Games and Freedom

First over Christmas and then during vacation last week, Helena had a lot of time to play with her cousins, especially Luidi (who just turned five) and Henrique (who is almost 4).  It's been interesting to watch their games, because they seem to show something important about human freedom.

Most of the time, Helena has one or two games she likes to play with her toys.  She likes to put them in her mouth, she likes to play peek-a-boo, and she likes to play ball... but a four or five year old knows a much greater range of games.

Maybe an example will help me to explain: Over Christmas, Luidi brought his cars from the movie Cars over to grandma's house, and Helena wanted to play with them with her mouth, and then by throwing them onto the ground (another favorite game).  Luidi, an immensely patient little boy, sat down next to her on the ground and said, "What we do is this:" and he pushed the car along the tiles and said "zoom, zoom."  Helena looked at him strangely, as if to say, "why aren't you putting the cars in your mouth?"

"The cars can talk, too," Luidi went on, and then acted out a scene between Lightning McQueen and the Tow-truck, Tow-Mater.  Helena found the play acting fascinating, and took the other cars out of her mouth long enough to watch.

Whether we can credit Luidi or just the normal process of development, over the last month and a half, Helena now pushes her little truck across the floor and imitates a kind of conversation between her finger-puppets (especially the monkey, toucan, and giraffe, her favorites) before putting them into her mouth in order to scratch her teething gums.  It seems that Luidi's lesson opened up new possibilities for Helena's world, new ways to interact with the objects in it.

A second event last week, when we stopped by Luidi's parents' house for the little boy's birthday, took the lesson to a new level.  Luidi and a couple of his friends were playing with some interlocking construction pieces, and Helena sat in the middle of them, picking up one thing and then another.  Several of the other little boys took the pieces from around Helena to build their own things, but Luidi stopped them, and put half a dozen pieces around her: "These are Helena's," he told his friends.

Games follow rules, and within the game, we have relatively limited freedom: you can't pick up a soccer ball and carry it.  But an even greater limit on our freedom, I think, is that we allow ourselves to get stuck in one game: an adolescent who can only argue with his parents, and doesn't know another way to relate.  The businessman who knows all the rules of the game in his business (including the rules about when he can get away with breaking the rules), but never steps out of that game to ask if what he is doing is right. The girl who thinks that the rules of fashion are obligatory all the time.  These are social games, rather like Wittgenstein's language games.

Luidi taught two important lessons to Helena: first, that she could choose what game to play with her toys.  And second, that not all games are selfish and competitive: games can also be about helping others and making them happy.  And as Helena learns these lessons, more options are open to her.  She becomes a little more free.