Inside the play-ground an absolute and particular order reigns. Here we come across another, very positive feature of play: it creates order, is order. Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary, a limited perfection. Play demands order absolute and supreme. The least deviation from it ‘spoils the game’, robs it of its character, and makes it worthless. The profound affinity between play and order is perhaps the reason why play, as we noted in passing, seems to lie to such a large extent in the field of aesthetics. Play has a tendency to be beautiful. It may be that this aesthetic factor is identical with the impulse to create orderly form, which animates play in all its aspects.
…..Though play as such is outside the range of good and bad, the element of tension imparts to it a certain ethical value in so far as it means a testing of the player’s prowess: one’s courage, tenacity, resources, and last but not least, one’s spiritual powers – one’s ‘fairness’; because, despite one’s ardent desire to win, one must still stick to the rules of the game.
….In the world of high seriousness, too the cheat and hypocrite have always had an easier time of it than the spoil-sports, here called apostates, heretics, innovators, prophets, conscientious objectors, etc. It sometimes happens however, that the spoil-sports in their turn make a new community with rules of its own…..indeed heretics of all kinds are of a highly associative if not sociable disposition, and a certain element of play is prominent in all their doings.