Reading Response #6 

to Artful Design • Chapter 6

Anna Gruzas

Due 11/03/2024

Music 256A / CS476a, Stanford University

Reading Response: The Value of Playing

From this week's reading, I'd like to respond to a specific part of Artful Design Chapter 6: Principle 6.1: “Play is what we do when we are free; play is what we do to be free.”  

I found this chapter on gaming and our lecture last week to be very enlightening and comforting. I grew up playing video games and still love playing them today, but I have never really taken time to consider why I like playing them, or why I like the games that I do. I’ve realized through this chapter and past lecture that the reason I like playing them is because it allows me to work on something that has no implication to my own life, and they help me feel a little bit out of my own body for a while. Video games are what I go to when I need a break and if I have free time, I ideally spend it playing them because they take me away from my real life better than anything else. Not that my real life is horrible or needs escaping necessarily, but games help me to escape my thoughts and rumination over my stress-inducing activities unlike other things that I do enjoy. I become so immersed in whatever I’m playing that I am able to forget completely about stress or anxiety outside of my in-game achievements. I think that I am drawn to very immersive games in particular because they allow me to free myself from my own thoughts.

Something I struggle with is feeling guilty about how much I “play,” but this chapter was a great reminder of the value it has in my life. Whether it be playing games or playing my instrument, I feel a sense of guilt that I’m not doing something more productive with my time. Maybe I have been trained to feel that games are a waste of time, but I generally struggle to allow myself to do things that have no external purpose. This also applies to playing my instrument. When my instrument was my degree, it felt productive to practice because it was furthering me in my performance ability. But now that I’m not doing a performance degree I feel bad about spending time playing my instrument because I feel like I should be reading papers for work, or writing emails, or doing homework, or applying to internships. On top of that, a main reason why I stopped pursuing performance as a career is because I couldn’t help but feel selfish for doing something as a career that didn’t really provide much to anyone but myself. Of course I think that music has “intrinsic worth,” as mentioned in Principle 6.1, but I felt that pursuing it as a career was a selfish endeavor because I know I am equally capable of doing something that will be more lucrative (which helps me, my family, my partner, etc), and hopefully allow me to help other people more directly. I found this chapter very healing for my perspective on my own gaming and my music-making. Play is not a waste of time, and does contribute value to my own life and even other people's lives.