The Wonderland of Play

This essay has been modified from it’s previous publication on my substack.

I have an on-going fascination with the power of play. It comes so naturally to children (which is why Ann has written about Play Therapy for Helping Children Heal) yet seems so difficult for some adults. Why is that? What happens to adults that prevents them from being able to play? And what would the necessary conditions be to help facilitate play for adults?

Earlier this month, I had the honor of presenting at the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology‘s annual Day of Scholarship some of the on-going work I’ve been doing around play in board games. The presentation was titled Entering Wonderland: Exploring the Precursors to Play and looked specifically at the ways board games offer a container for nested realities–where things can be real and not real at the same time–and how we enter into the ‘wonderland’ of play through a process called subsidiary focal integration. Let’s unpack this:

Nested Realities in Board Games:

French Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan described the way a person organizes their world with three intersecting and overlapping registers: the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. Often depicted as three interlocking circles in a Borromean knot (see below), these registers structure a person’s experience, subjectivity and meaning. Professor of counseling psychology and Lacan scholar Paul Hoard took these registers and applied them to the experience of playing board games, noting that they act as ‘nested realities’ a player weaves seamlessly through and between. He writes, “games are microcosms of our lives. In a game, we are engaged in what can be called a nested reality, an imaginary-symbolic world contained within our material reality. This nested reality provides meaning and purpose for our choices and existence within the world of the game.”¹

So here is how Lacan’s registers function as nested realities in the context of board games:

• The Imaginary is the world that is created by the images and themes of the game. It’s the story or narrative arc that the game tells as you play with the characters in the world created by the game.
• The Symbolic is all the rules and language that govern the world of the game—it’s the mechanics and structure of the game that dictate how to move/play within it.
• The Real is everything that can’t be put into words. In board games, it is the reality of the players sitting at the table, things that cannot be represented or expressed inside the game, such as the player’s gender, age, history with board games, intelligence, desire, multiplicity of selves and more.

These ‘nested realities’ act as worlds within our world and become the stage for which our play can take place. The Imaginary and Symbolic of the board game build the world or ‘wonderland’ and shape how our play is enacted in and through the Real in this interactive and intersecting way.

Down the Rabbit Hole: Subsidiary Focal Integration

In her book, Loving To Know: Covenant Epistemology, philosopher Esther Meek uses Michael Polanyi’s concept of subsidiary focal integration (SFI) to describe a part of the process of coming to know something. She writes,

“On the basis of his own research, Polanyi concluded that knowing is the active shaping of clues to form a pattern, to which we submit as a token of reality. This very human action he called integration. Integration is a risky, responsible struggle, a skilled groping towards the not-yet-known. It involves shifting from looking at puzzling and apparently unrelated particulars to relating to them differently: relying on them, or attending through them or from them, to comprehend a deeper pattern.”²

In short, we come to know something through the process of integrating the tacit knowledge of subsidiaries (i.e. background elements, context clues, past experiences, etc.) into a meaningful whole or focal point, through the process of personal engagement (or indwelling to use Meek’s word).

This same process applies to learning to play a new board games; A player gets more information than they know what to do with as the structure and rules (symbolic) of the game are explained during the ‘teach.’ These subsidiaries, or background elements, include understanding the mechanics of the game, the rules that govern players movement/actions, the win conditions or objectives, etc. The focal point of playing the game begins to integrate as a player starts to engage with the pieces of game, (including the experience of moving physical pieces such as rolling the die or flipping a card) even as the player may not know the fullness of how they function. They are in the process of coming to know how to play, integrating and understanding all the bits and pieces before entering wonderland. Thus, it is through the SFI of ‘falling down the rabbit hole’ that precedes entry into the wonderland of play.

