When I used to play Utopia, I remember that great part of the gameplay and pleasure of play was the quantitative analysis of my province. Numbers and more numbers to know my defense per acre, wealth, offensive and defensive units, buildings and building planning. I used to spend like an hour or two per day calculating possibilities before taking a course of action. Come the war, my province would usually be the first hard targeted in the kingdom, and good part of the game was to resist, rebuild, manage resources to reconstruct a strong economy and army again. Those were good times, when by the end of the day I would sit and have a coffee cup, listen to good music and just analyze and build strategies…
But can you consider this “play”? How does play and calculation can be related?
How can it not be?
Pretty much anything can be broken down to calculations. Take any sport, for example, and apart from the physical prowess factor needed for the mere execution of the calculations, it pretty much all comes down to the incredible maths our brains can do. Just because, in this particular example, it’s done consciously, doesn’t make it any less fun. On the contrary, if you ask me :)
Or consider a baby, having fun with blocks and squeaky toys and whatnot. Banging it all together, throwing stuff to the floor, squeezing stuff, rotating stuff,… what it’s doing is basically figuring out some of the basic laws of physics and enjoying the experience a lot. Its brains are figuring out the calculations we all come to take for granted.
Of course, I’ve always been a fan of maths myself, so I might well be rather biased here. Lately I’ve been regularly training myself to calculate the squares of 3 digit numbers without writing anything down, at which I sadly still fail more often than not, the problem being one of memory rather than one of calculation though. Still… this is fun to me and I won’t ever understand the majority of people’s aversion to calculations. There would be no joy at all without them.
PS: Thanks. I was worried there. Though I don’t buy your explanation :p