January 2026 – The Necessity of Play in Dark Times

I’ve been recently thinking a lot about play. Last year I put out a broadcast to my professional email lists and collected a small group of psychotherapists interested in experimenting with role-playing games as applied to psychotherapy (and group process). This was engendered by a surge of creative and playful energy released by finishing a very not-playful PhD dissertation several years ago. It might seem from the outside like this would be a diversion or distraction from the serious endeavor of the healer, but what I found confirmed what I learned as a young activist in the 1990s and from my work treating depression: play is one of the most serious things we can do.

The following article attempts to articulate that. It’s a big subject, so this is not a treatise or manifesto, but rather an attempt to reflect and comment on the psychological realities of living in authoritarian regimes, one’s own depression being one of them. May it be useful as inspiration and validation to figure out how to weave play both into one’s external and internal revolutions, to fighting with serious play and playful seriousness, for what is the through-line of goodness that defines this collective human life.

The Necessity of Play in Dark Times

I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy [who told Emma Goldman that it’s indecorous to dance]. I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.” Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world—prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal. (Living My Life, Emma Goldman, 1933; this has typically been paraphrased as, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution!”)

Play has the following relationship to both clinical depression and authoritarianism: both attempt to crush it. Both say that the world is concrete, obvious, “just what it is,” and supposedly what the world is is dark. Authoritarianism may be dressed up in bootjacked formalism, violent power, absurdist nihilism, clownish absurdism, or (per Bertram Gross’s 1980 book) a kind of “friendly fascism,” but the structure and import of both is the same: you have no power, the world is out of your influence, and you need to lay down, stop playing, and comply. The Borg in Star Trek captures this in their society’s catch phrase, “Resistance is futile.” That is what depression and authoritarianism both tell us, and that is why play is so important at psychological and political times like these. Play refuses to take futility and powerlessness as defining of reality, which is why authoritarian societies regulate play and coopt it into state-approved forms, forms that do not allow free experimentation and imagination. This is also why such a society’s art is so bad.

Gray (2013) gives this definition of play:

[First,] play [is] self-chosen and self-directed. Players choose freely whether or not to play, make and change the rules as they go along, and are always free to quit. Second, play is intrinsically motivated; that is, it is done for its own sake…Third, play is guided by mental rules (which provide structure to the activity), but the rules always leave room for creativity. Fourth, play is imaginative; that is, it is seen by the players as in some sense not real, separate from the serious world. And last, play is conducted in an alert, active, but relatively unstressed frame of mind. (p. 274)

Both depression and authoritarianism are rigid, undemocratic structures; reality is not the result of a play of ideas and dialogue between equal subjects (people), but is a given thing that the individual is expected to knuckle under and adopt. Authoritarianism enacts this essentially through a combination of fear and propaganda, and depression through shutting down (mind, emotion, body, and relationships) the belief and feeling that anything but bleakness and powerless is possible. The assertion of futility (see here) is the great hatchet man of both.

The conflict that is fought out in authoritarian times is at multiple levels, and in multiple domains (the courts, schools, values/morals, etc.), with a very potent level being the psychological and ontological (i.e., what is considered most true about reality). There is typically not an authoritarian force that is strong enough in and of itself to dominate a population (or psyche) without its buy-in, and that requires that the psyche or psyches (populace) substantially believe that the world which is proffered is actually real. The tenets of, “your survival depends on the authority figure(s),” “there is no imaginable world better than this,” “you have no power/you cannot resist,” are core to authoritarian dogmas (depression or social) because they are statements of base reality that then determine what is possible, even thinkable.

But it’s much harder to control psyches that see through the game of control that the authoritarians are playing; raw and destructive force is, of course, one of the tools of power, but the oppressed’s belief in their own power is an enormous counterforce to control. Governments with such people ultimately topple.

George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), that paragon of the analysis of authoritarian technique, writes about the psychology that supports the regime. As you read it, substitute “sex” for “play” and you’ll get a sense of what I’m on about here:

When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?

