ABSTRACT
The conclusion argues that what plays us and makes us players is rooted in human existence as a poetic being. The human being plays more than normally expected, and not only with balls, drums, dices, masks, and their own body, not only with what we call “art”: music, song, poetry, pictorial, and sculptural creation, decoration of the body.… But the human plays also with language, with words and intonations, and people are often singing their words and accompany them by playing tunes. Social relations are in a high degree social (role)play. These reflections withdraw from all attempts to imprison play in a system, in a defined structure of rules and decisions, plans and evaluations, which certain philosophers of game have tried. There is nothing such as “the Play,” “the Game,” “the Culture,” but the phenomena come forward in plural, in diversity. And there is good reason to avoid a monolithic phenomenology, where all is play. Humans play in a multiplicity of play cultures. In this respect, there is no “normal” human play, but either Danish or Tibetan, or if both than probably not Russian, Libyan, Navajo, and Rwandan.… If we in a Chinese “book of sport” see people watching the moon, watching flowers, watching lanterns, and watching birds, the Western ethnocentricity is challenged. This does not mean that all is play. There is a lot of non-play in human life. But we do not find any neat line separating the spheres. The study of play delivers rather a critical perspective: being about contradictions and conflicts.
