#3 Utopia of Play: Games we're forced to play

(Post 3 in the series: Utopia of Play)

In the introduction to this series, i asked some questions, the first of which was - 'Why is joy rationed while productivity is infinite?' and the second question 'Why does living cost so much - and who decided survival should depend on perpetual work?'

i gave a historical account in the following post, to try to show how the culture we have today stems from historical events long before any of us were alive. The history of the modern worker is a history of profound misdirection and exploitation.

In the previous posts, i traced how the sacred, improvisational, and essential power of play - that ancient technology for collective meaning-making and cosmic negotiation - was first severed from ritual by Christian theology, then weaponised by the Protestant work ethic, and finally absorbed into the twin engines of industrial-colonial extraction. And finally, how this violence became somatic inheritance we carry in our nervous systems. The cage was built. We were born inside it.

Yet even stripped of divinity, humans cannot live without play. The instinct to test, to improvise, to make meaning through movement remains. The industrial revolution gave birth to capitalism as we know it today. And capitalism didn’t abolish play - it reformatted it into games. Games with rules, points, hierarchies, and winners; games that look like order but feel like confinement.

This distinction, between play and games, may sound abstract. But it explains something fundamental about how we experience work today. Why we crave structure yet feel trapped by it. Why we're drawn to systems that promise clarity but deliver only exhaustion. Why transformation feels perpetually out of reach.

As we move from ritual to regulation, from sacred play to corporate gameplay, we arrive at the central hinge of this series: what happens when we’re only allowed to play by rules we didn’t write?

Transformation and boundaries

In his theory on play, Johan Huizinga identified play's "magic circle" - a bounded space where different rules apply, where we experiment without real-world consequences. Step into the circle, and suddenly you're protected. Children playing house. Athletes on a pitch. Actors on stage. Inside the circle, we can be someone else, try something new, fail without catastrophe.

But Huizinga made a crucial error: he conflated play with games. He treated them as the same phenomenon, just with varying degrees of structure. That confusion misses the point.

In David Graeber's Utopia of Rules, games are "rule-governed action". Structured activities with win conditions, point systems, hierarchies. Chess has rules. Football has rules. Monopoly has devastatingly accurate rules about how capitalism works. You know when you've won. You know when you've lost. The framework is legible.

Play, however, is pure possibility. It's what children do before adults teach them the "right" way to play. It's improvisation, disruption, refusal of predetermined outcomes.

Watch children before they've been schooled in games. They don't follow rules -they generate them in real-time, abandoning them the moment they stop serving joy. A cardboard box becomes spaceship, then castle, then boat, then spaceship again. The point isn't winning; it's the pleasure of transformation itself. It's a world building activity.

Miguel Sicart calls play "appropriative, creative, disruptive." It takes what exists and reimagines it. It refuses to accept that things must be as they are. Games, by contrast, need stable structures. Agreement on what counts, who's winning, who's losing. Games need buy-in to their logic.

Both have value. Games teach us strategy, cooperation, how to lose gracefully. But play teaches us something capitalism fears: that the rules themselves are negotiable. That reality is more flexible than it appears. That another world is possible because we can imagine it.

When you replace play with games, when you make everything measurable competition with prescribed rules, you kill the thing that makes alternatives thinkable. Play asks "what if?" Games ask "how do i win?"

A history of growing up

i started this journey with the book Bullshit Jobs, where David Graeber discussed at length, the roles and entire careers that those doing them felt were completely unnecessary to life on earth. The juxtaposition of this with the Covid policies that announced essential versus non-essential work started a series of thoughts in my mind. Work's purpose in our society must carry a meaning beyond meeting our basic needs. In hunter gatherer societies, it meant having food to eat, as much as it ensured shelter. But what about when we have our basic necessities met, there's a roof over our heads and food on the table? What more beyond this is work doing for us, socially and structurally?

Let's imagine a fourteen-year-old in medieval England, leaving his family to serve as apprentice to a master craftsman. For seven to fifteen years, they'd learn not just a trade, but how to live in the world. Save wages, master craft, eventually become masters themselves. Marriage, household, apprentices of their own. The process was long, arduous, often exploitative, but it promised progression. You learned a craft. You gained autonomy. Eventually, you became the one who taught others.The promise: work hard, learn well, graduate from childhood into full adult citizenship.

