Fun is dead

When video games turn play into work, we need to play without fear of consequences.

Simon Walters

Simon Walters is Curate at Holy Trinity Huddersfield.

A woman stand in front of a large video screen displaying the Space Invaders title, hold her hands out in front of her.

Photo by Andre Hunter on Unsplash.

Imagine there’s been a sudden change in plans. The evening meeting is cancelled at the last minute, or your friend is sick and can’t come round. There are no looming tasks that need doing, so you set out to have some fun. What do you do?

Karen Heller’s recent article in the Washington Post suggests that we don’t really know how to answer that question. ‘Fun is dead’, proclaims the headline, and her analysis is simultaneously insightful and depressing. Weddings have become stressful extravaganzas, holidays require a constant stream of activity, retirements should have a purpose and a plan. Our fun, our play, requires a reason to exist. Can we have fun without it having some larger purpose? Can we play without needing to post it on social media? Everyone else, it seems, is having much more fun than we are.

Take video games. You might think this ought to be the very definition of a playful activity, one with no particular end or purpose in mind. But even here, it seems we don’t know how to have fun without some type of incentive. Conversations about video games online are frequently so self-serious and toxic that you’d be forgiven for thinking that it was a matter of life and death, not differing preferences about fun. Some of the world’s biggest games – things like Fortnite, Genshin Impact, and EA Sports FC – give rewards to players who turn up to play every day. It sounds generous until the psychological hooks of these methods grip you far past the point of fun. Players talk about not being able to sustain more than one of these types of games, because otherwise they won’t be able to keep up. What starts as play quickly turns into a form of work.

The world of play is a world of grace, where we are free to find pleasure in an activity on its own merits.

I am as much a sucker for this method as the next person. I find myself drawn to games which start out as free and fun, but the fun inevitably seems to turn into a chore that I cannot dislodge. There is an unwritten pressure to turn up to play every day to complete daily tasks and keep up with the competition. I end up feeling guilty for wasting my time playing games, and anxious to keep up with what’s required when I do. No wonder, with all these contradictory pressures on play, I find myself more often than not vegetating in front of Netflix rather than really playing.

This is all a bit of a first world problem and might seem like another depressing indictment of modern society, but perhaps it shouldn’t be that surprising. As humans, we are always looking for some way to justify ourselves, some way of finding proof that what we do matters. Play, by contrast, demands that we step into a different sort of world. The world of play is a world of grace, where we are free to find pleasure in an activity on its own merits, and not for anything we might get from it in the end. Play, in its best sense, is purposeless apart from the joy of playing. "When we try to give our playful activities some wider purpose for why they matter, we are turning them into something else."

The world of the Christian faith is not often seen as a playful one. It seems so very serious, dealing as it does with matters of life and death. But within the serious world of the Church, a space for play emerges. After all, it is first and foremost a world of forgiveness from what we have done wrong in the past, present, and future. This forgiveness takes away the fear of failure. Whether I am greatly successful or not I am loved and forgiven by God. This is God’s gift, which cannot be earnt and cannot be lost.

The result, perhaps surprisingly, is that I am free to play, because I do not need my play to achieve anything for me. As the theologian Simeon Zahl puts it,

In play a person is free to engage with the world creatively, actively, energetically, but without fear of ‘serious’ consequences. The Christian is free to play with things that once seemed deadly serious, to find delight in what were formerly objects of fear, and to take themselves much less seriously.

In the world of video games, this idea is perhaps most clearly seen in the games produced by the Japanese game developer Nintendo. Their games, from Mario to Zelda, epitomize a vision for gaming which is driven by creating joy for whoever is playing, and not unnecessarily burdensome tasks. One of their best games of last year, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, doesn’t offer a prescriptive path for how players should approach its challenges. Instead, the player is given a toolkit and set loose to use it in the world as they see fit. The result is a sense of joyful freedom, a feeling that its world is full of delight and even silliness. It gave me some of the most fun playing games in recent years, without me even coming close to finishing it.

It's this playful attitude that I want to take into the rest of my life. What would it look like for us to see the world as a playground rather than an exam hall? The result wouldn’t just be a lot more fun. I think it would also be deeply Christian.

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Feminism

15 March 2024

5 min read

Sarah Everard: she was 'exactly like us'

An anniversary of anguish deserves the miracle of our attention.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen.

Sarah Everard.

BBC/Everard Family.

This week, three years ago, we’d been shut in our homes for nearly a year and things were anything but normal. I don’t know about you, but when I think back to those locked-down days, it’s all a bit of a haze, those weird weeks tend to blur into one.

Except this week, that is. This week, three years ago, was a wholly different story.

