Play as Rehearsal of Reality

Psychologists and anthropologists have tried to explain the human ability to play as an instinctive way to learn and practice skills. In other words, playing would be an activity, which allows us to “rehearse reality,” and thus to learn from mistakes, accumulate experience, construct knowledge to face and shape reality.

Psychologists have interpreted children play as a complex way to rehearse reality: children's play is a way to construct knowledge; thus, by playing, children experience, “know,” and make sense of the world. For example, Brian Sutton-Smith has highlighted how by using objects (from toys to doors), the child explores and manages to understand the relations between objects and all that is around them. As Vygotsky has noted, players act out, by playing according to established rules, family or professional roles (for example, that of mother or nurse), as well as social roles (the outcast or the leader). This way they learn from rehearsing their potential or real role.

In the 20th century, the Russian literary critic Michail Bakhtin and the Dutch historian fohan Huizinga have approached the issue of play as specific dimension. Michail Bakhtin examined the role played by carnival and by literary works, such as Gargantua and Pantagruel by the Renaissance French writer François Rabelais, in which the rules that regulate everyday human life are reversed. For example, in the festive space of the carnival, people can dress up as pirates or monsters, everyone can wear a mask and cross dress, and even freely play tricks on other people. Actually, these kind of behaviors are not just allowed, but considered proper to the carnival time. Bakhtin read carnivalesque play, as well as grotesque literature, as the reversal of ordinary life, a “space and time” for freedom, in which, nonetheless, by temporarily playing with established behavioral rules, we reaffirm the legitimacy of ordinary life and everyday roles.

Huizinga has formulated one of the most relevant philosophical theories considering play as rehearsal of reality. In Homo Ludens, Huizinga asserted that play is a phenomenon prior and independent of culture. He argued that play operates outside the realm of logic and causality, and that it is not an escape from the world of logic. In his view, play is a sort of parallel reality infiltrating the everyday life; as an example, we can think of the performance of a dramatic piece. We freely choose to go to the theatre (i.e., play is voluntary); the time and place of the action are different from those of the viewers, the stage is a separate space, and once the curtain is closed the story that has temporarily involved us is removed from our everyday life (i.e., play has its own spatial and temporal organization). Nonetheless, we may be affected for a long time by the performance (so that play shapes and affects culture). In sum, according to Huizinga we have two coexisting realities, everyday life and play, constantly influencing one another.

A costumed woman at the centuries-old Carnival of Venice in Italy. Escaping reality is considered proper at carnival time.

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