The Three States of Play
The Benefits of an Emerging Trinity
For those who read French, you can find the the original article here.
Following the metaphor
Since early childhood, you have learned about the states of water. Liquid, solid, gaseous: the same substance can take different forms depending on its environment, its temperature, or the pressure applied to it.
Did you know that play — whatever form it takes — also exists in several different states?
We tend to perceive it only in its most common and obvious form: the lived experience, the activity referred to by the verb to play.
Yet, with time and a touch of curiosity, we may discover that the territory of play has other entry points which, although interconnected, possess distinct properties.
These are what I have chosen to call the three states of play. Let us take a closer look.
Playing — The Liquid State 💧
The first form of play is also the first one we encounter in life: playing.
It is perhaps the most widespread and universal form of play there is. The verb itself captures its essence quite well, even if it sometimes feels too narrow to encompass the diversity of realities evoked by the word play (four letters is not much to carry all that it implies).
I associate this state with the liquid state because it is the state of movement and flow. It is both highly tangible — people generally know what counts as play for them — and yet perpetually shifting. Play exists largely in the space between players, in the interactions they build together, interactions that are never exactly the same twice.
This liquid materiality reinforces the idea that play exceeds the boundaries we usually assign to it. We may bottle it here and there, contain it within swimming pools or ponds, but its fundamentally oceanic power will always overflow culturally standardized categories such as video games, board games, gambling, and so on.
As I have argued elsewhere, play is a space. We enter this space much like crossing the threshold into another world — a world within the world. Play can exist without components, with improvised rules, without having to justify itself to anyone.
But playing is also an opportunity to make society: to bring members of our species together around an activity that is, in principle, voluntary and enjoyable — and that does not, for once, consist of killing one another (for real).
Of course, play is not always synonymous with harmony. Games can exclude, humiliate, or reproduce forms of domination and cultural bias. Yet precisely because they cannot be anything other than reflections of our societies, they provide a privileged terrain from which to observe them.
Making Others Play — The Solid State 🧊
The second state of play is making others play.
To make others play is to consciously and deliberately give shape to play. It is what all professionals within the world of games do: publishers, designers, developers. In short, all the links in the chain through which a game comes into existence — whether or not they make a living from it: authors, illustrators, manufacturers, distributors, game retailers, game design educators, and so on.
More broadly, making others play encompasses everyone who produces and/or mobilises play, whether for commercial, recreational, social, educational, or even artistic purposes. This includes libraries dedicated to games, gaming festivals, game design conventions, local associations, as well as educational spaces — whether they are schools devoted specifically to games or schools and community centres that use play in their activities and programmes.
Becoming aware of this second state means recognising that games do not simply fall from the sky. They are produced by situated individuals, within specific economic, cultural, and historical contexts. They may constitute a profession, a hobby, or a form of civic engagement that contributes to the public good.
To continue the metaphor, the liquid play of the first state is something rather difficult to hold in one’s hands. The second state, however, is that of solid play, in which play becomes an object, a device, or a medium that can be refined, improved, and exchanged.
Making others play consists in stepping outside the experience of play itself in order to organise the conditions under which that experience may occur. This can mean taking an existing game and introducing it to new audiences, or creating entirely new games.
It is in this spirit that certain game design theorists, such as Eric Zimmerman, describe game design as a second-order design problem: the designer creates structures — rules — that shape behaviours, which in turn generate experiences. Designers therefore do not directly create experiences, nor do they exercise perfect control over what players will ultimately feel or do. Rather, they establish the conditions within which meaningful interactions may emerge.
Put more simply, those who contribute to this second state of play are like hosts at a gathering, making sure their guests have a good time. They, too, may enjoy the evening and occasionally forget that they are the hosts. Yet their role and responsibilities never fully overlap with those of their guests.
Thinking About Play — The Gaseous State ☁️
Thinking about play is this final state in which play becomes the subject of discourse, research, or critical reflection: it is the gaseous state of play.
This state took time to emerge. It is only relatively recently that we have been able to speak of game studies or, in some contexts, the science of play as distinct fields of inquiry. Of course, disciplines such as sociology, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, and history have long engaged with play as an object of thought. Today, however, this intellectual practice continues to expand and diversify year after year.
In concrete terms, thinking about play encompasses everything from journalistic work shaped by the commercial news cycle to specialised gaming media, politically engaged game criticism, fundamental academic research (such as works like This Is Not Just a Game or the Dictionary of Game Studies), and even research-creation programmes such as Rhétolud.
Thinking about play offers an opportunity to reflect upon an object that is inseparable from society through questions that are still too rarely asked: What narratives do games convey? What do they reveal about a particular era, a society, or a worldview? What responses can play offer to the challenges of today’s world — or the world to come?
