GAMES AND AMUSEMENTS

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 340, 28 April 1928, Page 22

GAMES AND AMUSEMENTS

WHY PLAY IS SERIOUS NOT ENOUGH LAUGHTER A French civil tribunal recently decided that lawn tennis was not “an amusement.” Lawn tennis was adjudged to be “an excellent preparation for physical education and military service, and as maintaining and improving the physical and moral health of the race.” To watch the faces of the players j and of the spectators will confirm the view that games are not an amusement at all. They are not merry. Yet some of the old-fash-ioned pedants tell us that games are frivolous, and are a mere supplement to “serious education,” writes Eustace Miles, the famous ex-athlete and physical eulturist, in an English newspaper.

A well-known American says: “Sports are useless —if a person needs exercise he will do something useful in itself.” As if fttness through healthy interest, movement in the open air, social life (which tends to break down class and other barriers), the training in courtesy, pluck, self-control and other factors in character-building, were not something useful in themselves. It is interesting to go through most of the thing« that most people do during the day, and ask whether they are really of greater value, whether they are really more useful, than the best games. Games are certainly a change, though sometimes people transfer to them the strenuous keenness of business life. I noticed this in America, when many of the big business men of New York come back in the evening to Tuxedo and played hard at some form of ball game. But, as to easy and carefree recreation, certainly no! Football, lawn tennis, cricket athletic sports, golf—at any of these forms of sport watch the faces of the players and the faces of the crowd. The game of life is not nearly so engrossingly serious!

Or take less active games like bowls, billiards or bridge: could anyone call them amusing? I mean amusing with such amusement as would be given by George Robey on the music-hall stage, or on the screen by Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd or Larry Semon. The fact is that, when we are doing things ourselves, we are apt to be grim and strenuous, and we may be infected with a feeling of grimness and seriousness when, watching a game of football, we see others doing things themselves seriously and strenuously Will games ever be amusements? Not these game, I think. They have come to stay as our most earnest forms of work. And it might be worse. Certain theorists have condemned games and sports as "unproductive” and "uncreative,” and even as “destructive.” They are indeed destructive—they tend to destroy, not property, but ill-feeling and dangerous pent-up energy. They provide release for it. But they are—or should be — also creative, not of mirth, but of health and of good will and mutual understanding. Games, as we usually apply the term, are not amusements. We need to supplement them with plenty of laughter.