In this sense, play is an act of learning. More specifically, it’s a low-cost way to explore the world in order to obtain high-value advantages. To push it even further, it’s a search for the truth of the reality that we want to effectively inhabit as we live and as we age over time.

The speed of social media (and real-time media) means that social exchange pulls towards the poll of violence, rather than to that of justice. In place of the reasoned (albeit, angry) mobilisation and retribution that seeks justice, we see a quickfire escalation of punch and counter-punch. The condition of a perpetual present – of constant ‘real-time’ – has certain properties in common with Hobbes’s ‘state of nature’, which is a condition of trauma, that mobilises all of the powers of the nervous system in the service of self-defence and attack.