Writing a book: your thoughts?

Powerup!

Playing games isn’t something you’d normally associate with self-development. Play is what you do when you’re taking time out from the frenetic activities that make up your daily life- making money, building relationships, planning ahead, remembering (occasionally) to eat, and far more often to consume an ever increasing amounts of your caffeinated beverage of choice. Increasingly, though, there is a case to be made that play is a vital and integral component to helping people overcome, cope with and learn from the pressures of life, not just as a way of getting away from it all, but woven throughout every part of life. Play can be a deeply serious and passionate endeavour, far from the childish frivolity the word commonly evokes.

Powerup! is a book about exploring- often playfully- the idea of play with a view to helping the reader understand how play contributes to their life. In doing so, I hope that awareness will allow them to more actively harness the incredible power play has for self empowerment and self development. Make no mistake, this is not a ‘how-to’ book. Play is a deeply individual and incredibly complex thing, built on many layers of behavior both personal and social. This book is a lot more about exploring ideas and general concepts than providing a catch-all recipe for success. As with other areas of self-development like study, exercise and diet, everyone will have their own particular needs and will struggle if those aren’t addressed. Unlike these other forms of self-development, however, play has a huge advantage. It is- almost by definition- fun.

Asking someone why they are playing is a meaningless question in a way, or it certainly seems like it from the blank and benignly confused responses I have recieved when I have asked it. Play needs no justification, it is a goal in and of itself (the fancy word for this is ‘Autotelic’). Because of this, we don’t suffer the problems with motivation that many other forms of self-development are so laden with. So why do you even need a book like this? You’re going to play anyway!

There are two main reasons. The first is that though play needs no motivation, it almost inevitably has one. Often we feel bad about playing because we feel like we should be doing something constructive, when in fact there is almost nothing more constructive that we could be doing. By thinking about the value that play brings to your life in a more focused and complex way, you’ll probably be able to worry less about whether you should be doing it and as a result get even more out of it! The second is that by understanding why play is so intrinsically motivating, you can begin to deliberately bring this attribute into other parts of your life where motivation is hard to come by.

Along with these there are a host of other benefits. By understanding the many kinds of play and motivations for playfulness you can begin to understand how other people play and communicate what you value in your own play more clearly. You can appreciate how areas of play overlap and intersect with each other, bringing your favourite pastimes together in new and creative ways. There’s also the simple fact that the world of play is fascinating, engaging and deeply entwined with creative and meaningful endeavours everywhere you look. It’s worth thinking about.

What will be in the book?

First the book will give an overview of the concepts of play and games. What is play? What are games? Unfortunately, there’s no simple answers- it really depends on what you want to accomplish with your definition. With that in mind we’ll look at developing some historical ideas into something more simple and pragmatic that can be used to examine play.

Then we’ll take a look through the motivations for play and the benefits of playing, both those expressed by the players themselves and those discovered by more systematic research. I’ll isolate these motivations into some simple characters who epitomize that motivation, characters we’ll call back to later in the book.

From there we’ll begin to dive into the real content of the book. Looking at existing kinds of play and communities of players, we’ll see how you can use these ideas for self-development and self-empowerment. This section will be broken down into three broad parts

Solitary play:
Exploration and investigation, fantasy and creativity, ritual and meditation, solitary play behaviors take up a good part of our lives. They’re also the ones we’re liable to be most self critical of, and for good reason- play can be self-destructive as well as self-empowering and without the benefit of other people to see the play from a different perspective, it’s easy to get caught up. How can the positive aspects of play be harnessed throughout your life? How can solitary games be used to at the same time relax and grow. By understanding play you can direct it towards helping you achieve your goals with a greater degree of control, and a feeling of control is essential to getting the most out of many kinds of play, so this creates a kind of virtuous cycle- achieve more and feel better doing it, the holy grail of self-development gurus everywhere.

Competitive play:
Competitive play permeates contemporary society both in practice and in spirit, everywhere from politics to romance, competitive play reaches deep into the most serious endeavours of life. No other form of play can bring the same rollercoaster of highs and lows as direct competition with rival players, so this section will explore ways in which to emphasise the positive emotions of competition and cope with the frustrations. It will also look at how to maximise the development from competitive play, win or lose.

Co-operative play:
Less dramatic and consequently less romanticised than competition, cooperative play where several players work towards a shared objective is nevertheless an important part of the play ecology. Dramatists or preachers working an audience towards catharsis, board gamers trying to un-knot a thorny puzzle the cards have laid down, storytellers trying to evoke an imaginary world, even a group of friends working together towards an atmosphere of general comfort and well-being, playing with others can achieve heights that solitary play can sometimes struggle to reach. Having a clear view of what you’re working towards, communicating your objectives and methods to other players and recognizing where working together with others can help are all reasons to think about co-operative forms of play.