Heaven Is a Playground (And We’re Ruining It)

G. K. Chesterton once wrote: “It is not only possible to say a great deal in praise of play; it is really possible to say the highest things in praise of it. It might reasonably be maintained that the true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.”

I recently started reading Rick Telander’s seminal 1976 basketball book and had one of those forehead-slapping moments when I realized that’s where the title Heaven Is a Playground comes from. I’d always assumed it was just a nice turn of phrase about pickup ball at a Brooklyn park. But no — it’s Chesterton, pulling the theological thread all the way through to the hardwood. Heaven is a playground. When we are truly free, truly whole, truly ourselves, we play.

Which makes the way we’ve learned to ruin sports all the more interesting.

Just a few weeks ago, Dave Zahl wrote an article for Christianity Today that, depending on your theological wiring, either felt like a warm blanket or a minor provocation. His argument, drawn partly from pickleball courts outside his church window, was that play — genuine, unnecessary, for-its-own-sake play — is something Christians should take seriously. Not just tolerate but champion it. His closing move leaned on Nigerian theologian Nimi Wariboko’s line that “the logic of grace is the logic of play.”

While Zahl’s prescription for play is probably good advice for all of us, I recently read a book that highlighted the most common stumbling block in my own pursuit of playfulness: our perpetual need to insert scorekeeping into the equation.

Thi Nguyen’s The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game is the most theologically resonant book about sports and games I’ve read in years, despite the fact that the word “gospel” appears exactly zero times in it. Nguyen is a philosopher who studies games, and the book is his attempt to diagnose something he calls “value capture” — the process by which a metric that was supposed to help you suddenly becomes you.

The mechanism goes like this: your values are rich, subtle, still developing. Then you step into an environment — a job, a sport, a social platform — that hands you a simplified, quantified score. “Here’s what you need to do to get better, to win.” And slowly, almost without noticing, that score takes over. You stop living by your own values and start living for the number. As Nguyen puts it, instead of setting your values in the light of your own particular experiences, you’re letting distant forces set them for you. You take them, as he says, “off the rack.”

I quit fantasy football for a couple of years a while back. I didn’t make some grand declaration about it; I just didn’t join any leagues one season. And I found, embarrassingly quickly, that I could actually watch football again — not my players, not the injury report, not the Thursday night waiver wire — just football. Games I had no stake in were suddenly interesting again. I’d been so deep inside the metrics that I hadn’t noticed they’d completely rewired how I watched.

Then some work colleagues needed one more for their league, and I got sucked back in. And I have never felt more personally attacked by a piece of journalism than when I came across The Onion’s headline: “Man Who Spent 300 Hours Playing Fantasy Football This Year Rewarded With $30 Second-Place Payout.” Yes … I am that man.

This is Nguyen’s “value capture” in its purest sports form. Fantasy is engineered to make you care about a quantified score — your points total, your weekly ranking, your playoff odds — at the direct expense of the actual games being played. My team, the Denver Broncos, were playing a dramatic back-and-forth game with the Colts in week two of this past NFL season, and I suddenly realized I missed the very dramatic game-winning field goal because I was locked into my phone trying to see if one of my starting WRs had garnered enough catches for me to beat the VP of marketing in our head-to-head matchup. The game was right in front of me. I wasn’t watching it.

But fantasy is just the most obvious version of something that runs much deeper through how we’ve all learned to consume sports. A huge amount of fandom starts as pure enjoyment — rooting for teams, marveling at athletes, absorbing the drama of games — and slowly morphs into something else: the need to be right. To have the correct take. To have predicted the thing that happened, or to have the analytics to explain why it did. The joy of watching becomes secondary to the performance of having understood what you watched.

Derek Thompson, writer for the Atlantic who recently interviewed Nguyen on his podcast, put it well: baseball got smarter, teams coordinated around efficiency metrics, in-game decisions improved — but nobody had a metric for fun. Attention was pulled toward what was trackable and away from what was actually good about the game. We didn’t just do this to baseball. We did it to ourselves!

Nguyen shares that a philosopher he admires once told him there’s a difference between a goal and a purpose: “When you have friends over for cards, the goal is to win, but the purpose is to have fun.” Goal and purpose aren’t the same thing. The goal is what you aim at inside the game. The purpose is why you’re playing in the first place.

When a metric takes over, the goal devours the purpose. You become what Nguyen memorably calls a “charades asshole,” the person who studied the game so relentlessly that you forgot you were supposed to be enjoying it with your friends. (Yes, I have also been this man.)

Nguyen also draws a distinction between what he calls the “achievement player,” the one who cares only about winning, and the “striving player,” someone who values the struggle, the process, the actual experience of playing. Value capture slowly converts striving players into achievement players, replacing the rich texture of why we play with a single external number.

Of all the ways the law and gospel manifest in the world, sports may be the clearest place to see them on display. The game, in its original form, is gift. It’s free, unnecessary, delight-driven —  a working definition of grace. Nobody forced you to watch. You showed up because something about it called to you. As Chesterton said: to regard the universe as a lark. That’s the gospel shape of the thing.

And then the metrics arrive. The wins and losses, rankings, WAR stats, fantasy points, betting lines, PFF grades, the Twitter takes-per-minute. And slowly — the way the law always operates — the gift starts to feel like a demand. The thing that was supposed to be free starts to cost you something. Enjoyment becomes contingent on performance, on winning, on being right. You’re not watching anymore. You’re auditing.

Nguyen describes a feedback loop he calls “value collapse”: simplified values lead you into a narrower set of experiences, which in turn reinforces your oversimplified values, until the whole bandwidth of what made sports wonderful has been compressed into a number that either goes up or goes down. You’ve cut yourself off from what he calls “the rich emotional feedback system within us” — the quiet signal that says this is good, this is fun, this is what you were made for. The external score speaks too loudly to hear it.

Play so often ends up taking a backseat to competition, not through malice but through something subtler, the way any good law operates. It enters your life as a tool and exits as a tyrant. It compresses what’s valuable and calls the compression the whole story. It tells you what to want, and you suddenly want it.

Chesterton’s full quote ends here: “To be at last in such secure innocence that one can juggle with the universe and the stars, to be so good that one can treat everything as a joke — that may be, perhaps, the real end and final holiday of human souls. When we are really holy we may regard the Universe as a lark.”

Secure innocence. The threat of judgment removed. The game as gift, not demand. That’s not just Chesterton being whimsical — that’s grace with a jump shot.

Grace, and the gospel, claims that there’s something deeper than the score, that the purpose precedes and exceeds the goal, that the game was a gift before it was competition, and that we are more than our metrics.

Maybe, with the start of March Madness nearly upon us, it’s time to watch the games without our phones, without having entered an office pool, without having filled out a bracket. For its own sake. Uselessly. Playfully.

Heaven is a playground. Somewhere between the injury reports and the point spreads, we forgot we were already there.