This really became vivid for me the last time I visited the Kruger National Park in South Africa. I was in a wooden hide overlooking a small lake, and was lucky enough to witness a herd of about 20-30 elephants emerge from the bush on the other side of the lake. For the next hour they did nothing but play in the water under the baking heat (this was one of South Africa’s hottest Decembers on record). One of the baby elephants was particularly mischievous and enjoyed spraying it’s mother with water from behind. When the herd decided to leave, this baby elephant and another insisted on staying for a few more minutes. It was funny to see the mother’s come back and get them.
Elephants really are incredible creatures, which I had seen many times but never like this. All the seriousness in their imposing size disappeared quite literally in the water. It was amazing to see a group of animals in the wild do nothing but play. It reminded me that we humans sometimes just need to do the same as well, with no reason or productive purpose.
To learn the productive purpose, try sitting in the corner while everyone else plays.
After a while, you'll find yourself shunned from all kinds of activities, and even maybe bullied and considered an outcast. Do it long enough and it might affect your mental health and lead you down a path of depression or suicide...
Which leads to a possible purpose... It's detecting "bad" community members and expelling them. Nearly all animals that play also sometimes expel or kill some members of their own community.
>It was amazing to see a group of animals in the wild do nothing but play.
In fact that is the norm in the wild, and even among primitive tribes today. Also among many non-primitive but simpler (than us) people in rural areas.
>It reminded me that we humans sometimes just need to do the same as well, with no reason or productive purpose.
Any study of "play" must take into account of the classic work, 'Homo Ludens—A Study of the Play-Element in Culture', by the maverick Dutch historian, Johan Huzinga, from a 100 years ago. ("Homo Ludens" means "Man the Player" in Latin).
To quote the abstract of the said book by Huizinga:
[...] He identifies five characteristics of play: it is free; it is not "ordinary" or "real" life; it is distinct from "ordinary" life both as to locality and duration; it creates order; it is connected with no material interest, and from it no profit can be gained.
With cross-cultural examples from the humanities, business, and politics, Huizinga examines play in all its diverse guises—as it relates to language, law, war, knowledge, poetry, myth, philosophy, art, and much more. As he writes, "Civilization is, in its earliest phases, played. It does not come from play like a baby detaching itself from the womb: it arises in and as play, and never leaves it."
Starting with Plato, Huizinga traces the contribution of "man the player" through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and early modern world. With an eye for our own times he writes: "In American politics [play] is even more evident. Long before the two-party system had reduced itself to two gigantic teams whose political differences were hardly discernible to an outsider, electioneering in America had developed into a kind of national sport." With its remarkable historical sweep, Homo Ludens defines play for generations to come.
> He identifies five characteristics of play: it is free; it is not "ordinary" or "real" life; it is distinct from "ordinary" life both as to locality and duration; it creates order; it is connected with no material interest, and from it no profit can be gained.
According to this, video games are a form of play. I've always been told that playing video games is a waste of time, it would be interesting to see scientific evidence that it is actually good for you.
Playing video games has plenty of benefits which you can find scientific references to by searching around. They can also be a waste of time if one uses them as a tool for procrastination or incessant escapism. As a medium, games are especially prone to causing such behaviors since they're so highly tuned to produce frequent small bursts of mental stimulation, in conjunction with a common focus on perpetual replayability.
If, as the OP alleges, play is useful for preparing one for future challenges, then play can be counter-productive if an obsession with playing precludes one from ever encountering those challenges.
I'd only say don't be too quick to draw conclusions without reading the book. :-) I don't play video games myself; last I played was more than ten years ago. But I don't think it is a "waste of time" at all, when done with the "right mindset" (as kibwen alludes to in this thread).
As the old saying goes, "moderation curbs all vices" (normally attributed to Leonardo da Vinci; but, of course, he was riffing on the ancient Greek virtue of "sôphrosune"—temperance).
A lot of online games have a chat component to them so while not in-person in the strictest sense it's probably educational in some way. I learned English selling and buying stuff in RuneScape and I know a lot of my friends did too.
Eve Online is essentially training for careers in finance, logistics, corporate management and international politics. And I'm being serious here.
That outlier aside, you raise a good point about language - I too learned my English mostly through videogames. Single-player, story-rich videogames, which hooked me enough to play them with a dictionary on hand. I learned most of my vocabulary trying to understand the games' lores and navigate dialogues.
Anyone who tells you anything you do is a waste of time without a good foundational argument (as is implied here) is exhibiting abusive behaviour and should not be listened to.
For the child it is entertaining and also entrains static sedentary behaviour.
