If you don’t have the ability to bleed off excess pressure – if you don’t have that safety valve, if the exhaust can’t escape from the gas engine, whatever – then what you have is a very different machine: a bomb.
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If we accept that it’s possible for a game to be not fun, the next obvious question is simple: if it is not fun, is there perhaps some other reason for playing it?
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Play – as Huizinga defines it above – is ultimately generative. It creates an order that would not otherwise come into being: in the middle of the twentieth century we see a narrowing of horizons. They are not so much being allowed to play as they are being encouraged to engage in what might be called a kind of “socratic” play. The doll or the model car has a specific way that the user is encouraged to engage with it in, and to do otherwise is a kind of perversion.
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I call this “the social zamboni.” It is something that smooths out the rough edges and fields of intensity. I do not think that this particular social formation is one that was designed – such thinking would be conspiracism – but one that has gradually emerged to make the environment in which it occurs more stable.
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Perversity is what might be called “ectopic play” or “ectopic sovereignty” – sovereign authority deployed in a limited fashion without permission and in a place where it isn’t considered to belong. In some contexts this might be criminal or stupid. In others, it can be genius. This juxtaposition is what makes perversity so interesting to me. It is the willingness to creatively misuse a given system.
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