I was recently asked by a colleague the question: Why is fun, fun?
As David Graeber suggests in ‘What’s the point if we can’t have fun?’ what Jared Diamond gets wrong in his book Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality is that there doesn’t always have to be a point to everything. While from the social Darwinist perspective sex is fun because it serves the purpose of procreation, such instrumentality is a uniquely Modern (and postmodern) anxiety.
I am a firm believer that evolutionary biology got it wrong when we thought that everything has to be purpose-driven. A very capitalist projection indeed!
The animal ethologist and play expert Gordon Burghardt suggests that we and other animals play because it helps us be the best versions of us (also evolutionarily). Creativity is sparked through contexts allowing safety around making mistakes, and finding our boundaries, individually and collectively. Play helps us practice for ‘real life’ situations, but without the high stakes. It helps us hone our abilities, and to laugh when we get it right as well as when we get it wrong.
Play is a form of teasing, drawing each other out of our huffy attachments and our numb barriers. It allows us to recursively iterate on grooved habits to create more wiggle room for new ways of responding to similar stimuli. And play is fun because it combines our competitive aspects through a cooperative container. It allows us to be both in our bodies, emotions, and neocortex simultaneously, without having top-down control by any one locus. It gets us out of limbic capitalism by reallocating dopamine resources in novel ways. And that novelty, that playing with our edge, releases all sorts of hormones that we normally don’t have access to: reducing inflammation, giving us a change of state that we typically don’t have access to.
Whether a board game in which people get overly excited by taking it seriously (but not too seriously), a foot or cycle race, or witty repartee with a good friend, these forms of play, and infinite others (and especially physical interactions like playing music or dancing), are intrinsically fun — we don’t do them in order to achieve something else. We do them because they are ends unto themselves.
To ask why fun is fun is like a Zen koan: there is no answer because the action is empty in the sense that no response can fill it. It is intrinsic rather than instrumental. Fun is about process, not result. The feeling of fun provides meaning — knowing for a moment that this joyful sensation is enough to keep on living and working towards our values and ideals, even when we live in a broken society that attempts to capture fun and turn it into entertainment.
Burghardt, G. M. (2005). The Genesis of Animal Play: Testing the Limits. MIT Press.
Burghardt, G. M. (2009). Surplus resource theory. In R. P. Carlisle & J. G. Golson (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Play in Today’s Society (pp. 689–690). Sage Publications.