This will be useful for the future as we really have very little need of nature or vigorous movement - the longer the time we can remain still and mentally active, the more we will be able to contribute to society.
I'm glad this was voted down (for once). I put this comment out there as a sarcastic, antithetical opinion to my own - a little experiment. I half-expect the HN crew to vote it up.
This may be obvious to everyone else, but it wasn't until I adopted a dog that I realized how much "playing" is reinforcing skills needed for survival, like hunting and fighting. When dogs play with each other, they mostly wrestle or chase. It's hopefully in a non-violent context at the dog park, but it exercises the same muscles and reflexes that dogs would need for real fighting. It's been cool seeing my dog grow up and get better at skills like catching a ball in midair (chasing prey).
Even human play mimics skills needed for survival, we just need more complicated skills, like war strategy and creativity. Just think about sports, board games, and so on.
I'm glad I took the time before my baby was born to read a bit about human development and the purpose of laughter and so on. It made me realise how similar a human infant is to a baby chimpanzee. And sure enough, my baby loves being treated like one, with the fake climbing and play wrestling and whatnot.
He really wants to climb things and me, and probably has the strength for it, but lacks the coordination to successfully apply his strength toward that goal. But if I help out by supporting him (physically) he gets to experiment with various ways to grab hold of things and pretend that's the reason he's gaining altitude too.
I think that play is a form of behavioral exploration that nature can be "creative". You can think of evolution and genetic mutation a kind of "play", and it's not all that surprising that this mechanism is built into every creature. We have to act somewhat randomly or erratically in order to overcome whatever obstacle we're facing (which sometimes we aren't even aware). I also become keenly aware of this when I play with ML because we design this kind of randomness into the system on purpose. I think that it's universally acknowledged truth that every creative/intelligent being has to have a right mixture of randomness and focus.
I’ve been thinking lately about how games are the root of formalisms. Turn based games with rules seem a unique bridge from the messy world to the ordered Platonic realm.
> We work to make money to eat to have energy to have leisure time to play.
So what do you think about the idea expressed in the article, that play is fundamental to survival? You stated a thesis that seemingly argues the opposite. The article spends thousands of words to support its reasoning, now I’m curious to know yours.
Suppose play is necessary for survival. Abstractly, it would bring the reasoning full circle.
Do people eat to eat again? I guess you could say that. We survive to survive. We play to play.
People that don’t play or have leisure or relax do have worse health and psychological issues. So it would seem there is evolutionary pressure against lack of said play.
In the context of HN: ‘we post on HN to post on HN’ (i.e. leisure for leisure).
mensetmanusman: “survive to play”. The end purpose is play. Survival is the means of getting there.
TFA: “play to survive”. The end purpose is whatever survival entails (probably reproduction, or more generally passing on one’s genes). Play is the means of getting there.
I saw the comment as a tangential observation on play.
But there was a section in the article where it suggests that in nature, play is "expensive" - in that it costs precious energy (and some animals may actually put themselves in actual risk in the process).
So costing energy could be seen as what we view as labor. Working to be able to play, so to speak.
Yes, but the article argued exactly that it pays off, i.e. has utility for survival so high it exceeds the cost.
If it was not useful for survival, play (as defined in the article) could be thought of as the pinnacle of existence, useless on its own with everything else building up to it; but it is not that, it is argued to be merely a means.
With comment presenting the opposite viewpoint to TFA, either I was missing its point, or it reacted purely to the keyword “play” in the title and not the substance, or it was begging for someone to reply and ask for elaboration (which I did).
>>> A mountain climber, von Helmholtz said, “hits upon traces of a fresh path, which again leads him a little further.”
A big example of this in my life was doing my MBA (I was a hardcore developer/dev manager at the time.) While many classmates had specific goals like leaving a career behind or breaking into investment banking, my thought was more like "I got the time, my employer will pay tuition, maybe this will be challenging and fun."
Fast forward a few years, I "naturally" ended up in product management. Not because it was my goal, but because the time in b-school taught me how to think about strategy, markets, communicate more clearly, and just be more sociable and have skills to confidently meet high-level clients and not embarrass myself. In other words, "playing at business school" happened to give me skills that enhanced my life in an unexpected (though in retrospect predictable) ways.
Smaller examples of this abound. During COVID lockdown I randomly bought a raspberry PI and some basic electronic components. Soon after I ended up buying motor controllers, a tank chassis, sensors (and a soldering iron..) Without intending to, I went from someone who's "never done anything with electronics" to someone who "has built an autonomous rover that navigates by sonar." Completely useless but - for example - it opens up future opportunities to confidently work on a hardware business/product should an opportunity arise.
