Before we get into the Rucker PLAY Model, let’s look at why being deliberate about having more fun is important. Almost all of us have the innate ability to quickly calculate and re-calculate the risks and rewards of our decisions. However, often we do not take this step when picking a course of action — this is especially true when we marginalize our daily decisions as casual choices. Instead, we passively make many types of decisions without much thought.
An area of decision-making in this realm that is extremely vulnerable to passive choice are the decisions we make about how we spend our leisure time.
The luxury of leisure activity is meant to be time reserved for fun and enjoyment. Yet, all too often, we squander these opportunities for fun with activities that do not truly bring us joy.
A Concerning Trend about Leisure Time
Based on recent findings from Nielsen, we are now spending almost half of our day engaged with media and content. Do not get me wrong; there are many ways that consuming content is a great way to have fun. However, we know from years of research about media consumption that mindlessly watching television correlates with unhappiness (If you’re interested in the science, see: What Do Happy People Do? and A Daily Diary Investigation of the Link Between Television Watching and Positive Affect). As the technology that delivers media gets better, we are also increasingly using digital tools like social media as a form of escapism.
We Can Do Better
In order to better one’s ability to have fun, I have come up with the PLAY model (seen below). The PLAY model gives you a framework to rank your different activities/ideas for fun according to their level of challenge, as well as the level of fun you will likely garner from engaging in them. The “challenge” (x-axis) is the investment component of any given activity (e.g., the time, energy, and outside resources required, the financial cost of the activity, the potential tradeoffs, etc.). The “fun” (y-axis) is your reward component. How much enjoyment will you get from the experience? Is the activity something you really consider fun? Or is it something you might partake in because it’s easy to do or has become part of your routine and is comfortable?
Rucker PLAY Model
There are four possible scenarios in the PLAY model.
- Pleasing: Pleasing activity is easy to execute and has a high fun factor. It does not take a lot of time and/or resources to engage in. This is what you are aiming for in your day-to-day life, so find everyday opportunities that invite more fun in your life and fit these into your routine. Only you will know what these are (from your own experience) because, for the most part, fun is a subjective measure. Examples in the pleasing quadrant that will apply to some of you are things like scheduling the time to catch up with a friend, unstructured play with kids or pets, personal hobbies, etc.
- Living: Fun yet challenging activities exist in the Living quadrant (e.g., to partake, you may need to travel somewhere, learn a new skill, or step out of your comfort zone). Living activities are generally not activities you can engage in all the time. However, when we engage in peak experiential activity, the payoff is grand. A peak experience is often triggered when your activity involves a degree of challenge, risk, physical exertion, natural beauty, and/or deep interpersonal interactions. Fun often requires variable states. Alexandre Mandryka, Director of Design at video game companies Ubisoft and Relic, says that having fun often comes from alternating periods when you increase your challenge followed by periods when you get to enjoy your mastery. Put another way, fun is often experienced outside our comfort zone, although we enjoy and relish the moment while back in our comfort zone. Activities in the Living quadrant might not be suitable or realistic for your day-to-day routine, but it seems obvious we should make space for them in our lives nonetheless. What is it that would truly make you feel like you are living again?
- Agonizing: Agonizing activities are activities that are challenging to execute in some significant way and bring us little or no joy. It is fair to say life is not meant to be all fun, and most of us are going to have agonizing activities from time to time: work that just needs to get done, certain aspects of child-rearing, mandated responsibilities (e.g., taxes), etc. We cannot avoid everything that is agonizing. However, one of the most important steps in having more fun is to eliminate agonizing activities when possible. When people use the PLAY model, they are always amazed at the activities they can simply stop doing but had not up until now because they had previously not been strategic about their decisions. They had not evaluated their choices with a critical eye before. (Pro tip: Taxes are not one of those activities; unfortunately, we all still have to do our taxes. Ironing, on the other hand … the people that count in your life are not going to judge you if your shirt is a bit wrinkled.)
- Yielding: These activities or projects are easy for us to execute, but when we look at them critically, they are not really that much fun. This is the low-hanging fruit, and it’s the area where I see people getting quick, early wins. For example, you might enjoy playing Angry Birds, but there are probably other activities you would relish more if you made a more informed choice about how you spend your time. When authentically assessed, yielding activities are, at best, recognized as a poor use of time. At worst, yielding activities can be a form of escapism. Furthermore, yielding activities that are habitual can quite literally make us lose time. That is because our brains are efficient and often encode noneventful routine activities as a single memory. If you had 200 copies of the same thing, would it be efficient to hold on to the other 199?
Using the PLAY Model
To begin your journey toward having more fun, evaluate your activities using the framework above and see where your various activities fall within the matrix. As you go through the exercise, it will become clear which activities will maximize your opportunities for fun and which are probably squandering opportunities to improve the amount of fun you are currently having.
For instance, let’s say you have decided to host an outdoor barbecue, which you have never done before. To bring this activity to life requires buying a lot of new equipment. Furthermore, there have been frequent thunderstorms this summer, so the weather is dicey (high challenge). To top it off, you don’t really enjoy cooking (low fun); you just want to get your friends together (for more on the importance of including friends in your fun, click here).
In this instance, after using the PLAY model, you might ditch the barbecue idea altogether for something more entertaining (higher fun) and easier to organize (lower challenge), such as going to a local stand-up comedy show. The possibilities are limitless and specific to how you have fun and find joy.
Sources & further reading:
Maslow, A. H. (unknown edition). Religions, values, and peak-experiences. Penguin Books.
Pomfret, Gill. “Mountaineering adventure tourists: a conceptual framework for research.” Tourism Management 27, (2006): 113-123.
Mandryka, Alexandre. “Pleasure without learning leads to addiction” last modified May 16, 2012. http://gamewhispering.com/pleasure-without-learning-leads-to-addiction