Life is worth playing

Do you remember the quotation from the opera “The Queen of Spades” based on Alexander Pushkin’s famous story of the same name “Life is but a game”? This statement of course can hardly be disputed. But the more we learn about the concept of the game, the more we think that our life is more like a series of games we simply can’t do without.

First of all, the game is older than the culture. Culture is constantly associated with people. However animals didn’t wait for a human being to teach them to play…

For many years scientists have been studying the subject. For many years scientists have been racking their brains over the question: “Why do people like playing games?” They found out that the reasons of this interest can be different.

When children play, they imitate adults. When adults play, they enter their second childhood. With the help of different games we try to relax, to break the monotony of day-to-day life, or to improve our mood. But there is something special in playing different games that makes children dance with glee, that makes the gambler forget about everything, that makes millions of people stick to the TV screen. Could Mother Nature give us such a multicultural present for no particular reason? Let’s see…

We all started playing in childhood. When we couldn’t talk, games became our first language. Later, play started to be a kind of training before our first serious activities. You see, for children a game plays the role of the teacher. Learning in the process of playing is possibly the best way. It’s no wonder that didactic games in modern schools are considered to be very effective for teaching. Some kind of delusion takes place – children think that they are occupied with something fun and not serious, while actually they study very important things. It’s interesting that it’s the illusory lightness of the game that makes us remember things better, that helps us to concentrate on the problem, that gives rein to our imagination and creativity.

All our lives we play: football, chess, different musical instruments. The concept of a game enters every sphere of our activity. But the most amazing thing is that we play with our language, we play with words. Sometimes it seems to me that friends exchanging jokes have the same pleasure as little boys passing a ball to each other.

Now we come to the most popular and up-to-date human game-called humour. Have you ever thought what one joke can change in our modern world? It can settle a conflict as well as provoke a quarrel. It can point at a problem better then any serious statement. It can make people best friends or sworn enemies. It can make people laugh or fall silent. It can help to change something horrible into something funny. Now you understand why a sense of humour is so important in our world. Scientists say that people playing on words improve their health and live longer than others. Moreover, investigations have showed that there are fewer childless people among them. It makes clear that Mother Nature considers a sense of humour and the ability to play on words valuable qualities that should be passed on from generation to generation.

Many scientists think that humor is a distinctive feature of humans. Animals also have a tendency to use some playing signals. In spite of this fact, the importance of them is getting lost, while human play signals are becoming more and more important. The situation is the same with one of human’s favorite games – sports. Rhythmical physical exercises were quite typical for chimpanzees. In the course of time they are dying down. Human exercises, on the contrary, are constantly evolving and giving birth to different kinds of sports.

People like both participating in sports activities and watching other people playing. In my view, sports for people is not only a part of culture, but a chance to live in some other parallel reality. The Olympic Games are a good example of this. During this period people forget about conflicts and wars. They live the lives of their favorite sportsmen. Each kind of sport has its rules. And sportsmen dispute with each other using another language – the language of strength, adroitness and endurance.

How many games are around us! There are more than you think. Eric Berne, a famous psychiatrist, who developed the theory of Transactional Analysis, wrote a book called “Games People Play”. This book looks at the ways people interact with one another. Specifically, he is interested in the psychological games people play. Berne thinks people’s personalities are divided into three distinct egos – child, adult and parent. The child is representative of our personalities when we were children – emotional, charming and creative. The adult is our rational and objective side. The parent represents our parents and the attitudes they had towards us when we were children. It is the interaction of these parts of our personality with the equivalent child, adult and parent in others, that make up our relationships. Often, when we are interacting with others, there can be two conversations going on at the same time. For example our “adult” can give the impression of talking to their “adult”, when in fact it’s our “parent” who’s talking to their “child”. Thus we see an example of a role-play in our everyday life. That’s why relations can also be called a kind of game, which gives us special pleasure.

In the long run, we see that playing games can be one of the ways of living in this world. People sometimes are very controversial. There is a constant conflict between the body and the spirit in every person. There is a life-long duel between good and evil in every soul. Human nature is dual. And maybe it’s only a game that can settle this conflict. Playing games allows us be different. Playing games allows us live in parallel words. Playing games allows us be young forever.