Tag: Play

Clown School Break Day 5: On Play and Depression

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In which Our Hero muses on the interaction of these forces.

The question came up at dinner:
What’s the relationship between play and depression?
Is play the antidote? Is the lack of play the cause? Or are they simply two dancers who keep stepping on each other’s toes?

My take:

  • I love Play. Play is enlivening and delightful and deeply satisfying.
  • Play is a sign of a healthy environment: one that nurtures the growth and expression of its members.
  • Some environments don’t require play or can’t support it, especially high-stress or high-stakes ones in intense moments.
  • If you lack play long enough, you will feel like crap.
  • If you can’t play with people, you won’t feel good around those people.

Blockers to play:

  • Lack of safety. If you can’t experiment or express, you shrink. The body contracts. The options narrow. The world gets small.

I often think of depression as a kind of flatness. A greying-out of inner movement. And a lot of what prevents play, at least in my own experience, is fear/anxiety. So the loop becomes:
fear/anxiety → no play → depression.
It’s not the only description of the loop, but it’s a fair one.

Another view:

  • Maybe depression is fundamentally the lack of experienced pleasure.
  • If that’s true, then you can find pleasure through play. But also through other avenues, including observation and appreciation.
  • In that framing, play is one antidote, but not the only one. (And it may not be the proper antidote for a specific situation, nor a permanent fix.)

Still, I think social play is necessary for social satisfaction.
It’s a treadmill you have to keep running on—just enough—for the system to stay stable.
Stop for too long, and you get flung off the end, cascading into a wall of lonesomeness. Start running again, and the world comes back into color.

However, you can’t force play. You can only create the context for it to naturally emerge.
Even if you’re a player?
Even if you’re the game.

Clown School Day 18: You Must Play the Game

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In which Our Hero misquotes Shakespeare.

“This above all: to thine own game be true.” —Hamlet, Act 1 Scene 3.

It’s very easy to forget the game.

But the game is the most important thing.

Some performance is only game. Tennis, for instance, is only game: and look how much money that earns.

The Rehearsal

My scene partner and I rehearsed today. We lacked pleasure because we had forgotten the game.

The original game was simple: I make my partner lick a thing. Like when children find a bug and dare each other to eat it.

It wasn’t fun anymore. We knew it was coming. We knew he would do it. There was no tension, no conflict.

So we changed it.

Now, we begin with a eulogy for a piece of the space: “We are gathered here today to say goodbye to the power outlet.”

Then we play rock-paper-scissors.

The loser, as a ritual of farewell, must lick it.

As the scene escalates, so do the lickables. The floor. The bottom of a shoe. The teacher.

We didn’t have a game. Now we have a game.

The game? Rock-paper-scissors.

But with stakes!

The Farce

In Improv class, I realized the rule applies to everything.

We played a farce: a train compartment. One person enters, perfectly normal except for one grotesque tic. They repeat it. Then a second person enters, takes pleasure from that game, and — after a long time enjoying their tic (longer than you think) — adds their own tic, heightening the first. Then a third person. Then a fourth.

The game is simple: take the game from the person before you, heighten it through your play, and pass it on.

Simple is nice.

Simple is hard.

You have to feel the scene. Is it falling down? Are you talking over the game with “train compartment” nonsense? Are you heightening or dominating or smothering?

When everyone played the game, the farce appeared by itself.

When someone forgot, everything froze.

The game makes the show. Always has. Always will.

The Handstand

This morning, I flipped upside-down.

My first handstand (wall-assisted), then onto a peer’s back, who rolled me forward, turning us both into a ball.

A new game: gravity as partner.

I’d forgotten the joy of inversion.

The Father

My father arrived in Étampes today. He wants more than anything to see a class.

I’d love to have him: to share my play space. The school forbids it.

No visitors, no cameras, no phones. We even sign a “no recording” oath, like monks taking vows.

Why so strict?

Because clowning is vulnerable.

I’ve seen people bare grief. I’ve seen them make absolute fools of themselves (and not the good kind).

Once, a student scraped his false teeth along the floor before popping them back in. The room gasped. Disgust and horror.

Once, I yelled at the teacher. Their instruction felt like trash; maybe provoking me was the point.

This isn’t for YouTube. This is for us.

The school protects its game.

It keeps the outside world out, so the play inside can live.

The Lesson

The game is everything: the lick, the tic, the flip, the secret room.

When you forget the game, everything dies.

When you play it, life appears.

Protect the space so you can play the game.

Then find the game.

Release all else.

Play the game.

And when you lose it, start again.

That’s what makes it a play.

Clown School Day 9: Clown Fight!!!

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In which Our Hero proves he’s got rubber balls

Today I pissed off a clown.

It’s better to piss off a clown than to be pissed on by a clown.

We were playing 9-square. It’s like 4-square, but with 9 squares and more chaos.

I was playing legally. The rules say you can’t block another player, but you can wander outside your square. I was the King—the occupant of the center square—but I spent the whole game standing off to the side. Because: strategy.

The owner of that square complained.

The ref said my move was legal.

The owner complained again.

The ref asked me to move.

I moved.

Then I taunted the square’s owner.

The owner complained a third time.

The next ball that came to me…

I smacked it as hard as I could at her feet.

She was pissed. The crowd gasped. She appealed to the ref, who shrugged, as if to say: He played the game hard. What do you want me to do about it?

She stormed off. Later, I caught her venting to another player, confirmed later as badmouthing: “Can you believe that?”

