blog (January, 2007)
game vs. play
A variation of it's the journey, not the destination:
Games are structured by rigid boundaries... You win, and, surrounded by adulators, you live to enter the contest on another day. You lose, and you lose alone; you are out of the tournament; you might as well be dead. If you continue winning, you are given virtual immortality status. You have been able to do a slam-dunk on death. Since play, in contrast, knows of no ultimate winners or losers, all boundaries become vague, fuzzy. There is no all-or-nothing demarcation between life and death as far as play is concerned. You don't play in order to acquire some sort of sham immortality. You play simply because you are alive. Life is most fundamentally play, with little or no concern over death, since it hardly ever enters into the equation. Games are serious business. The play of life, in contrast, is joyous. It resounds with a kind of laughter.
[...]
Games look to the future. The goal entails triumph of the future over the past. Games are therefore purposeful: the future holds a reward, and he who gets there first gets the gold. For this reason, games are relatively easy to define. They specify what must happen in the future when the gamers are in combat. Play, in contrast, is excruciatingly difficult to define. Since each moment presents some new context and different circumstances, improvisation becomes the name of the play. [italics mine.] In other words, play lives for the moment. Whatever the future brings, it will bring, and it will be negotiated whenever it enters into the present.
-- Floyd Merrell, Capoeira and Condomblé: Conformity and Resistance through Afro-Brazilian Experience
This is a vital distinction between many modern articulations of Capoeira, and the traditional, or Angola form. Contemporary Capoeira, -- as fight and structured game -- at surface level, is typically more flash, feat, glamour and glory, while Angola -- as play -- is not only richer in history, but deeper and broader in actual experience.