I've heard this framed other ways like "living to work vs. working to live", but I prefer the term play here since it evokes something more necessarily joyous and creative, not just vaguely alluding to being alive.
Anyway, this is not going to be my neatest write-up ever, but it's something that was on my mind and want to put out there.
What I was noting was, to use an example, John Cleese (the comedian) has a talk where he goes into what he calls "open and closed mode" and how getting into the open mode is important for creativity. It's an interesting talk and all, but something I feel I missed about it when I first encountered it and for a long time after is the way in which it implicitly emphasizes the priorities like this: "play is something you do in order to get into a more effective state for producing better work."
I don't think he says this in so many words, but it's implied, from what I can remember, and in any case, it's just one example in a sea of how capitalist thought talks about labor. Recreation is often framed as something you do to rest, rejuvenate, and otherwise improve the end result: which is to produce labor.
Rarely is it framed from the other direction. So we have the directions that look something like:
Play to Work (capitalist): Listening to music to help you concentrate for work, doing brainstorming activities; the normally play-like activity becomes a tool for you to work better, play becomes subservient to work.
Work to Play (communal?): Laboring in order to accomplish some kind of security/safety/sustenance, so that you can sing and dance and play music with community after (or whatever playful activity you can think of; the activity itself is less important than the purpose being toward the end of play rather than toward the end of work).
The problem I see in Play to Work is how depressing and demoralizing it can be. Something that, if you had an okay childhood, you learned to associate with liveliness and excitement, openness and awe, instead becomes something you learn to associate with struggle and hardship, efficiency and effectiveness. What used to be a play that makes you happy to be alive gets warped into a tool of labor and the joy gets sucked out of it. It's no wonder, then, that adults sometimes pine for the days of childhood play.
Is this to say that if you bring play into work at all, it will become "corrupted"? No. But it is to say that if you have no play that is actually, really for things like liveliness and excitement, openness and awe, you might find yourself struggling to look forward to things.
Efficiency isn't enough. We aren't machines. And there's a temptation, if one is caught up in capitalist efficiency brain, to go, "Alright, so the takeaway is, do play more effectively." Which is more of the same trap. What is being lost is a fundamental exploratory nature of play. This does not mean you can't bring skill to play, that if you decide to play the piano, you must play it badly even if you know it well, in order for it to qualify as play. No, it means that if you mean to play the piano, not just go through the motions, that is a different state of being, a different state of mind, than laboring over a piano.
Or to go deeper with it, what kind of society are we working to create and nurture (beyond basic sustenance)? One where we are all very efficient? That's great for logistics, but it can't be all there is to it. Somehow we have to escape the machine view of efficiency. Which doesn't only mean acknowledging that we break down and grudgingly setting aside time for relaxation, but also recognizing the fundamental liveliness that comes from having play to look forward to for a purpose more meaningful than "restoring our battery levels".
Thanks for weighing in.
You're welcome to correct me if you think I'm misrepresenting how you feel about it, but to me, that sounds like the capitalist mindset.
Using the video game example you give, it is true that a lot of video games are designed like lists of tasks, but that wasn't always the case. Personally, I can still remember the shift in my own mind, when I went from seeing video games in a more open, playful way, to viewing them through a lens of efficiency and performance. I don't remember exactly when the shift happened, but I'm certain that it did.
Also, I could opine on the design of video games in general at great length. I have more familiarity with them than just playing them and I've watched as the tendencies have changed over the years. I wasn't there for every evolution of it, but I saw, for example, the gradual shift from the Series Model (ex: Mass Effect 1, Mass Effect 2) where you buy once, maybe some rare DLC, and that's it - to the Live Service Model where MTX and even lootboxes get normalized and design is centered around pushing you toward extra purchases rather than making a good enough game that you'll want to buy a wholly separate "next version" of it.
In other words, there's a monetary reason that games become so task-centric to loop you into an addictive model. It's easier to keep you playing for longer and get you spending on MTX that way.
Games as art, as something more open-ended and exploratory, never took hold very well to my observation, though there was at least some academic and indie interest in it here and there. Indie games experiment a little more than the AAA fair, but still have to appeal to existing market interest if they want to be seen. So you get games like Stardew Valley, which is inspired by Harvest Moon or Undertale being inspired by Earthbound. Not that appealing to existing interest is necessarily a bad thing, but point being, the more nebulous realm of games as a vehicle for some kind of artistic messaging mostly got overshadowed by games as a vehicle for maximizing the profit of shareholders. Which helped create and normalize the idea of games as "fun work".
For contrast, I doubt most avid readers would call reading a fiction novel work in the same way a video game enthusiast would talk about tasks in a video game.
I stopped keeping up with new games a while ago, so I don't know what the current situation is like. But the concept of leveraging the desire for meaningful work to extract profit from the consumer really tracks with capitalism. But as per my example, even older games like Harvest Moon is literally about farming, which is labour.
You do have a point in that video-games might have been developed to normalize the idea as fun work to promote a capitalist mindset. But that's only possible if work was fun to begin with.
From my perspective, the appeal of video-games is that it places you in a world where what you do is meaningful. Whereby the efforts of your labour improves your position in life and the community as a whole. Because it's something that humans desire and that capitalism can't provide.