The other day, Sharon and I were back in Henderson KY for the ordination of a former co-staffer at FBC, David Hayashi. (We were both interims, he in music, I in preaching.) We stayed in an Airbnb across the Ohio in Newburgh, Indiana, and took a walk along the north bank after supper. We happened upon these young folks playing what we learned was Spikeball, and they were kind enough to give us a short tutorial. I’d seen a few minutes of it on TV, but not enough to catch the name of the game or to figure out what was going on. 

Turns out, it’s a lot like volleyball, with similar scoring. But in this case, the two teams face each other across a small, circular “trampoline,” and, instead of bouncing the ball over the net, they knock it down on the net after three or fewer touches. It’s a wild enterprise, but these kids were making a go at it.

It reminded me of a couple of expressions I picked up in my faculty days at Wheaton, when I was tapped to teach a course on work and leisure, a course I also taught in my closing years at Southern. We’ve all heard of ‘homo sapiens’ (“man, the discerner”), but there are a lot of cognate expressions, including two I picked up for the course, ‘homo faber’ (“man, the maker”) and ‘homo ludens’ (“man, the player”). (You can find about sixty others on Wikipedia under “Names for the human species.”)

When I first read about homo ludens, I was reminded of a book that was making the rounds during my early-1970s, graduate years at Vanderbilt—Magister Ludi by Nobel laureate, Hermann Hesse. The title was an alternative to the literal German one, The Glass Bead Game. Two other Hesse biggies of the day were Siddhartha and Steppenwolf, the latter inspiring the name of a rock band whose hit, Born To Be Wild, introduced the expression ‘heavy metal’ to the genre, and a theater company on the North Shore of Chicago, one of whose founders, Gary Sinise, was Lieutenant Dan in the movie Forrest Gump.  

Anyway, man is, indeed, a creature who plays. Of course, we’ve seen wildlife footage of bear cubs horsing around in mock combat or sliding down icy slopes for fun, but human game design is distinctly a matter of “sapientia.” It can get right complex. Indeed, I’m still trying to figure out the ins and out of ice hockey, and I remember the challenge I had in explaining baseball’s infield fly rule on two occasions, to British visitors at Wrigley field in Chicago and to a Shia immigrant from Iran at Comerica Park in Detroit. 

In reading up on play, I discovered that the word ‘ludicrous’ derives from ‘ludens,’ pointing to non-serious behavior. Of course, those involved in “mere games” can exhibit the utmost concentration, expend the greatest effort (even to the point of collapse), and soar and sink to emotional highs and lows according to results, but these are not matters of life and death, as in gladiatorial games. And they don’t contribute directly to providing food and shelter, the way work does. So there’s a distinction.

Incidentally, the Newburgh Spikeballers asked if I wanted to join in, but I declined, confident that my performance would be ludicrous, and perhaps self-injurious.