Marisol Quint plays chess every Tuesday against a retired postman who has beaten her, by her count, four hundred and eleven times. She does not mind. The philosopher, whose book The Serious Game has become an unlikely word-of-mouth success, believes that losing gracefully at something unimportant is among the most underrated skills of adult life. We met in a café near Ellery College, where she teaches, and she arrived carrying a folding board, just in case.
I began by asking why a philosopher would write a whole book about games. She answered by reciting the definition that sparked her career. The Canadian philosopher Bernard Suits proposed that playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. Golf, she pointed out, would be far easier if you simply walked the ball to the hole and dropped it in. The whole point is that you choose not to. Games are the rare place where we deliberately make life harder, for no reason at all.
That lack of reason, Quint argues, is exactly what makes play valuable. Almost everything else adults do is instrumental. We work to earn, exercise to stay healthy, network to advance, even rest to recover. Play is one of the few activities pursued entirely for its own sake. Suits went so far as to suggest that in a perfect world, where every material need had been met, playing games would be the main thing left worth doing. Quint half agrees. She thinks we need not wait for utopia to start.
The magic circle
She is particularly fond of the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, who argued in Homo Ludens that play is older than culture itself, and that law, art and ritual all carry its traces. Huizinga described the space of a game as a kind of magic circle, set apart from ordinary life, with its own rules and its own time. Inside it, Quint said, a boardroom executive and a nine-year-old can be equals. Few other places in adult life offer anything like that.
Play is the only activity where we choose difficulty for its own sake. That makes it a rehearsal for freedom.
I asked whether the rise of gamification, the points and streaks and badges now attached to fitness apps and language lessons, counted as a revival of play. She winced. That, she said, is play turned inside out. Gamification borrows the pleasures of games to make us do things we would otherwise avoid, usually for someone else's benefit. Real play has no ulterior motive. The moment a game is secretly about productivity or engagement, the magic circle has been broken, and we are back at work.
Her prescription for readers is disarmingly modest. Choose a game with no reward outside itself, and play it regularly with someone you like. Crosswords, cards, bowls and chess all qualify, as does kicking a ball against a wall. Lose often. Notice how it feels to care intensely about something that does not matter, and then to stop caring the moment it ends. That capacity, she believes, is a small training in proportion, and proportion is something public life badly needs.
As we finished our coffee, she unfolded the board and set up the pieces. I lost in nineteen moves, distracted by my notebook. She reset the board immediately and offered me white. It struck me, walking back to the station afterwards, that I could not remember the last time I had done something so completely pointless and enjoyed it so much. Quint would say that was the whole argument of her book, delivered in under half an hour.
