Citizenship Games: Fixing the Relationships Between Work and Play

I am going to talk about three relationships between work and play, how the different ideologies have manifested, and their impacts. The first relationship is when work is valued over play, the second is when work and play are kept separate, and the third is when play is valued over work.

In the United States, work has become increasingly valued at a rate where some people no longer value their play or leisure time. As means of communication improve, the distinction between work and play is becoming less and less defined. For many jobs before slack, emails, and texts, you did not have to worry when you were off the clock. Nowadays, the fear that your boss' perception of you may become worse if you didn't answer that 7:00 PM slack message until the morning is very rational. This can also be seen in motivational communities and online spaces such as r/GetMotivated on reddit. These communities take on the mentality of never taking days off, constantly working on new skills, etc. While these are admirable motivations, it certainly has negative impacts on many. Humans are constantly in high-stress mental attitudes, wondering what it is they should be accomplishing and essentially get rid of their ability to relax.

This especially manifests when we look at retirement and how people treat leisure time when work is no longer a factor. There is a book in the reg written at The Conference of Aging (1957) that talks about this called Free time; challenge to later maturity. According to the authors, humans are currently experiencing the most free-time that they ever have. We used to live until 40 and work 70 hours week. In the 1950s, we began to live until 70 and work 40 hour weeks, resulting in over a hundred thousand more hours. This begs the question, what do we do with all of this time? I claim that many humans are no longer able to effectively use free time when their lives have revolved around work for 4-6 decades. First off, when this book was written, it was predicted that we would have a 20 hour work week by 2000. Obviously, that did not happen. Why not? It turns out that when many people retire, they claim that purpose has been lost in their lives, and who could blame them? When you give a person all the time in a day, you are asking them to access a level of creativity with what to do with their time that they have not accessed since they were children. They do not know how to create new experiences for themselves which can make a life very dull. As a result, many people push off retirement or simply work until they die. It's like when a Uchicago break lasts too long, all your friends have gone back to school, and you just sit there with nothing to do. You end up thinking to yourself, "I need school to start up again." It's not that work is essential to the meaningfulness of a human's life, it's that they live in a culture where work becomes their life. If we have emphasized work so much that humans can no longer enjoy their lives without it, I believe there is something very wrong with the model.

Situationist International Art, critiquing monotony in the work force

The second relationship that I will observe is establishing a clear distinction between work and play time. One of my favorite organizations (who I highly recommend reading more about) is Situationist International. This organization was a group of artists, philosophers, and intellectuals prominent in Europe from the 1950s until the 1970s. They expanded Marxist theories to account for the changes in capitalism that have come about since Marx's time. They argued, as I demonstrated above, that aspects of advanced capitalism have spread themselves to every aspect of life and culture. Production has continued to increase exponentially and many jobs have become increasingly trivial, yet companies have not attempted to reduce labor hours. They argue, then, that advanced capitalism is no longer about creating leisure time, luxury, or happiness, but production itself. They called, then, for humans to reclaim play time for what it is and entirely separate it from work. A more radical group, just called the Situationist, called for work time to dissipate entirely.

Clearly, neither of these cultural shifts happened (unfortunately). I believe this is for the same reason that people are unable to retire; people do not know what to do with their free time and are devoid of the creativity when they spend their lives repeating monotonous tasks. Therefore, I believe the third relationship offers a middle-ground that allows people to enjoy their work time, and build creativity so that their lives do not need to center around work and can instead center around their own experiences. This relationship is when "play time" blends into "work time."

Many do not see how this is possible, but anthropologists and ethnographers have demonstrated that there are societies that very much intertwine their work with play. The easiest example of this is when societies consider hunting a sport even though it is also their means for survival. Of course, most people in the U.S. no longer hunt as a means of survival. However, we have seen how Citizenship Games, Serious Games, Educational Games, etc. can provide a ludic experience while also leading to productivity. Why should it not be the case that learning and working is made enjoyable?

Take a math game for example. If kids truly are learning mathematic principles through this game, and are also using creativity, active engagement (by the nature of the medium), and developing gaming literacy, what is wrong with this? Especially when we take this in comparison to the formal teaching method of simply lecturing to a room of students, when students are most likely to show decreased brain activity. According to the theory of constructivism in education, children learn by actively engaging with subject material and molding it with their previous knowledge. What better way to do that then a game where there are clear progressions and require interactivity from the user?

Even outside of education, I believe games can be a powerful motivator. We saw in the Citizenship Games presentation that gamers were willing to create brain models purely because it was made fun. If this is the case, then it can certainly be applied to almost all jobs. This fixes two problems: firstly, people are less likely to hate their jobs, which take up a significant portion of their lives. Secondly, people are still forced to access creativity in order to play these games. Helping people keep their creativity alive throughout their careers can have profound impacts on society with unique ideas, and also on the self with coming up with new ways to enjoy themselves. For this reason, I believe Citizenship Games, Serious Games, etc. can lead to a society that values the human experience over pure production.