So, I’m really bad at Go. Like, absolutely garbage at playing it. Which is to say, I know how to play better than most people. But compared to people who actively play, my style is absolutely remedial. I make sloppy shapes, I have no sense of pacing, and I make plays that give up initiative on the reg. And, oddly enough, I love losing. Love it. I’ve played 9-stone handicap games against people waaaay above my level and had my score absolutely dwarfed in comparison to the other player. And I had fun.

Huizinga writes that “The spirit of the professional is no longer the true play-spirit; it is lacking in spontaneity and carelessness. This affects the amateur too, who begins to suffer from an inferiority complex” (197). I don’t know if I agree with that. I look back at the unorthodox early-game of the late Go Seigen and see an immense playfulness in his style—his brash willingness to work against convention kicked off an entire movement of crazy opening moves later dubbed the Shin Fuseki (“new opening”) Era. Outside of board games, I think of Magic Johnson, whose finesse on the court Sicart describes as “Dark play,” or “a playful approach to play situations” (Play Matters 31). Perhaps these players are outliers in professional games, but I absolutely see room for playfulness in competitive sport.

Which brings me back to the amateur, to losing against a skillful opponent. I’ve played Go against people twenty years my senior, who have been playing for decades, and had them wipe the floor with me, even with a significant handicap in my favor. But I also never went into those games expecting to win; I went in expecting to learn, to play my best game. The elegance of their moves showed me the ugliness in my own and gave me hints as to how I should improve. And my lack of experience allowed me to play unorthodox moves that would surprise and confuse the more experienced player. In playing sub-optimally, there were moments where I was able to think around all of the built-up heuristics and strategies that the more experienced player was used to, and those moments of brief, fleeting, (and usually fairly insignificant) triumph salved the sting of losing some.

Play is all in how you approach the game, and the standardization/professionalization of competitive sports does not necessarily take that away.