Play as a Strategy of Formation of Personality in Glocal Space

Abstract

Play with its impulsiveness, spontaneity, and unintentionality helps to understands the world in all the variety of its connections and to learn the norms that are important to live in society. It identifies key strategies for the formation of personality in modern society. The ontological conception of play, proposed by Eugen Fink, defines it as a direct projection of human life on infinite possible worlds with inexhaustible worldview reserves, and helps to understand play as an intermediary between objective social norms and their subjective individualized interpretations which are realized in concrete personal actions. Play is a symbol of interpenetration and, at the same time, opposition of global and local both in the individual mind and in culture. It is a condition for the formation of the ability to “be open to the world”, to take into account “other people's rules” and go beyond the value and ideological isolation, which is an essential element of glocalization. The ability to play is a way of reduction, formalization and fragmentation of social space, the reason for the internalization of moral norms and the possibility of their application to individual behavior. Play in the contemporary world becomes one of the strategies for overcoming crisis and conflict as ontological characteristics of modern human condition and establishing the necessary dynamic balance in the conditions of glocalization. In play a person can put himself on the place of others. Try to understand what they are guided by in their actions and how they assess the consequences of those actions. Acting in play, following its rules or consciously breaking them helps a person to acquire new qualities and reject one-sidedness and narrowness of thinking: in play the world is becoming an “integrated place”. Ultimately, play creates the necessary conditions and opportunities for people to think in global categories and to live in a real world, which is measured in local scales.