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.

Review

Culture

Film & TV

Trauma

Work

4 February 2025

4 min read

Severance: the ins and outs of seeking oblivion

We can't contain trauma to just one sphere of our lives.

Josh Richards

Josh is a curate in London, and is completing a PhD in theology.

In a retro-future styled office, workers stand or sit around a pod of desks.

Apple TV.

How far would you go to stop yourself doing late-night emails? Or what would you be willing to do to escape those painful memories? Severance, returning for its second season on AppleTV+, explores an extreme solution to both.

The show follows a group of office workers at Lumon who have had their memories severed: when outside of work they do not remember what they do at work and when at work they do not know anything about their lives outside. The work-self, referred to as an 'innie', enters the elevator at 5pm and immediately finds themselves back in the elevator at 9am the next day. They feel rested without any memory of the rest. Their "outie" blinks at 9am and then it is 5pm.

Adam Scott's protagonist, Mark, joined Lumon Industries as a severed employee working in "Macrodata Refinement" (MDR) as a result of losing his wife. In an episode early in the second season, one character recounts Mark telling them that he applied for the role because it felt like he was "choking on her ghost." Being severed offers Mark hours each working day where a version of him can work oblivious to this grief.

Of course, Mark's employer is up to something sinister, though exactly what remains unclear even to the innies. Lumon is at times terrifying, at times goofy and always unsettling. Innies are mistreated but cannot communicate with their outie beyond what Lumon allows. Even in these conditions, the small MDR team, each with no more than a couple of years' worth of memories, find purpose in their relationships with one another and in seeking to understand their bosses' designs.

Severance has attracted a lot of attention and reflection. Writing for the Financial Times, Emma Jacobs concludes that the show points us to our impossible longing for a boundaried life. The Northeastern University academic Tomas Elliot proposes that Severance can be read as an inversion of The Matrix: employees knowingly placing themselves in a state of naivety. Jacobs and Elliot both read the show as pointing to the paradoxical nature of modern work as both the cause of discontentment and the place many look to for a sense of purpose and fulfilment.

Instability cannot be contained to one sphere of life. Life is hard and so is work. Neither can offer escape from the other.

At the heart of many of the questions that Severance raises is the relationship between work and identity. Most of us live with a sense that who we are is found in our relationships. Work means something because it is one of the places we are most powerfully shaped by and shape relationships with colleagues, competitors, consumers and everyone else. Work becomes destructive when it cultivates destructive relationships in the workplace or when it displaces other forms of community and sources of identity.

The process of severance protects outies from the formative power of workplace relationships: their strains and their joys. No doubt we could each imagine benefits to this. However, it leaves Mark's outie paralysed by grief because he has denied himself a key source of relationships through which he could begin to heal, integrating that grief into a new sense of self.

Just as Mark's innie is protected by the outie's grief, the outie is protected from discovering who he could be without his wife. As the series progresses, it becomes less clear whether Mark's motivation is the fear of grief's crushing burden or the fear that one day the burden may ease.

In his book Resonance, Hartmut Rosa writes:

Time and again, human beings come to discover that they can become "different people" in different contexts. And under the highly dynamic conditions of late modernity, the task of finding out who we really are collides… with repeatedly having to "reinvent" and creatively redefine ourselves. That said reinvention also should be "completely authentic" is surely one of the more pointed paradoxes of the present age.

As Rosa notes, the dynamism of contemporary market forces produces a dynamism in our sense of identity, which can be experienced as instability. One response to this instability—and all the other humiliations and challenges of living at this time—is to look for ways of separating "work" and "life", to carve out a space where I can be free from constant performance and reinvention. And yet, as Severance shows us, whatever part of ourselves we designate as "life" or "outie", it cannot be free from pain and sometimes we will escape to, rather than from, "work".

Instability cannot be contained to one sphere of life. Life is hard and so is work. Neither can offer escape from the other. Some things must be resisted and some must simply be lived with. Both can only be done together. Ultimately, both can only be done if we are held in and defined by a relationship secure through any failure or loss. Seeking such a relationship is a life's work, for both innies and outies.

Join with us - Behind the Seen

Seen & Unseen is free for everyone and is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Alongside other benefits (book discounts etc.), you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing what I’m reading and my reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin

Editor-in-Chief

Find out more and sign up