This is why fear is important for authoritarians to control, because it burns energy and limits attention (and therefore worldview) to the threat and limits one’s access to one’s own joy. To reclaim this access is an act of resistance that is vital to fuel the rejection of these controlling systems. When a human being is not afraid, they play, something obvious in children. Yes, play itself is not sufficient for a revolution, but it sure helps, giving some of the energy and motivation to fight.

What is adaptive about play, therefore, may be not only the skills that are a part of it but also the willful belief in acting out one’s own capacity for the future. The opposite of play, in these terms, is not a present reality or work, it is vacillation, or worse, it is depression. To play is to act out and be willful, as if one is assured of one’s prospects. A weakness of many of the self-oriented play theories is that they often sound too much like vain consumerism instead of being about the more passionate and willful character of human play, which involves a willingness, even if a fantasy, to believe in the play venture itself. (The Ambiguity of Play, Sutton-Smith, 2009)

When I was in my early 20s, at the start of the first Gulf War, I was involved in street activism with a group of young activists who knew, both intuitively and through study, the potency of play. All of our marches and events had strong elements of play, from rowdy dancing and music, to street theater and satire. Did we stop the war? Of course not, but the effects of that time have shaped in large ways all of the participants’ lives, and rippled out into different endeavors and relationships throughout our adulthoods. We saw that the emperor had no clothes, and felt the power of separating our minds from the authoritarian mindset, either as oppressor or oppressed. We learned that our play and comradery could be autonomous of the exertions and exhortations of power.

Play is not trivial, and is not an extra in times like these, nor in the challenge of not just managing but decomposing depression. My recent experimentations with the emerging sub-field of using tabletop role playing games (yes, like Dungeons & Dragons) for therapeutic applications have been a staggering reassertion of these political lessons I garnered as a young man. As Huizinga (the father of modern game studies) puts it:

The contrast between play and seriousness is always fluid. The inferiority of play is continually being offset by the corresponding superiority of its seriousness. Play turns to seriousness and seriousness to play. Play may rise to heights of beauty and sublimity that leave seriousness far beneath. (Homo Ludens, 1944)

The reclaiming of beauty, of goodness, from how exterior and interior authoritarian figures frame that goodness is essential to both surviving and to being an agent of change and advocate for goodness, for the love, community, and creativity that humans continually reorient towards regardless of the proximate disruptions. Play taps us into a primary source of that beauty, ungoverned and uncontrolled by forces outside ourselves.

So, for all of these reasons, at the social change level we must play to be effective agents of change. That play can look very serious, and is, but it can also look anarchic and satirical, and at best is paradoxically both. But at root, it is an oppositional play, not cooperation with the logic of what needs to change.

However, at the personal level (especially with depression, that arbiter of the “given darkness”), play and change looks different. The reason for this is that the internal authoritarian is actually of a different nature than the external, in that its intention is, from its point of view, our wellbeing and survival. From the Internal Family Systems view, it is a “protector” who is using brutal means to keep us from a world viewed as futile and overwhelming (see here for a full treatment of IFS). This harsh ruler is actually amenable to dialogue, and play contributes to that flexibility and rough respect that’s necessary to shift it to an ally, in a way that our attempts at domination of that protector simply do not.

But that internal truth is not the same as in external reality. Yes, the external authoritarian always tells a story of care for the populace (or the approved segment thereof), but such a story is merely propaganda. Unlike the psyche’s protector, society’s authoritarians feign care to gain power, and are not amenable to dialogue. As has been said, “You can’t negotiate with Nazis,” which means that play in the social domain is not to open up human social responses inside the authoritarians, but to demonstrate to everyone else the edges of power, to push against authority’s inflexibilities, and to infect others with the spirit of rebellious play.

I’ll make some comments next month about how to cultivate serious play, but let’s end with the following thought: in dark times, inner and outer, play is not simply a distraction, not a piffle and diversion, but a fundamental reproducer and reminder of what it is in the human spirit that is worth fighting for. While depression is well-meaning but social authoritarianism is not, both need to be confronted with spirits which are serious in their refusal of external authorities to assert and then demand adoption of their convenient dogmas. Those spirits are, like Emma Goldman, fundamentally committed to change not simply as swapping regimes, but as acts of creativity, of radical play.