This wasn't unique to Europe. In Tokugawa Japan, the iemoto system created even more formalised pathways from apprenticeship to mastery. Consider urushi lacquerware: young apprentices would enter workshops at twelve or thirteen, beginning with the most basic tasks. Cleaning brushes. Preparing materials. Observing in silence. Years of mimetic learning, copying the master's movements exactly, absorbing technique through repetition rather than explanation.

The progression was methodical and profound. In calligraphy schools like Shōren-in, apprentices didn't just learn brush techniques but ways of seeing, thinking, being in the world. The master-disciple relationship, called deshi, created what anthropologist Dorinne Kondo describes as "intense bonds of mutual obligation and aesthetic transmission."

Remarkably, this system persists. Contemporary calligraphy schools such as Nihon Shuji and Bunka Shodō still operate according to iemoto principles, built around master calligraphers whose lineages stretch back centuries. When i perform calligraphy within these traditions, i'm not simply making marks on paper. i'm enshrining and continuing the master's legacy, embodying aesthetic traditions passed down through generations of carefully cultivated relationships.

What strikes me about this system is its temporal logic. Both master and apprentice operated within extended timeframes. Decades rather than quarters. Lifetimes rather than financial years. The crucial element was progression with purpose. Your craft creates legacy, not simply products. Through disciplined work under guidance, young people transformed into self-disciplined adults.

The work itself was transformative, not just economically but ontologically. You became a different person through the process. The apprentice learning urushi lacquerware wasn't just acquiring a skill, they were being remade. Their hands learned to move differently. Their eyes learned to see differently. Their sense of self shifted from dependent to autonomous.

This is what play and craft share: both are fundamentally transformative. Both change the person engaging with them. Play transforms through imagination, craft through discipline. But both promise becoming.

Permanent adolescence and the anatomy of a job

Adulthood, in these systems, was marked not by age but by economic independence. By no longer needing to work under the orders of others. The apprentice became the master. The cycle continued. Masters could start their own schools, creating new legacies and philosophical approaches to their discipline. And the quality of craftsmanship produced in this system? Quite literally timeless.

Fast forward to present day and work doesn't quite deliver on its promise of transformation. There is no end goal autonomy, no inheritance to leave one's children. Most of us are living paycheque to paycheque, in the present moment, with no real glimpse of the future. No one is building a better future for the next generation with their forty-hour work weeks.

Capitalism disrupted this model fundamentally. It trapped us in what Graeber terms "permanent adolescence." Unable to reach mastery. Unable to achieve the economic independence that traditionally marked adult status. Even our crafts and products are designed to fail, incentivising further sales and repurchases. We designed a system that profits on everything being short-lived and poor quality. Including our careers.

Jobs today don't transform, they maintain. You don't progress through stages toward mastery, you perform competence indefinitely. The relationship isn't master and apprentice but employer and employee, a fundamentally different structure. One promised eventual equality, the other institutionalises permanent hierarchy.

This matters because transformation was the point. Work was never just about producing value for someone else. It was the mechanism through which you became yourself. The structure that turned children into adults, dependents into masters, apprentices into teachers.

When that transformative function breaks down, work becomes something else entirely. A holding pattern. A way of treading water. A performance of adulthood rather than its achievement.

Finally, millennials, Gen Z, and any adult who didn't achieve what they'd been promised. We can finally justify the collective lack of accomplishment with academic theory.

Consider the numbers. UK average house price is now over eight times average salary, compared to three times in the 1980s. Home ownership among 25-34 year-olds fell from 67% in 1991 to 40% in 2021. Meanwhile, the gig economy exploded - Uber drivers, Deliveroo cyclists, freelance content creators - all working without traditional benefits, job security, or progression opportunities.

And it's not just our labour, everything has become a subscription, the era of owning our products died alongside the era of hard work guaranteeing our futures.

Zygmunt Bauman called it "liquid modernity" - when traditional structures of career, family, community become fluid, uncertain, temporary. Guy Standing calls this the "precariat"workers facing chronic uncertainty, lacking secure employment, predictable income, or clear professional progression (Standing, 2011).

Does that sound familiar?