We, the public, had just learnt that Sarah Everard, a thirty-three-year-old woman in South London, had been abducted, raped and murdered by Wayne Couzens, a serving police officer in the Metropolitan Police. And the news of this heinous crime took our breath away. Do you remember it? How you felt when you learned what had happened to Sarah? I can remember the anguish of hundreds of people ringing out from Clapham Common, reaching every corner of the country. I can remember that, legal or not, nothing seemed to quell the outrage that was drawing people to the vigil being held there. All that grief, it had to go somewhere.

The anger that night was so visceral, it feels like it’s still in the soil of the Common. The fear, so palpable, it still lingers in the air. And at that point, we didn’t even know the half of it. ‘She was just walking home’ - That’s the sentence, isn’t it? The one that haunted those days, weeks, and months.

Three years on and we’re no closer to coming to terms with what happened. Not really. In the wake of the recent Angioloni Inquiry, which concluded that Wayne Couzens should never have been allowed to become, let alone remain, a police officer, the BBC released a documentary that follows DCI Katherine Goodwin’s story as she led the investigation. From first seeing the bulletin of a missing young woman, to hearing the ‘whole life’ sentence come down on Couzens – viewers are walked through the whole thing, step by step. What led up to Sarah’s death, and what followed it. It’s something that we should all see, even though we’ll immediately wish that we hadn’t.

Because it would be hard to unsee the grainy footage of Wayne Couzens standing next to a handcuffed Sarah on the side of a busy road, abducting her while his hazard lights flash, all of it so sickeningly hidden in plain sight. It would be harder still to unhear the victim statement from Sarah’s mum, who admitted that every night, right at the time of the abduction, she silently screams ‘don’t get in the car, Sarah. Don’t believe him. Run!’.

All of it, it’s just so hard to know.

The details are hard to think about, and harder still not to think about. But that’s the point, I suppose. I remember what philosopher Simone Weil wrote,

that ‘capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle… it is a miracle’.

I’m just not used to a ‘miracle’ making me feel so nauseous. In theory, Weil’s words are beautiful, in reality though – they ache.

I don’t tend to acquaint a feeling of utter helplessness with the miraculous. Where my understanding runs dry, my answers falter, and my tears flow – those aren’t the places I expect to see anything of any use, spiritual or otherwise.

But Weil goes on:

‘…it is recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specific from the social category labelled ‘unfortunate’, but as a man (or woman), exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction.’

Sarah Everard – her memory, as well as the people within whom her memory is most vivid, and her loss most keenly felt – deserve the miracle of our attention. Then, now, and for many years to come. We continue to grieve her, the woman who never made it home, as if we each knew more of her than her name. And that’s a beautiful thing, a human thing, a sacred thing. Because Sarah was more than her name, and she was more than her death. And so, she must be grieved as such, with our eyes fixed on the beauty of who she was, and the tragedy of who she will never be.

And it’s tricky, because you can’t tidy up lament, can you? There’s no silver-lining, nothing to polish. You can’t put a neat bow on despair or grief.

And then there’s Weil’s ‘exactly like us’ line to grapple with. And grapple with it, we do. The knowledge that it could have been any of us is ever-present. As a woman, I feel it every single day. If male violence against women is a spectrum - 1 being a wolf-whistle as we walk down the street, and 10 being death – the truth is that most of us will only ever face experiences that sit on the lower end of that scale. And yet, we are ever aware that 10 exists and that we could encounter it at any point. So, we are on the lookout for it. We are alert, always.

Sarah walked home a specific way that night; not the quickest route, but the best lit.

That’s what we all do. ‘Exactly like us’, indeed.

Lament; I suppose that’s what this feeling in my stomach is. And maybe yours too. It’s a feeling that goes beyond the rage I feel toward the monstrous perpetrator, and the institutions that failed to stop him, and so many others. It’s a kind of wordless grief that things are the way they are, agony that we live in a world that hurts this much, despair at how things could have been so different. I felt all this three years ago, when I heard about Sarah’s death. And I felt it last night, when my sister walked home from my house in the dark with her hood up so that she was less distinguishable as a woman walking alone.

And it’s tricky, because you can’t tidy up lament, can you? There’s no silver-lining, nothing to polish. You can’t put a neat bow on despair or grief, and you can’t pull yourself out of it by your own bootstraps. And that’s not to be defeatist, or to relinquish our responsibility to enact justice and fight for change. On the contrary, lament is rooted in the knowledge that things can be, and should be, better. But to try and find a way to solve the outrage we feel when it comes to the death of Sarah Everard is to completely misunderstand it, and ourselves, and reality.

Bad things hurt.

So, although writing this piece has been hard, I’m at least comforted in the knowledge that it was supposed to be a hard piece to write. And that the queasiness I feel and the tears that are threatening my professional resolve are the evidence of some kind of miracle that I don’t fully understand.