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.

Podcast

Culture

S&U interviews

Weirdness

27 December 2023

5 min read

My conversation with... Tom Holland

Noticing that Tom Holland is the star of The Rest Is Politics Christmas special, Belle Tindall is remembering her conversation with the historian earlier this year.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A man sits at a table speaking into a microphone but looks into the distance. Behind him, through the window and beyond a wall is Big Ben

Tom Holland recording the podcast at Lambeth Palace Library.

In a festive one-off, two worlds have collided. Tom Holland, of the beloved 'The Rest is History' podcast, has joined Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell in their 'The Rest is Politics' parallel universe. They spend a merry hour talking through religion, politics and the way in which they have both shaped our modern world... plus dinosaurs, always dinosaurs.

And it got me reminiscing - my mind drifted back to earlier in this slightly odd year, on the eve of the coronation, when we had the one and only Tom Holland on our podcast. We called that episode of the podcast - Re-Enchanting History and the Coronation - but for me, it could just as aptly be entitled Re-Enchanting the Weird.

Below is a reflection that I wrote immediately after that fascinating episode was recorded. If you've enjoyed his appearance on The Rest is Politics, you may just enjoy his appearance here too.

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Re-Enchanting the Weird

Let me start in the proper place, with introductions.

If you are a fan of history, Tom needs no introduction. But, for those of you who are not yet acquainted with his wonderfully infectious expertise, Tom is the co-host of the beloved podcast, The Rest is History (alongside Dominic Sandbrook). He is also the best-selling author of Rubicon, Persian Fire, Dominion, and the up-coming book for children, The Wolf-Girl, The Greeks, and The Gods. Justin Brierley and I recently had the pleasure of soaking up a little of Tom’s extensive knowledge when we interviewed him for a Coronation special of Seen and Unseen’s Re-Enchanting podcast.

Tom’s most recent book, Dominion, charts the mighty impact that the Christian revolution has had; beginning with its unexpected origins and following its cultural reverberations through to the present age, highlighting its very present influence. We are, to borrow Tom’s own phrase, a society of goldfish who are (perhaps unknowingly) swimming in a distinctly Christian fishbowl. And so, our conversation began there – as he pointed out that, like it or not, the West operates in the residue of the Christian revolution. Christianity has been hidden in plain sight all along. For the sake of eloquence, I’ll let Tom explain:

‘The conceit of the West is that it’s transcended Christianity to become purely universal, purely global. But its values, its assumptions, its ethics remain palpably bred of the marrow of Christianity’.

Throughout our conversation, Tom took us on a whistle-stop tour of what was, what is, and the thread that can be drawn between the two. And while I don’t wish to spoil things for you, I imagine you can guess what the thread is. This conversation touches upon the origins of democracy (as we perceive it), the Reformation and the Nazis, to name but a few. I couldn’t recommend it enough. But I must warn you, you cannot un-hear Tom’s observations. The things he points out, you simply cannot un-see. Christianity will no longer be hidden; it will just be in plain sight.

Seen as it is within in touching distance, we also wanted to get Tom’s thoughts on the Coronation. And this is where the re-enchantment of the weird began. At least, for me.

The very notion of this upcoming Coronation is odd. It is a distinctly peculiar event.

Firstly, it is incredibly old. We are the only country in the world that still does this particular thing in this particular way. What we will see unfold before us is derived from the 10th Century, when King Edgar was coronated by St. Dunstan, and yet it goes back further still - its roots actually lie in Bronze Age Israel.

During the Coronation, the ancient and the modern will converge. As spectators, we will be peeking into times gone by; as Tom (rather excitedly) said, watching this ceremony, and everything that will surround it, will be like ‘seeing a dinosaur… still alive… in a zoo’. I wrote that last week’s conversation with astrophysicist, Dr. Jennifer Wiseman, made me feel small – small in time and small in place. Well, in many ways, so did Tom’s thoughts on the Coronation. The ritual is so very old, and we, so very young.

But there is more. Tom reminded us that the Coronation is not only old, it’s weird. It places the mystical, the supernatural, the sacred, and the down-right strange on centre stage.

Nick Cave, who will be sitting in Westminster Abbey on the day despite not being much of a royalist, explained that he accepted the invitation purely because of its bewildering oddness. In his Red Hand Files, he wrote

‘what I am also not is so spectacularly incurious about the world and the way it works, so ideologically captured, so damn grouchy, as to refuse an invitation to what will more than likely be the most important historical event in the UK of our age. Not just the most important, but the strangest, the weirdest.’

Both Nick Cave and Tom Holland have allowed themselves the fun of being curious. Curious about the fact that something profoundly supernatural is about to be taken incredibly seriously in the heart of a so-called secular society. And whatever pragmatic questions I may have about the place of monarchy in the here and now, I think I will allow myself the fun of being curious about that too.

My conversation with Tom re-enchanted the parts of Christianity that, as someone who grew up as a Christian, I used to be quite embarrassed by. Namely, the weirdest parts.

As a teenager, my instinct was to minimise (at least in public) the aspects of the Christian faith that cannot be explained by rationalism. I used to keep quiet about the parts of my faith that outed me as someone who believed in things that are supernatural. I would try my absolute best to blur the details of the most obscure facets of Christian thinking. But, as Tom said, ‘a Christianity that has bled itself of enchantment is a pallid thing.’ And if there is one thing that the whole Jesus movement was not, it’s pallid.

If you, like Tom Holland, crave enchantment, this episode will be for you. Afterall, what better place to go looking for the wonderfully weird than in the ‘greatest story ever told’?