Sports play a giant role in contemporary society worldwide. But few of us pause to think about the larger questions of money, politics, race, sex, culture, and commercialization that surround sports everywhere. This course draws on the tools of anthropology, sociology, history, and other disciplines to give you new perspectives on the games we watch and play. It's the new and improved version of Professor Orin Starn's original "Sports and Society" for Coursera, which drew more than 40,000 students. We will focus on both popular sports like soccer (or “football,” as anyone outside America calls it), basketball, and baseball, and also lesser-known ones like mountain-climbing and fishing. You will never watch or think about sports in the same way again.
Why Do We Like to Play? Part 1
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Do curso por Duke University
Sports and Society
305 classificações
Na lição
Getting Started! Games, Play, and Sports
Conheça os instrutores
Orin StarnProfessor
Cultural Anthropology
[MUSIC]
I want to think with you a bit more today about play and the nature of play.
As Johan Huizinga said, play is essential to our very nature as a species.
As Rodger said,
play can be divided up into these different types that we've talked about.
But this raises a question of how do we define play in the first place?
I think scholars of play and
sports have generally tended to agree that there are three things that define play,
as opposed to work, as opposed to the rest of our lives.
A first thing is that play is free.
It's something that we choose to do.
We have to go to work if we don't wanna starve.
There are certain, we have to go to that family dinner if we don't
want our mom to be angry, and so forth and so on.
But play tiddlywinks, golf, badminton, chess,
whatever is something that we freely choose to do of our own will.
It's not an obligation, or at least it shouldn't be, it's something we wanna do.
So play is free, play is also separate.
It's separate from everyday life.
It's separate both because it's played in a particular space that's not the normal
space of everyday routine and also because it obeys it's own rules.
A soccer game is played on a soccer field.
A basketball game is played on a basketball court.
A chess game on a chess board.
And even children's games, when they're playing,
they're playing in these imaginary places that are separate and
kids imagine to be cut off from everyday life.
The doctor's office or the schoolroom or whatever the kids are pretending to play.
Play takes place in these separate spaces from the world of
work and of the everyday.
Play is also separate because it obeys different
rules from the rules that we're normally expected to follow.
For example, if I'm playing rugby, I can run into you and knock
you on your butt if, I'm a little old for that but maybe I could have 20 years ago.
If I do that in everyday life, I see someone, I see you out on the street and
I run and smash and knock you over, I'm going to go to jail for assault.
So the rules, what you can do,
what you can't do, are also different when you're playing.
So, play is free, play takes place in a separate space, and
play is also uncertain by its very nature.
There's certain things in this world of ours that are sure,
the sun will likely rise tomorrow, death and taxes and
some other things that just always seem to happen.
But games are by their very nature
things that don't have a resolution that we know in advance.
Yes!
That you know world class soccer team is gonna beat that
lesser soccer team 99 out of 100 times but maybe once, there'll be that upset.
In general, we play games because we're not absolutely certain who the winner is.
That's why we play them, to find out who the winner will be and who the loser.
So play is free, it's freely chosen,
it happens in a separate place and it's uncertain.
But this leaves still open the question of, why?
Why is it that we make this choice to play?
The answers to this question of why are really quite complicated when you start to
think about it.
And the reasons why people play can often be quite different.
It may be, and often is, that we play for release and
relaxation from the humdrum routines of every day life.
It can also be in team games the sense of cooperation,
the pleasure that comes from working with other people to try to win a competition.
And, also emphasized that the particular pleasures for particular
different kinds of games are different, depending on what that particular game is.
For example, mountain climbing.
The struggle to get to the peak, and the sense of accomplishment of being on
top of the world as against say, tennis, where maybe the pleasure is
getting your opponent moving, the great serve, the overhead smash.
Or the pleasures associated with a card game like poker.
Using your mind, out thinking your opponents, bluffing,
maybe winning some money in the process.
So the pleasures attached to different games are different
depending on the sport, or the game.
What I wanna talk about in the second part of this lecture is the theory about why we
we like to play of one particular original social thinker and that's Sigmund Freud.
I'll see you for the second part of the lecture.
[MUSIC]
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