This has been fun. Partly because reading and thinking about playing is itself quite a lot of fun. But also because I love diving into an entirely new topic about which I know nothing and finding out what’s going on inside it. Sometimes this is a case of acquiring a language for thoughts I’ve already had; sometimes it’s a case of looking at things in an entirely new way. This week has been a bit of both.

I’m specifically interested in ‘play’ at the moment for two pieces of work: a paper I’m delivering at a conference in a month or so, and a chapter I’m writing for someone else’s book that’s supposed to be finished scarily soon. One’s about Saint Christopher and the other’s about Beowulf, but I think both are also about play; or that both can be enriched by using the language also used to analyse play (by which I mean here ‘make-believe’, or ‘sociodramatic’ play).

In most ways, this interest in play is another facet of the questions I’m asking about storytelling, which I wrote about last week, in terms of truth and fiction, and how meaning is made and so on. While I’ve enjoyed some of it, I’ve found a lot of analysis of storytelling (usually under the heading of ‘narrative theory’) pretty dull and empty, and haven’t feel particularly stimulated or challenged by it (which is not to condemn the field, by any means; it just hasn’t fed my fires during this particular quest).

So, before I did any of this reading, I was mostly focused on the way ‘play’ tells a story, with the participants inhabiting characters. I figured that understanding how it works a bit more might help me to be clearer about how stories and the telling of stories functions. So I dove into reading some pretty foreign fields – primarily educational theory – to see what they had to say for themselves. And it was just a boundless joy. It’s excited me to the point where I’m having to hold myself back just a little bit from coming up with entirely new papers and ideas and rein it in, at least until I’ve completed the things I’ve got started.

What’s exciting me now is thinking about, first, how some things really matter and have to be a certain way, while most things absolutely don’t and can become anything at all. The balance between rules and chaos intrigues me, and particularly the way it’s negotiated on or understood by all of the participants. This points towards the obviously fascinating aspect of play: how transformative it is of objects, environments, and participants – while also being a recognisably closed world, with participants able to step outside of ‘play mode’ at any moment. That stepping in and out of ‘play’ seems just magical to me (which probably says more about how irretrievably trapped in my own self-awareness I am than anything else). I’m also interested in the way play often consciously takes on known stories and then varies them, adding elements or looking before and after. My final major plank of interest is in how (when it works) play creates stories cooperatively, in effect constructing a community by agreeing what matters and taking account of other people’s concerns. This relates back to the stepping in and out, where participants agree to notice certain things that are said and done, and not others.

It’s going to take a bit of effort to move this forwards, I think. I’m looking forward to seeing my nephews next week and might try to talk to them about play and how it works, just to stretch my thinking a bit further and possibly to try to relate play and storytelling a bit more tightly. I definitely need to spend some time to allow the new things I’ve read to percolate before I return to apply them to my thinking about the telling of stories in hagiography and in Beowulf. So that all feels like a challenge, and like one I haven’t really got the time to face. But I like academic work when it’s like this: I feel as thought I’m looking out at something new, and that I don’t know what’s going to happen next; like I’m playing, I suppose. From being pretty confident that I had two pieces of work all done bar the writing up, I now don’t know what either of them will say.