A final example - also during COVID lockdown - our living room in-wall AC was barely blowing air and also getting wet. Repair people said that everything is working fine, that's just how it is given the airflow in the location of the unit (which didn't make sense because my wife remembered it working better a few years ago.) I decided I was going to figure it out - for fun. I didn't know anything about ACs and I figured there's a good chance that I'll fuck things up more, but the "worst" would be buying a new AC (about $2000) which might work better anyway despite what the repairmen said. So basically I had "room to play"
Several days later, after several trips to a parts distributor in Queens, after learning about and switching out capacitors, etc. I didn't fix the problem. I started to try to measure the current going across the blower fan motor (I learned enough to associate the ice/condensation with insufficient air flow) when I short-circuited something and the motor sparked, smoked, and died. FUCK.
Here's the scene of devastation (at about 3am) when I finally extricated the old burnt motor out of the unit: https://ibb.co/crYxs4R
One more bike trip over the bridge to pick up a new motor, then one more because the new motor had a different thickness shaft and I needed bushings, I replaced the motor and noticed right away stronger airflow. Long story short, the old motor was slowly failing (before I made it fail quickly by blowing it up.) So now, we have a perfectly working AC and it cost about $300 (vs living with it or paying $2000 for a new one) and most importantly, I had fun and accidentally learned the skills that will make me a much more confident home owner in the future.
There was a funny exchange I had with a colleague when I took a day off to work on the AC. He couldn't believe I took time from "the big important job" to do mechanical work, but he was missing the point - the reason I had "the big important job" is that I do shit like this and acquire random skills that help me move forward.
I'm glad you had the confidence to tell your coworker that ultimately your time working on the AC unit will make you a more well rounded (and more productive) worker in the long run.
Enjoyed your story. Reminds me to keep working on things outside my comfort zone.
I wouldn't say the AC experience itself made me better at my job, it's more like a lifetime of acquiring "random" experiences have made me overall much more capable than I'd be otherwise, and some of that helps with work. Tackling the AC is just an example of that class of thing. But I do think back to this specific experience often when I need a reminder that "I can probably figure this out" when I am confronted with something unusual.
I do have to say that I have a tendency to chase shiny objects and it's important to keep that in check. EG if I ended up spending a year on the AC it wouldn't have been worth it - there's a line somewhere. IDEALLY, we strategically select the discomfort we want to experience as being the specific discomfort that will grow us in the way we need to, rather than just swinging at a lot of different things as I sometimes tend to.
And - I am really glad you enjoyed the tale and it reminded you about something you care about.
> A big example of this in my life was doing my MBA (I was a hardcore developer/dev manager at the time.) While many classmates had specific goals like leaving a career behind or breaking into investment banking, my thought was more like "I got the time, my employer will pay tuition, maybe this will be challenging and fun."
I think your anecdote also illustrates how people with the privilege to play can reinforce their advantages. When you don't have an employer willing to pay for you to play, it can be difficult to make the same kind of "natural" career changes, as one example.
Really tired of the privilege stuff. My family emigrated to the US as penniless refugees just ten years prior to me starting at this company. I went to NYC public schools and a state university. I got very lucky having parents with high expectations, some good teachers along the way, and a natural interest in computers and problem solving. I thank god every day for that mix of things and for our ability to come to the US. But "privilege" sounds like I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth that somehow allowed me to skate through life and have people pay for my shit. Frankly, it goes the other way. When I was in junior highschool, my "privileged" classmates were playing with Sega and Nintendo while I was trying to figure out how to get the TRS-80 that I found in the trash, to work. Ironically, that kind of "play" enabled me to get whatever I got down the road. Virtuous cycles are a thing but to call everything "privileges" misses our own agency.
I didn't read it that way. My take on privilege is "currently being in a fortunate state". Doesn't imply you didn't earn it.
I consider myself privileged. Similar story with parents except I was raised by my aunt and uncle who were penniless immigrants to the US. They had their own kids to worry about so I was low priority. Half my clothes came from flea market bins. No tutoring, extracurriculars, etc. I was jealous of kids who could 'afford' $1.25 school lunches.
I would even say that I was privileged at the time that I wasn't raised by abusive alcoholics and that at least my adoptive family valued education. And I never had to worry about starving.
This led to the virtuous cycle where I have a lot of free time today.
I live in Romania now and when people say I'm privileged I agree.
Gotcha - I agree with that, and the term I would use is "virtuous cycle" because at least to my ear, that motivates one to take action that creates such cycles (eg: I am going to save a dollar now because over months and years it puts me in a financially better position, I am going to watch a video about programming instead of a gamer stream because it builds up my skills base, etc.)