This isn't just economic. It's existential. The markers of adulthood, home ownership, financial independence, the ability to start a family, form long-term plans, these aren't just delayed. For many, they're structurally unattainable. We're locked in permanent adolescence not because we're immature but because the systems that enabled previous generations to "grow up" have collapsed.

The apprentice never becomes the master. The progression never completes. The transformation never comes.

And yet, the moral framework persists. We're still told that hard work leads to independence. That dedication yields mastery. That time invested transforms into security. The promise remains even as the mechanism delivering it has broken.

This creates a peculiar psychological state. We're adolescents performing adulthood. We have jobs, not vocations. We have productivity metrics, not mastery. We have careers that are really just sequences of roles, each one temporary, each one potentially the last.

In response, work had to reinvent itself. If it can't promise material advancement, it must offer psychological satisfaction. Workers perform professional identity through social media, personal branding, networking. The LinkedIn post celebrating a promotion becomes more important than the promotion itself, if promotions even exist in your industry.

i see this constantly. Designers running Medium blogs rehashing tired conversations. LinkedIn influencers reminding us they wake at 5am to "focus." We are on year five of endless think pieces and clickbait articles about office versus remote working. Consultants networking so aggressively they forget what they're consulting about. We're all performing productivity because actual productivity no longer guarantees anything.

When ChatGPT can generate "10 Leadership Lessons from My Morning Coffee," it reveals something uncomfortable. The post was always algorithmic. When AI writes the same formulaic Medium articles, it exposes how much professional discourse was already template-driven, devoid of genuine insight.

The reason AI can replace so much work? Because much of this work serves no real purpose to meaningful life on earth. We could very easily live without it.

Meanwhile, things AI struggles with, genuine creativity, embodied craftsmanship, deep human connection, contextual problem solving, these map remarkably well onto activities we typically dismiss as "just play."

Brian Sutton-Smith offered this provocation: maybe the opposite of play is not work, but powerlessness. This reframing becomes crucial when work itself becomes disempowering. When the structure that was supposed to transform you into an autonomous adult instead keeps you permanently dependent. Play, when freely chosen, is an act of agency.

The seduction of transparent rules

What makes the replacement of play with games particularly seductive is that games offer something modern work desperately lacks: what Graeber calls a "utopia of rules."

Humans crave legible systems. Spaces where effort maps cleanly to outcome, where you know what counts, where the framework is transparent. We love games precisely because they give us visible, negotiable rules where skill development leads somewhere.

When i was working on this material as a research thesis for my Masters, i became interested in the act of "grinding." Repetitive tasks required to progress in online games. What fascinated me was how players have absolute clarity about when a grind is worthwhile.

i spent time with Destiny 2 players who could articulate exactly when the game's demands became unreasonable. One told me about a quest requiring double kills with grenade launchers in PVP. So difficult that players collectively decided to subvert it. They'd form teams and stand still, letting each other get kills. They recognised when the "work" wasn't worth it.

As one player, Kyzer, told me: "The grind is terrible, it's boring and the rewards aren't worth it."

When developers pushed too far, communities revolted. Reddit threads became manifestos. YouTube videos dissected exploitation mechanics. Players organised boycotts. Crucially, the game's rules were visible enough to contest. Bungie actually responded to player complaints and changed these mechanics in later updates.

This is what Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identified as prerequisites for flow: clear goals, immediate feedback, balance between challenge and skill. Games provide this. Work pretends to but doesn't.

In Destiny, you know exactly what you need to do to earn a specific weapon. Kill these enemies, complete these objectives, accumulate these points. The path is transparent. The reward is guaranteed. And if the path becomes too onerous relative to the reward, you can see that clearly enough to refuse.

Work offers no such transparency. You're told "work hard and you'll succeed," but success criteria remain opaque. You're told about meritocracy, but promotions follow invisible logics. You're told "we value work-life balance," but taking holiday feels like theft. You put in the hours, develop the skills, demonstrate competence, and still the transformation doesn't come.

Capitalism took game transparency and weaponised it. It created systems that feel fair because they have visible metrics. KPIs, performance reviews, productivity tracking. Whilst hiding the actual mechanisms that determine who rises and who doesn't.

The seduction of games is that they make transformation legible. Level systems, skill trees, achievement lists, these aren't just gamification gimmicks. They're ways of making progression visible. You can see yourself transforming from novice to master. The apprenticeship is compressed and clarified.

