This is the driving principle of Nintendo, the company best known for characters like Mario, Pikachu, and Zelda, as well as its game consoles Switch, Wii, and N64. The people who work there understand the power of play.
Game designer Shigeru Miyamoto once noticed kids sending text messages to each other on the train; that was fun. When I read that passage, I realized that I also had a really fun game on my phone—the Notes app, where I tap and swipe many of these blog posts out with my thumbs. I had joined the infinite game of blogging.
The best thing I did for my writing was to intentionally approach it in a way that made it fun again; to make it fun first. Fun needed to be a priority. There will always be business to be done, and of course results matter, but it all grinds to a halt when there’s no more fun to be had. It’s on me to infuse practice with deliberate play.
“Without play, only Shit Happens. With play, Serendipity Happens,” David Weinberger’s line comes to mind. In Creative Doing, a prompt calls for you to Make Time to Play, “We already know how to play—to do something for its own sake, to explore, to imagine. It’s just that sometimes we go without it for so long that we may forget. No wonder there are classes to teach us how to relearn this valuable skill that was squished out of us.”
The best type of game requires effort and intention. It’s fun, and it comes with a thick reward, an intrinsic memory or experience that you can feel proud of for a very long time—maybe even the rest of your life.
Fun doesn’t have to be short-term. If you know something will cause suffering in the long-term, but feels exciting in the short-term, that’s not fun. Edward Slingerland describes one extreme in Trying Not to Try: the early Greek hedonists saw pleasures like sex, food, and wine as ephemeral—to them, vulgar, unsatisfying, and ephemeral which didn’t make them feel good—and instead found philosophical reflection more fun because they could come back to over and over again.
Fun is what keeps everything moving forward and growing; it’s a key nutrient that feeds the roots and trunk of the tree. Discipline happens in service of fun; it’s what keeps players of games coming back to play.
Defining what’s fun for yourself, and deciding to make hard work fun: that’s the choice and challenge.