Privilege on the other hand reads like "something you have and I don't and therefore I can never catch up" - which in turn leads one to be passive and not believe that their actions can alter what kind of cycle they are in.
Maybe it's linguistic nuance that not everyone sees the same way (eg: you see it differently) but it seems to me that most discourse on "privilege" has to do with "how do we take it away from others / use it to justify our own relative lack of success" rather than "ok I get the concept, what opportunities to I have to build up such 'privilege' for myself and my family?"
That's a good point about the linguisitic connotations. faitswulff's comment reads so much better to me when you just replace the word 'privilege' with 'virtuous cycle' or 'snowball effect'.
Exactly, for any good thing that happens to anyone it's always easy to find some 'privilege' that enabled it. The fact that it's so easy to do so means it's not a very interesting exercise at all.
On a personal note, it’s hard to determine what measure of my success was my own doing, but looking back over my life I can see so many things that I had absolutely no control over that led to where I am today. What that inspires in me is gratitude and humility, and makes me much less judgmental when I hear others stories of their success and failure.
Right? Like, "we're just playing with derivatives today, but maybe one day your ability to calculate rate of flow is going to come in really handy as a real life skill"
Yup. As I understand the history, Newton was aware of the co-development of calculus and physics, because he was the one doing it -- with no concern for real life skills. A lot of the math techniques used in science and engineering were first developed on an abstract basis by mathematicians with no concern for useful applications.
But the educational process has to serve two needs. It serves as a place for people to develop intellectually, but also to make themselves employable if they want to be. Those two tracks may be completely mixed together in each class, but the students who are in it for "play" are definitely there. I was one of those students. I came from a middle class family, but I gave relatively little thought to my future career during college.
People tend to only say something that has contextual relation to the conversation at hand. You don't interrupt a conversation about aqueducts to say "I got mud on my shoe once", so a reasonable interpretation is that something they said made you think they're not something; and, since the conversation was about relating things to other things and that's a very philosophical act, the insinuation is that they're bad at it.
so help me out here, im insinuating that someone is bad at philosophizing by guessing they are not a philosopher, when they make a statement that has the hallmarks of a scientist, and none of the hueristic qualities of philosophy.
i know its impossible to tell now, however my original comment was the first response to the parent submission, the philosophy was the interrupt event.
If you were going to say they seem like a scientist, it would have been better to go with "I'm guessing you're a scientist or in a science field?"
A similar kind of way of speaking would be something like "I'm guessing you never went to college". This would be similar to calling someone an idiot. Or "you program like someone that's never taken a class in it".
These are difficult to take positively because nearly every connotation implies that they're somehow lacking something.
Rather than speaking about how someone is lacking, it's wiser to speak about how what they're doing is a positive.
"You didn't go to college, did you?" is negative; but, "Are you self-taught?" is a positive.
Self-taught implies a sort of stick-to-it-iveness and discipline, where as not going to college, again, implies a failing on that person.
I appreciate the defense but you probably shouldn't argue with them. I'm guessing they are trolling or egocentric (not a meaningful difference). I mean they are supposing that one cannot be both a scientist and a philosopher at the same time, which illustrates quite a naive viewpoint of what science actually is (there's a reason physics was called natural philosophy). Such a notion is a bit ludicrous and so I didn't even want to give it merit by acknowledging the insanity of it.
And I mean come on, they said "machine learning is just bio-mimicry big whoop" and I responded "yeah, that's kinda the point"[0] because clearly they don't understand the bio-inspiration of ML and its history, which is a bit obtuse considering we call them "neural networks." And that's without even looking at things like dropout (inspired by sex), genetic programming (sex again), or exploration/exploitation strategies (which are directly related to play). Just let them ride their imaginary high horse. But I do have to give them props for the strangest insult I've gotten all year.
[0] It would be very naive to actually say that ML is bio-mimicry. It has a lot of bio-inspiration but does things vastly differently than what biology actually does. But one cannot ignore the inspiration despite the implementation being vastly different.
Because ML is vastly different than biology in implementation. It is accurate to say that ML is bio-inspired (which they insulted me for saying) but it is not accurate to say that it is bio-mimicry. That's an insult to the elegance of biology. Sure there's some similarities, but gasoline would not make for good soup.
Elephants really are incredible creatures, which I had seen many times but never like this. All the seriousness in their imposing size disappeared quite literally in the water. It was amazing to see a group of animals in the wild do nothing but play. It reminded me that we humans sometimes just need to do the same as well, with no reason or productive purpose.