This is why we're drawn to games even as we feel trapped by work. Games give us what work promised but stopped delivering: visible pathways to mastery, transparent rules for progression, transformation as achievable rather than mythical.

The paradox of our moment

The rules we inherited from factory time didn't disappear. They morphed. "Flexible hours" sounds like freedom but means you're always working. "Unlimited PTO" sounds generous but makes taking holiday feel like theft. The anxiety that wakes you at 3am wondering if you responded to that email quickly enough, that's factory discipline internalised.

Erving Goffman documented how we constantly perform within institutional scripts we're never given. We learn rules by violating them and suffering consequences. You discover you were supposed to "read the room" only after failing to. You learn about "executive presence" only after being denied for lacking it.

But Goffman documented relatively stable 1950s scripts. Oppressive, yes, but learnable. Today's rules are what Bauman calls "liquid." Constantly shifting, impossible to master. The performance making you "leadership material" yesterday makes you "not a team player" today.

Modern work culture operates like a game where the win conditions keep changing mid-play. Performance metrics stand in for transformation. Success depends less on developing genuine mastery than on intuiting invisible codes that shift constantly. What worked for my parents won't work for me, won't work for Gen Z.

You know this feeling. When the ground shifts beneath your feet. The rules contradict themselves, yet we're expected to play perfectly. Speak up in meetings, but not too much. Show ambition, but don't seem threatening. Be confident, not arrogant. Collaborate, but guard your ideas.

This is the paradox. We crave the clarity games offer, the transparent rules, the knowable win conditions. But the systems we actually inhabit pretend to be games whilst operating by entirely different logic. They wear the aesthetics of fairness, the language of meritocracy, the promise of transformation, whilst hiding the actual mechanisms of progression.

The transformation work once promised, from dependent child to independent adult, from apprentice to master, has been replaced with something else. Permanent performance. Endless optimisation. The appearance of progression without its substance.

Without players there is no game

Work has become a game where the rules shift constantly, where the win conditions remain perpetually out of reach, where transformation is promised but never delivered. We're told we're permanent apprentices in a system that has abolished mastery.

And yet, we keep playing.

Perhaps because we remember, dimly, what work was supposed to be. A pathway to adulthood. A means of transformation. A way of mattering. Perhaps because we've inherited the Protestant conviction that meaning comes through labour, even when the labour produces nothing meaningful.

Or perhaps because we don't quite believe we have a choice.

But games teach us something work wants us to forget: transformation requires not just effort but structure that genuinely enables it. Clear goals. Transparent progression. Achievable mastery. The magic circle only works when the rules inside it actually function.

What my research into gaming communities revealed is this: players are extraordinarily good at recognising when a game stops being worth playing. When the grind becomes exploitative rather than engaging. When the reward structure breaks down. When progression stalls.

When Destiny 2 players recognised an exploitative grind, they didn't just complain. They organised. They found workarounds. They collectively decided which mechanics deserved their time and which didn't. They remembered that play is supposed to serve them, not the other way around.

That clarity, about when participation serves you and when it serves only the system, is what we've lost in the translation from play to work. We've forgotten that the apprentice was supposed to become the master. That transformation was the point. That adulthood meant economic independence, not permanent precarity.

The apprentice became a master because the system was designed to transform them. Modern work keeps us apprenticed because the system is designed to extract, not transform. To maintain hierarchy, not overcome it. To promise progression whilst delivering only performance.

We've forgotten that we're players, not pieces. That the magic circle only exists because we agree to step inside it. That the rules only have power because we consent to follow them. That we could, collectively, refuse to keep grinding for rewards we're never meant to receive.

The question isn't whether the game is rigged. The question is: what happens when enough of us stop pretending it isn't?

The cage was built. We were born inside it. But cages, like games, only work when we agree they do.

Next: #4 Utopia of Play: The altar of exhaustion

References

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990) Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper & Row.
Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday.
Graeber, D. (2015) The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Brooklyn: Melville House.
Graeber, D. (2018) Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. London: Allen Lane.
Huizinga, J. (1938) Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Kondo, D.K. (1990) Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Office for National Statistics (2023) Housing Affordability in England and Wales: 2022. London: ONS.
Sicart, M. (2014) Play Matters. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Standing, G. (2011) The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Sutton-Smith, B. (2001) The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.