Does play make you relaxed

The Finnish playground manufacturer Lappset promotes playgrounds for adults in their website (btw, playground in Finnish is leikkialue and children “lapset”). According to their websites, “the world of adults is all about performance, scoring, setting targets. Play can offer an alternative where adults can express themselves and relax.”

I disagree here – adults do play. We play football, floorball, soccer, hockey, golf and so on. The play of adults is usually s called “hobby”, and the meaning of all these hobbies is tha same as mentioned above: to relax and do something else than what we do in everyday life, which usually means work.

The element of scoring is present in these adult plays called hobbies. We want to beat another team, our competitor in game, or our own ranking. We do want to score, even if we say that it is “just a play”. When looking at inter-company games where not-so-fitty adults are running after any ball, stress-free is not the word that comes first in mind. I do not even know how well the players are able to express themselves, if we do not take into account that they are not wearing their everyday suit but shorts and t-shirts instead.

Roger Caillois was a French intellectual, who in his work discussed widely about the meaning of the play. In his book “Man, Play and Games” he defines the play by six core characteristics: Play is not obligatory and it is separate from the routine of life; the results of play cannot be pre-determined and so that the player's initiative is involved; it is unproductive; it is governed by rules that suspend ordinary laws and must be followed by players; and that it involves make-believe that confirms in players the existence of imagined realities that may be set against 'real life'.

There have been critiques towards Caillois similar than mine above: in the western society, everything is more or less subordinated to the social pressure and we do think what the right ways to use your time are. But Caillois’ definition does provide an interesting connection between play and the relaxation. In Caillois’s definition the idea of escapism is obviously present – and escapism is strongly connected with relaxation.

So maybe scoring is related to relaxation, after all, but not so straightforwardly than presented above. And in any case, the play does not start from game or playground – it starts from the attitude. We adults adore children’s ability to surrender oneself to game; we admire the way children can make up stories and play almost out of nowhere. This attitude is something to look for, whatever its presentation might be.