Playfulness

What Playfulness means in play

In a cooperative building game, you place the final roof section the wrong way round. The house now wears a very serious hat. Your friend adds a tiny matching porch. You both laugh, save a picture and decide together whether to keep the result. The planned house remains an option; the unexpected one has earned a viewing.

Playfulness makes room for shared lightness without making someone’s dignity its price. Games already invite us into chosen rules and invented possibilities. A harmless surprise can open another way to enjoy them: an odd design, an improvised character or a mutually welcome challenge. Attention to the other players keeps that freedom shared.

Finding the balance

In ordinary play

A solo personal-best attempt

During a solo speed run, your character lands in a cart and rides downhill wearing a bucket. Enjoy the accidental entrance, then decide whether to continue the attempt or restart.

An improvised character

Offer a comic detail others can respond to, and let it pass if they want to continue.

Nearby virtues, different work

Courtesy

Courtesy attends to the people sharing the activity. Playfulness opens a possibility for lightness; courtesy helps you notice when the invitation has run its course.

Recognizing a counterfeit

Mockery counterfeits Playfulness when one person’s embarrassment supplies the entertainment. Playfulness leaves others free to decline the joke and helps repair an interruption that ceased to be welcome.

Cultivating Playfulness

• Treat a surprise as a possibility to offer rather than a joke everyone must enjoy.
• Notice whether the shared lightness continues or whether it is time to return to the original activity.

Try it today

Invite a small variation in a casual session. Make it easy to reverse and let everyone accept or decline. Notice whether it adds pleasure for the people present.

Questions worth returning to

• What did the unexpected moment make possible?
• Could everyone accept or decline the variation without embarrassment?

Choose your practice

These pages offer ideas for reflection and character practice, not professional advice. Choose practices suited to your circumstances and abilities. You may adapt, pause, or skip an exercise; putting yourself or someone else at risk is not proof of virtue.

Quotations and further reading

Seven readings, one for each day. All remain available here. Historical arguments and fictional dialogue are identified in their source notes.

1. Come, we shall have some fun now!

   Lewis Carroll · Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
   Chapter VII, A Mad Tea-Party
   Alice, thought · Millennium Fulcrum Edition 3.0, Project Gutenberg 11; no specific historical print imprint identified in Linked text

   Alice welcomes a riddle as a possible turn toward enjoyable company. The party disappoints her; the contrast helps the page distinguish an invitation to shared fun from merely declaring that something is funny.

2. Of course, a large part of the fun of this game lies in the witty incorporation of all sorts of extraneous objects.

   H. G. Wells · Floor Games
   III, Of the Building of Cities
   H. G. Wells · Project Gutenberg 3690 transcription of the 1911 work; specific underlying print imprint not identified in Linked text

   Objects brought in from elsewhere can suggest unexpected designs. Wells immediately distinguishes an inventive addition from an incoherent accumulation, keeping the shared game in view.

3. I do not know why it is amusing to make a marble run down a long intricate path, and dollop down steps, and come almost but not quite to a stop, and rush out of dark places and across little bridges of card: it is, and we often do it.

   H. G. Wells · Floor Games
   IV, Funiculars, Marble Towers, Castles and War Games
   H. G. Wells · Project Gutenberg 3690 transcription of the 1911 work; specific underlying print imprint not identified in Linked text

   The enjoyment lies in watching an invented course behave. This gives pleasure in play its own place without requiring every harmless experiment to justify itself as useful training.

4. Do not make the games too serious. Get laughter and frolic out of them.

   Jessie H. Bancroft · Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium
   To the Teacher of Games, p. 29
   Jessie H. Bancroft · Project Gutenberg #25660; introduction dated March 1909; Linked text does not identify a dated title-page imprint.

   The aim includes the pleasure of playing together. A lopsided virtual house may give the builders a reason to keep inventing.

5. I have been myself attempting for some time past to complete a play in a small toy theatre, the sort of toy theatre that used to be called Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured; only that I drew and coloured the figures and scenes myself.

   G. K. Chesterton · Tremendous Trifles
   XXIII. The Toy Theatre
   G. K. Chesterton · Project Gutenberg #8092 transcription; underlying printed imprint not identified in preserved text.

   Making the scenery is part of the pleasure. The virtual builders likewise gain something by inventing a house of their own.

6. My mind goes on working all the same. In fact, the more head downwards I am, the more I keep inventing new things.

   Lewis Carroll · Through the Looking-Glass
   Chapter VIII, It’s my own Invention
   The White Knight · Project Gutenberg 12 transcription; no specific historical print imprint identified in Linked text

   The Knight’s upside-down inventions turn mishap into fancy. The builders can enjoy an improbable roof without needing to make it sensible.

7. Perhaps one reason for the scanty tolerance that humor receives at the hands of the disaffected is because of the rather selfish way in which the initiated enjoy their fun; for there is always a secret irritation about a laugh in which we cannot join.

   Agnes Repplier · Points of View
   A Plea for Humor
   Agnes Repplier · Houghton, Mifflin and Company, Boston and New York, 1891; Project Gutenberg #59018.

   Repplier notices the difference between enjoying a joke together and keeping someone outside it. Shared play invites the other person into the fun.

Continue through the catalog