| The purpose of this paper is to analyse the relations between man’s everyday actions and games, between what is serious and what is lighthearted, playful about human actions. There are two words in English which refer to these aspects: game and play. They share some semantic features and differ in others. Game focuses on competition and obeying rules, whereas play focuses on amusement and freedom of action. I shall briefly cast a look at both Saussure’s parallel between language and the game of chess and Wittgenstein’s well-known syntagm language-game. I believe that only the latter is acceptable, on condition that by language we understand language in use, speech (in Saussurian terms). The most representative form of speech is face-to-face conversation. Such a form of communication is structured, has rules and a strategy whose end is to reach a certain goal; from this perspective it resembles a game, and, consequently, it can be studied by the game theory. In the last section I shall refer to Ilie Moromete’s approach to life, to the lighthearted face of game, to playing (through language) for the sake of playing. |
