds nice, but it’s so vague that it basically means nothing.
Maybe a better question is:
What would you still want to do if there was no reward?
If nobody cared.
If nobody applauded.
If there was no title.
If you weren’t going to become famous for it.
If there wasn’t some guaranteed success waiting at the end.
Would you still want to do it?
I think whatever survives that question probably tells you something useful about yourself.
Because there is a difference between liking an activity and liking what the activity might give you.
Do you like making music?
Or do you like the idea of being a musician?
Do you like making things?
Or do you like being called a designer?
Do you actually like doing the thing when nobody is watching?
That’s probably a better question than asking someone what their dream is.
But this shouldn’t become career advice either
And I think this matters beyond work.
Maybe even more outside work.
Not everything you enjoy needs to become your career.
Not everything needs to become something you are good at.
Not everything needs to become content.
Not everything needs to become useful.
Be bored.
Actually be bored.
Don’t immediately fill every empty second.
Do something that has absolutely nothing to do with a societal reward.
Learn something because you’re interested.
Make something because you want to see what happens.
Play something because it’s fun.
Walk somewhere because you felt like walking.
Think about something completely useless for an evening.
Maybe nothing comes out of it.
That’s fine.
I think adults need parts of life where they can do something without constantly having to answer:
What am I getting out of this?
Because now even rest has started needing a justification.
You aren’t doing nothing.
You’re “recovering.”
You aren’t walking around.
You’re getting your steps.
You aren’t playing around with something.
You’re developing a skill.
You aren’t interested in something random.
You’re expanding your knowledge.
Everything has to somehow become an investment in a future version of yourself.
Maybe sometimes we should just leave things alone.
Maybe that’s play
Maybe play isn’t necessarily childish.
It isn’t necessarily unstructured.
It isn’t necessarily casual.
It isn’t the opposite of competition.
It isn’t the opposite of hard work.
It isn’t even necessarily the opposite of optimisation.
You can optimise the hell out of Mario Kart and still be playing.
Maybe play is simply the part of life where the activity doesn’t need to justify itself through something outside it.
You do it because you want to be doing it.
There might be a reward.
There might not.
It doesn’t really matter.
And maybe in a world where almost everything is measured, scored, ranked, monetised, recommended and fed back to us through an algorithm, keeping a few things that exist simply because:
I wanted to do it
is actually pretty important.
