Both "play" and "playing" is correct here. People often see him (who is) playing basketball on the playground at the weekend. People often see him (who) play basketball on the playground at the weekend. So essentially both carry the same meaning.
1 "I have been playing tennis for five years" uses the present perfect progressive (also known as "present perfect continuous") tense. It means that I continuously played tennis for the past five years and continue to play tennis in the present.
I was playing hockey. You could use it as a way to say "No" when invited to play a game or a match or something similar. For example: Want to play a game of chess? I just played. Give me an hour to recharge my brain. If you say, "I was just playing" it means that you were just kidding around about whatever the topic of the conversation is. For ...
Played myself in scrabble. I won! What is the difference between playing with someone and playing someone? What if someone is replaced with the speaker themselves? Is the sentence in the quote cor...
The progressive verb "playing" in sentence #2 suggests you repeatedly played football as a child, and are probably still playing football in the present. It sounds like how a pro football player would tell their origin story: "I was already playing football when I was 5".
Cook (2000) defined language play as playing with words and meanings, playing in language and creating fictional words, and playing with pragmatics, which entails enjoyment with language.
The main point of the question is the difference between the tenses of "have been playing" and "have played". In addition to the tenses, we have the verb "play (tennis)", which is a dynamic verb (dynamic verbs have duration; they occur over time), and we also have the time phrase "for five years".
He had been playing for two hours. In the absence of any mention of such a subsequent event, this use of a past perfect continuous construction would be at best unusual, and arguably simply wrong.
Person B: someone next door was playing/had been playing heavy metal music all night long. In this situation, both those two options work, but was playing sounds better, and is overall the better choice. If you were having a conversation with someone whilst the music was playing, then you could use one of the other two options.