The Wonderland of Play

In Lewis Carroll’s story, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, ‘wonderland’ was a dream-like place that Alice travelled to in her mind. I use ‘wonderland’ here as a metaphor for play as a state of mind. Of course, various factors and contexts may differ from person to person as to what ‘play’ looks like. Donald Winnicott and Stuart Brown offer two views on play:

Donald Winnicott: Play as an In-Between Space
In Playing and Reality, English pediatrician and child psychiatrist Donald Winnicott describes play as natural and universal, a basic form of living that facilitates growth and thus belongs to health. He argues that play occurs in an in-between place that is neither solely a person’s inner world, nor just happens in the external reality.³ He writes, “The thing about playing is the precariousness of the interplay of personal psychic reality and the experience of control of actual objects.”⁴ Much like Lacan’s registers as nested realities in board games, Winnicott’s idea of play inhabits a both/and quality, holding both the internal realities of the players and the external experience of physically moving/controlling objects of the game. As psychoanalyst Michael Parsons writes, “Play functions to continuously sustain a paradoxical reality where things may be real and not real at the same time.” I would argue that is precisely what board games do—they sustain the paradoxical reality of the Imaginary-Symbolic world of the game nestled within the experience of the Real.

Stuart Brown: Properties of Play
In his book, Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul, Psychiatrist and play researcher Stuart Brown identifies seven properties of play:

• Purposelessness – an activity that has no survival value and is done for it’s own sake.
• Voluntary – there is no obligation to participate; it is not required.
• Inherent Attraction – provides psychological arousal: it is fun and makes you feel good.
• Freedom From Time – sense of losing time when engaged in play.
• Diminished Consciousness of Self – one stops worrying about looking good/bad, smart/stupid, etc and is fully in the moment.
• Improvisational Potential – has an openness to change, one is not locked into a rigid way of doing things
• Continuation of Desire – we want to keep doing it.

For some, all seven of Brown’s properties of play can be found within board games. However, because the concepts of ‘play’ and ‘fun’⁵ are unique and particular to each person, board games are not a universal way to experience play. Board games are a way to enter into play and as I have argued here, this happens through subsidiary focal integration as one learns to hold the nested realities of the game before entering the wonderland of play that is offered in and through board games.

How do you like to play?

Footnotes & Additional Works Cited:

1. Hoard, Paul. “On Pleasure and Board Games” in The Other Journal Vol 37: Spring 2024. https://theotherjournal.com/2024/07/on-pleasure-and-games/ ↩︎
2. Meek, Esther Lightcap. Loving to Know: Covenant Epistemology. (Cascade Books, Eugene, OR. 2011). Page 69. ↩︎
3. Winnicottt, D. W. Playing and Reality. (Tavistock Publications, 1971). Page 55 ↩︎
4. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, p. 64. ↩︎
5. For a fun look at “fun,” (see what I did there?), check out Paul Hoard’s take on his substack: https://paulhoard.substack.com/p/lacking-fun ↩︎

Brown, Stuart. Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul. (Avery, New York, NY. 2011).

Carol, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. (Originally published in 1865. Puffin Books, New York, NY, 1946).

Hemphill, Maggie. “Something More: Nested Realities and Desire in Veiled Fate” in Victory Points. Board Game Academics. August, 2025. https://boardgameacademics.com/something-more-nested-realities-desire-in-veiled-fate/

Hoard, Paul R. “On Pleasure and Board Games” in The Other Journal Vol 37: Spring 2024. https://theotherjournal.com/2024/07/on-pleasure-and-games/

Hoard, Paul R. “The Rules that Free Us: From Virtue to Play” in Paul’s Substack. November 20, 2025. https://paulhoard.substack.com/p/the-rules-that-free-us-from-virtue

Hoard, Paul R. & Paul Steinke. “Board Games as Liturgy: The Thin Space of Play” in Christ and Cascadia Sept 28, 2023. https://christandcascadia.com/2023/09/28/board-games-as-liturgy/

Meek, Esther Lightcap. Loving to Know: Covenant Epistemology. (Cascade Books, Eugene, OR. 2011).

Nguyen, C. T. Games: Agency as Art. (Oxford University Press, 2020)

Parsons, Michael. “The Logic of Play in Psychoanalysis” in International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 80(5):871-884. 1999.

Tuber, Steven. Attachment, play, and authenticity: A Winnicott Primer. (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2019).

Winnicottt, D. W. Playing and Reality. (Tavistock Publications, 1971).

Yadlin-Gadot, S., & Hadar. A. Lacanian Psychoanalysis: A Contemporary Introduction. (Routledge, New York, NY, 2023).