Play is one of humanity’s most basic and enduring actions. It is to deeply consider and even to laugh at that which matters most to human existence, from birth to death and the necessities of self and society that one encounters in between. This journal explores play, especially playing well, in terms of the voracious
playing of games and of finding excellence in actions, design, and criticism. This idea of excellence in play is central to games scholar and practitioner Bernie De Koven’s The Well-Played Game: A Player’s Philosophy (1978/2013). Here play is the “enactment of anything that is not for real,” and playing well is
to be “fully engaged, totally present” in this enactment (p. xxiv). Playing games well is to do so in the context of the separate form of reality that are games, or “performances, like works of art... belonging to some special sphere of human activity which clearly lies outside the normal reality of day-to-day living” (p. xxiii).
Games are not reality, yet as an artistic medium, they reflect it, and “what unites them with the totality of experience is not just their metaphorical quality but the manner in which they are played” (p. xxiii). Thus, to play a game well, one acts with focus and seriousness but with a spirit of immaterial exploration, both
drives in such balance with one another as to obtain excellence in goals that satisfy the player far beyond the boundaries of the game.
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