ABSTRACT
Ritual and play are shadow images of one another in the kinds of messages they transmit to the social order. Everyone plays and most people also enjoy watching others play – either formally in sports, theatre, on television, in films; or casually, at parties, while working, on the street, on playgrounds. Whenever prerational values attempt to regain cultural supremacy, what has been repressed under the name of “literature” or “art” as mere play and illusion also reasserts its claim to knowledge and truth, that is, its claim to power. Adult playing is different from children’s in terms of the amount of time spent playing and the shift from mostly “free” or “exploratory” play to rule-bound games. Both child play and adult play involve exploration, learning, and risk with a payoff which is the pleasurable experience of “flow,” the total involvement in an activity for its own sake Playing creates its own multiple realities with porous boundaries.
