Are We Human When We Play

You know the feeling. It’s that moment, maybe thirty hours into a game like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom or Elden Ring, when you realize you’re not really playing a game anymore. You’re just… living there. You were supposed to be saving a kingdom or becoming the Elden Lord, but instead, you’ve spent the last six hours meticulously building a flying machine to transport a small forest creature to his friend, just to see if you could. You’ve climbed a mountain for no other reason than to watch the sunrise. You’ve abandoned the main quest in favor of a personal, unwritten one: to map a forgotten coastline, to collect a full set of ridiculous-looking armor, to simply exist in a world that feels more vibrant and full of possibility than your own.

For decades, this kind of deep, immersive gameplay has been dismissed by critics as mere “escapism”—a childish retreat from the responsibilities of the real world. We spend hundreds of hours in these digital sandboxes, and the conventional wisdom is that we’re wasting our time, numbing our minds, and avoiding our true potential.

But what if this conventional wisdom is completely wrong? What if these open-world games are not a retreat from our humanity, but a powerful expression of it? What if, in these moments of pointless, self-directed play, we are actually becoming more human than we are in our daily, productive lives? To understand this radical idea, we need to turn to an 18th-century German poet and philosopher who knew nothing of pixels or polygons, but knew everything about the nature of freedom and play: Friedrich Schiller.

Meet Friedrich Schiller. A titan of German literature, a celebrated playwright, poet, and a close friend of Goethe, Schiller is not the first person you’d think of as a video game theorist. He lived in a world of quill pens and revolutions, not controllers and GPUs. Yet, in his most important philosophical work, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Schiller diagnosed a problem with modern life and proposed a solution so profound that it perfectly explains why you just spent your entire weekend building a virtual house instead of doing your taxes.

The War Within: Two Drives Tearing Us Apart

Schiller, writing in the chaotic aftermath of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, looked at the world and saw a humanity that was fundamentally broken, fractured, and incomplete. He argued that every human being is torn between two powerful, opposing forces, or "drives."

1. The Sensuous Drive (Stofftrieb): This is our physical, animal nature. It is the drive of our senses, our emotions, our immediate needs and desires. It binds us to the material world, to the relentless passage of time, and to the laws of cause and effect. It’s the part of you that feels hunger, fear, exhaustion, and the simple pain of a stubbed toe. When this drive completely dominates a person, Schiller says, they become a savage, a slave to their passions and immediate circumstances.

2. The Form Drive (Formtrieb): This is our rational, intellectual nature. It is the drive to create order, to impose rules, to think in abstract principles, and to act according to timeless moral laws. It is our sense of duty, our capacity for logic, and our desire for consistency and harmony. It’s the part of you that makes a to-do list, follows a budget, and understands mathematical equations. When this drive completely dominates, Schiller warns, the person becomes a barbarian—a cold, unfeeling creature of pure principle, willing to sacrifice individual life and happiness for an abstract ideal (a description he aimed squarely at the ideologues of the French Terror).

For Schiller, the tragedy of modern life was that it forced us to choose one over the other. Our jobs, our politics, our very society seemed designed to create either frazzled savages or rigid barbarians, but never a whole, complete human being.

The Great Synthesis: The Play Drive (Spieltrieb)

So, how do we heal this fracture? How do we become whole? Schiller’s answer is revolutionary: through a third, mediating drive he called the Play Drive (Spieltrieb).

The Play Drive is awakened when we are in a state of play. And for Schiller, "play" is not a trivial activity. It is the highest state of human existence. Play is what happens when we are simultaneously free from the physical compulsion of the Sensuous Drive and the rational/moral compulsion of the Form Drive. In a state of play, our rational and sensual natures come into a harmonious balance. We are not acting out of need, nor out of duty. We are acting out of pure, creative freedom.

In play, we give "living form" to the world. We create and appreciate beauty. We invent our own rules and find joy in following them. It is in these moments of purposeless, free creation that we experience the totality of our being. This led Schiller to his most famous, and most radical, declaration:

“Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays.”

Read that again. It’s not that play is a fun break from being human. It’s that play is the only time we are truly, completely human.

The Legend of Zelda as Aesthetic Education

Now, let's go back to Hyrule, or the Lands Between, or the vast expanse of Skyrim. An open-world video game is perhaps the most perfect technological incubator for the Play Drive ever invented.

Think about it. Within the game, you are liberated from the tyranny of the Sensuous Drive. You don't feel real hunger or cold. Death is a minor, temporary inconvenience, a brief loading screen before you try again. The brutal, unforgiving necessities of the physical world are transformed into manageable, even enjoyable, game mechanics. You are free from physical compulsion.

Simultaneously, you are liberated from the strict Form Drive. This is the magic of the open-world design. Yes, there is a main quest—a grand, moral imperative to save the world. That is the game’s Formtrieb. But you are not compelled to follow it. You can ignore the plight of the kingdom for a hundred hours. The game’s rigid rules become a flexible framework, not a prison. You are free from moral or logical compulsion.

In this space of dual freedom, the Play Drive awakens. You are no longer a savage merely reacting to threats, nor a barbarian slavishly following a quest log. You are a player. You begin to create your own meaning. The goal of the game ceases to be the one written by the developers and becomes the one you invent for yourself. Your purpose is no longer to "win," but simply to be—to explore, to experiment, to build, to create beauty, to impose your own "living form" on this digital world. The joy you feel when your ridiculous flying machine actually works is the joy of the Play Drive in action. It is the thrill of a free being harmonizing the world of things with the world of ideas. It is, in Schiller's terms, a moment of pure, unadulterated humanity.

We Play, Therefore We Are

Viewing these games through Schiller’s lens transforms them from mindless entertainment into something essential. They are not an escape from life; they are an escape into the kind of life our modern world rarely allows us to live. They are a form of "aesthetic education," a training ground where we practice being whole. In a world relentlessly governed by the necessities of work and the rigid forms of social and moral duty, the open-world game provides a rare sanctuary for the Play Drive—a space where we can, for a few hours, be fully human.

So, the next time you lose a weekend to exploring a digital landscape, don't think of it as time wasted. Think of it as a philosophical necessity. You are not escaping. You are playing. And in doing so, you are engaging in one of the most serious, and most liberating, activities a human being can undertake.

The final question, then, is a haunting one. If Schiller is right, and we are only fully human when we play, what does it say about our world that we have to build these impossibly complex virtual realities just to remember what that feels like?