Play creates trust precisely because it serves no purpose. Those who play together also practise giving themselves rules and keeping them.
Joy without a purpose
Cooperation usually serves a purpose. People work together to achieve something none of them could achieve alone. Play, by contrast, has its purpose in itself. One plays because it is enjoyable, and the game is over when it stops being fun.
There is a paradox in this. It is precisely activity without a purpose that produces what every purposeful cooperation needs. Playing with others, you get to know how they react under pressure, how they lose, whether they cheat, whether they can laugh at their own mistakes. You share with them the joy that also accompanies the click. Out of this grows a trust that no declaration of intent can create.
That is why time for play belongs in a cooperation, even though nobody can bill for it.
Schiller and Huizinga
Friedrich Schiller gave play a high rank in his letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795). In the fifteenth letter he writes that man plays only where he is human in the full sense of the word, “and he is only fully human where he plays” (own translation). Schiller means a state in which sensuous nature and rational form do not oppose each other but work together freely. The sentence should not be stretched too far: Schiller is thinking of aesthetic play, not of every party game.
Johan Huizinga, in Homo Ludens (1938), described play as a basic form of culture. It is free activity, it has its own space and its own time, and it follows rules that hold absolutely within that space. Huizinga made an observation that is instructive for any cooperation: a playing community is often more lenient towards the cheat than towards the spoilsport. The cheat still acknowledges the world of the game, even while abusing it. The spoilsport destroys it.
Rules one gives oneself
Every game has rules, and many groups change them. They agree on house rules, let a beginner take two turns, play a round without a time limit. These rules hold not because someone imposed them but because the players gave them to themselves. They are kept because otherwise the game does not work.
This is small-scale practice in self-legislation. Whoever has done it often knows how rules arise, when they fit, when they need changing and how to change them without breaking up the group. A cooperation that has to find its own constitution needs exactly this ability.
Play is not peaceful by nature. Many games are contests, and Huizinga expressly counted the competitive element as part of play. Trust arises not because nobody wants to win, but because everyone keeps to the rules, even when they lose.
An example
Under the name “Teletea”, family and friends used to meet online to drink tea, chat and play together. Everyone sat at home with their own pot, the video call running on one device and the game on another. They played whatever suited: guessing games, drawing games, board games, searching together for a place on the world map.
Across generations and borders, people laughed at the same mistakes. Those who had not spoken for a long time found their way back into conversation through the game. And having seen one another guess and lose, people later found it easier, even on serious matters, to tell how the other meant something. On site, with everyone living so far apart, these rounds would never have happened.
What this means for the law
Law and play are closely related. Both create a space of their own with rules of their own, and both depend on the participants accepting those rules. Huizinga saw features of play in court proceedings: the marked-off place, the fixed forms, the regulated contest.
Two things follow for the design of a cooperation. First, the law should leave room for trying things out, for example through trial phases, review dates and clauses that provide for changing the rules. Second, play shows that rules are most likely to be kept when the participants have given them to themselves. That is the basic idea behind the articles of an association (Verein) and every good partnership agreement.