Here’s what I learned:

  1. When I feel someone’s playing shenanigans, I get righteously pissed. When I get pissed, I get determined. And when I get determined, watch out.
  2. My classmates will now play differently with me.
    1. The fun-first crowd will avoid my wrath.
    2. The competitive ones will know I don’t back down.
  3. I may have just become the enforcer of clown school. Neither good nor bad—just a role.

It’s no coincidence that the person I clashed with was the second-best at the game. Competitive people find each other. And when they do, sparks fly.

I respect her. She plays hard. She got the ref on her side, a valid tactic. Later I overheard her admit she’d been feeling a bit touchy today. So maybe we both just hit the limit of our light play energy.

And she got me back. In the final round, she served me a tiny, dinky little ball: barely legal, perfectly placed. I was out. No one else noticed.

Well played. Respect.

(Though I’ve since heard others reacted to her venting with a kind of “Wait, what’s she mad about?” bemusement… so maybe the last laugh is still up for grabs.)

—

But what is this about, really?

Is this a story about clowning? About performance? About theater?

Maybe.

In a way, 9-Square is theater: it’s a miniature social hierarchy. The King in the middle. The peasants below. Everyone clawing their way upward by knocking someone else down. Game of Thrones played with rubber balls.

In singles, you play for survival and glory.

In doubles, it becomes a romance—your fate tied to your partner’s. You win not through aggression but through sync, trust, and conservatism.

It’s a lesson in status, alliance, and timing.

And like all good clown work, it’s about how you handle the fall.

—

As for my reputation: some classmates already dodge competing against me. Fair. For me, winning is part of fun, but the real goal is shared joy. I just happen to find joy in playing hard. Someone has to be clown game king: might as well be me.

Diveball: Your Next Favorite Game

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Today, only dozens of people in the world know how to play this game. In 5 years, it will be massively popular (on the order of 100k or 1M+ players). I’m going to popularize it. I’m publishing this post in part to spread it wide and in part to plant my flag before it becomes huge.

How to play is linked here. (I’ll update that document as I iterate on the particularities of the rules. The basic structure, however, is solid.) I’ve also pasted the current version of the rules below:

Diveball

Materials:

  • 1 pool table
  • 1 cue ball (that’s the white one)
  • 1 7 ball

Setup: 

  • Each of the 4 players stands at a corner. 
    • Players are on a team with the person directly across from them (i.e. the player with whom they share a long side). 

Definitions: 

  • The 7 ball is “dead” if it stops moving. 
  • The 7 ball is “scored” if it enters one of the corner pockets. 
  • Each player has a “kitchen”, which is the one-forth of the table closest to them. The boundary of the kitchen (the “kitchen line”) is formed by connecting the second dots on the side of the table. (Players who share an end will share both a kitchen and a kitchen line.) 
  • A team has “possession” when it is their turn to play. 
  • A player performs a “shot” when they touch and/or release the cue ball such that it hits the 7 ball. 
  • A player performs a “pass” when they transfer the cue ball to their partner (without the cue ball touching the 7 ball). 

Play: 

  • A team wins a point in one of three ways: 
    1. Making the 7 ball dead during their opponents’ possession
    2. Scoring the 7 ball (note: scored only applies to a corner pocket). 
    3. Their opponents commit a foul. 
  • “Possession” works like this: 
    1. The serving team begins with possession. 
    2. A team passes possession to their opponents by touching the cue ball and then the cue ball touching the 7 ball. 
  • Serving works like this: 
    1. Set up for a serve by placing the 7 ball in the middle of the kitchen line opposite the server. 
    2. A legal serve is one where the cue ball hits the 7 ball, then the 7 ball hits the back wall before it stops, goes into a pocket, or hits a side wall. 
    3. A server has three attempts at a legal serve. 
      1. If they fail, the opposing team receives a point and the 
  • Note: the 7 ball is not scored if it enters one of the side pockets. Instead, if this happens, no teams score any points and the player who hit it into the side pocket chooses the next server. (They may choose any of the 4 players.)  

Illegal actions (i.e. “fouls”): 

  1. Touching the 7 ball. 
  2. Touching the cue ball when it is not your possession. 
  3. Touching the cue ball while it touches the 7 ball. 
  4. “Playing from the side” – i.e. failing to have both feet behind the horizontal line that determines the end of the table when making a shot. 
  5. “Playing in the air” – i.e. failing to have at least one foot on the ground when releasing the cue ball in a shot that prompts the cue ball to hit the 7 ball. 
  6. The cue ball contacts the 7 ball while any part of the 7 ball is in the releasing player’s Kitchen. 
    • To avoid violating this kitchen rule, you should pass the cue ball to your partner when needed. 

A game works like this: 

  • Randomize the first server. 
    • After each point, the partner of the player who last legally transferred possession serves the next point. 

A match works like this: 

  • Play “best two out of three” games (i.e. the first team to win two games wins the match).

Clarifications: 

  • If the cue ball goes in any pocket, the point continues. Whichever team has possession had better fish it out fast! 
  • If the 7 ball jumps off the table, award no points and serve afresh. 
  • The 7 ball is only scored in the corner pockets. If it’s hit into a side pocket, no points are scored and the player who hit it into that pocket chooses the next server. 
  • The 7 ball is only deemed to have “stopped moving” when it is no longer rolling nor spinning AND the cue ball is stopped or touched by a possessing player or touches a wall. 
    • Therefore, the balls do not have to collide before the 7 stops moving; a team need only release the cue ball before the 7 ball stops moving, so long as the cue ball hits the 7 ball directly thereafter.