To consider play exempt from formal, sociological, or political analysis would be to grant it a form of extraterritorial status. It would mean treating the rules, representations, and systems that games stage as though they had no connection to reality — or worse, as though they could somehow be experienced independently of it.
And yet, we have everything to gain from exposing the dialogue between play and the world.
Because it is built around rules, play can help us reflect on our own relationship to norms. Because it generates interactions, it can shed light on social and psychological dynamics. Because it stages imaginaries, it participates in the construction and perpetuation of our collective representations.
Admittedly, the gaseous state is one of abstraction. It is the least visible of the three states, and undoubtedly the most difficult to grasp. It is therefore also the state that remains least present within society. Much remains to be done if we wish to invite more people to explore this dimension of play, and one of the reasons for the existence of Miroir des jeux is precisely to contribute to this endeavour.
Fortunately, you do not need a Master’s degree in game studies to begin exploring this third state. Simply taking the time to look at a game as something more than a mere object of entertainment is already a way of stepping into the gaseous state.
From there, the task is gradually to cultivate one’s gaze and one’s sensibility — to develop the habit of confronting games with the world in which they exist, without losing sight of the pleasures of the first state.
Because, rest assured, thinking about play does not mean dissecting it in order to strip it of its magic. Nor does it mean analysing what works and what does not in order to produce the next blockbuster hit — that belongs to the work of the second state. Thinking about play is, first and foremost, about giving it the opportunity to acquire depth.
Can you see the cloud beginning to form?
A Fourth State? ☀️
There is a fourth state that I have not yet mentioned, but one that should not be overlooked: the state of non-play. In a sense, it is the antimatter of the playful universe.
In this state, play is simply excluded from a person’s concerns, interests, or priorities. This may be because it is reduced to board games or video games and therefore not embraced as a leisure activity (“I don’t like games”), because it is not considered legitimate (“games are for children”), or because it is not seen as productive (“I’m wasting my time playing”).
Despite the interpretative biases that often reveal a limited understanding of play, this “ghost state” paradoxically has an important place within the ecosystem of play. Non-play is not the enemy of play.
Among other things, it reminds us that it is healthy to step outside the playful world and look elsewhere. It acts as a useful safeguard. After all, there is more to life than games — and games are certainly not the answer to everything.
If this fourth state intrigues you, I discuss it at greater length in a video available on our channel.
Sea, Snow, and Clouds: Why Choose?
Despite their different properties, these three states of play are not mutually exclusive. Nor is there any hierarchy to be found among them. They may serve converging purposes, stand in radical opposition to one another, or function in synergy. More often than not, however, they do not share the same temporality :
- When we explain the rules of a game, we are not quite playing.
- When we are playing, we are not analysing the game.
- When a designer playtests a prototype, they are not entirely playing, nor are they necessarily reflecting on the deeper meanings of its mechanics. They are also thinking about how the game functions and how it is received by others — that is, operating within the second state.
- You may manufacture games without any desire either to play them or to think critically about them — for instance, in technical production roles.
- And it is entirely possible to think about games… without ever playing them! (Admittedly, this is a rather rare profile, and the only person I personally know who fits it is my former professor and friend Gilles Brougère.)
The same individual may therefore move through different states of play over the course of a single evening. These positions sometimes overlap, and their boundaries are, of course, porous.
Recognising these different moments of play may help us avoid some of the misunderstandings that arise within gaming communities — particularly the notion that any one of these states alone could fully define what play is, or claim a monopoly on truth.
In practice, it is often the third state — the act of thinking about play, of which this article is itself an example — that is challenged. One hears statements such as “games are not political” or “analysing games is just intellectual masturbation.” More often than not, however, this state simply remains unexplored because the culture surrounding games has not yet developed sufficiently. In other words, the temperature has not risen enough for play to reach its gaseous state with ease.
Of course, this metaphorical description of the states of play is intended, in part, to defend and democratise this third state. But let us avoid falling into the opposite trap of overvaluing critical distance to the point of ending up with our heads permanently in the clouds.
To see games only as objects of study is sometimes to lose sight of what makes them singular and beautiful: the pleasure of playing for the sake of playing, of existing purely for themselves, without any explanation beyond what they are.
What matters, ultimately, is that these three states are allowed to coexist and continue developing in synergy if we wish to foster a richer culture of play within society.
The attitude that seems most balanced to me is therefore one of navigation: moving from one state to another. Ensuring that spaces exist in which people can play; that game creation can become more democratic and accessible; and that critical and sensitive reflection on play can gain legitimacy beyond academic circles.
The cultural maturity of this medium lies precisely in our ability to accept that it can be all of these things at once.
