The Walrus always packs its Walrus Talks events with a varied group of speakers, from poets to activists to “recovering politicians,” but Wednesday night’s group was seemingly a bit more uniform. Several former Olympians spoke, for example.
But that didn’t mean it was nine straight speakers talking about more or less the same thing. Play certainly brings to mind the thing kids do, or perhaps sports. And while many aspects of sports — from cheating to breaking new ground to sheer costs — were plentiful, there were some surprises in store.
As in past talks, the first speaker of the night set the parameters for discussion. University of Toronto’s Mark Kingwell spoke of “The Art of Play” and defined the word of the evening in its relation to time. He says there are two types of time, based on the Greek words chronos and kairos. The former is something regimented, measured; the type of time we experience every day. The latter means “eruption,” and a time out of time.
He then detailed types of play with three types of time. Sports measured in the chronos definition of time are myriad — hockey, soccer, football, basketball, to name a few. Baseball is what Kingwell called “quasi-infinite,” in that it can theoretically go on forever (though no baseball game has gone on forever yet). And finally, he described the “infinite” game of marbles, quoting from J.D. Salinger’s Seymour: An Introduction.
Bruce Kidd, a former Olympian, asked “Is sports still play?” and it was a tough question to consider after his talk. He argued that sports have become more regimented, and that play is now synonymous to conformity and work. Athletes are now training three times more than their counterparts a generation ago, and participation in school sports is plummeting because kids are unhappy with their first exposures to the world of athletics. He ended with some suggestions on what can make sport better, namely removing parents from the equation and letting kids have fun.
Former hockey player and Member of Parliament Ken Dryden’s talk was along similar lines. He talked of his short season playing hockey in Toronto and the little training and practice he did around it. Then he went into the new reality: to play at the AAA level of hockey in Red Deer will cost $19,900 in 2015. “When more is possible, more is hard to resist,” Dryden said, referring to the growing number of coaches and experts aspiring athletes are required to consult now.
Marnie McBean, a former Olympic rower, talked of trying to beat the German Olympic team in Barcelona, how she focused on conditioning, tactics and efficiency. But she quickly realized, after seeing the Ukraine team pull ahead of them in one race, that her team was missing something important: having fun. Her argument is that expectation takes the fun out of play — if you play with the expectation of winning, that’s all one can think about.
That elusive idea of fun also applied to Mary Spencer, a boxer who opened her talk explaining that she became interested in boxing at age 10 but didn’t get into the ring until seven years later, simply because her father believed that “girls don’t box.” As she rose through the ranks, winning national and world championships, she eventually hit the ceiling because at the time, women didn’t box in the Olympics. For the first time, she found herself boxing for the fun of it.
Dick Pound of the International Olympic Committee spoke on the dark side of play: cheating. Detailing controversies about the 2002 Olympic games bid and the same year’s figure-skating scandal, he argued that cheating is always deliberate and ruins the art of sport for everyone.
On a very different note, Pico Iyer told a wonderfully funny story about his life in Japan, where he found himself in an informal table tennis league and learned a lot about the country’s attitude towards sport simply by continuing to play with them. By the end, he had become one of the locals.
Jason Lewis took play into the world of video games — specifically, the way Aboriginal people are represented in them. He used the film Avatar as a prime example of how Aboriginals are portrayed on film — hopelessly backward and in need of a white guy to “become one of them” and save them. He asked several Aboriginal artists to envision futures with their cultures represented, a few of which can be seen below.
Lynn Hughes also talked games, but focused on independent video games, which are increasingly exploring unheard-of realms in the industry. One such game is called Johann Sebastian Joust by Die Gute Fabrik, a non-violent jousting game that has players protecting their wands from being jostled. At the other end of the spectrum is Minority, a 3D game based around the developer’s experience with his alcoholic father.
Play is common throughout the human and animal worlds, and the Walrus Talks showed that we could perhaps all play a little better.
