I had been carrying around the Feb. 17, 2008 New York Times Magazine with the cover story entitled ‘Why Do We Play?’ by Robin Marantz Henig for the past ten days, mildly dreading the time when I’d finally read it, because I sensed that I was going to have issues with it. The cover art was composed solely of children playing. That tipped me off. (If the cover art were to have added some baby otters getting eaten by sea lions, rats with half their brains cut out, and children crying with bloody noses, it would have even more accurately reflected what was within.) Henig’s article starts promisingly, with a psychiatrist explaining to parents why play is important to all ages, but then proceeds to make a series of turns down increasingly narrow passages dealing with parenting and scientific research, and leaving a lot of vital stuff unsaid.
Here’s one passage from it, in which Henig, quoting Brian Sutton-Smith, whom she cites as one of the nation’s preeminent play scholars, writes: “…children learn all those necessary arts of trickery, deception, harassment, divination and foul play that their teachers won’t teach them but are most important in successful human relationships in marriage, business and war.”
Say whaaaat????
While, “trickery, deception, etc.” can be part of a game, they are first of all, not an art, not by any stretch of the imagination. Art is about revealing, illuminating, making known. Precisely the opposite of Sutton-Smith’s definition. The behaviors Sutton-Smith describes as “necessary” are antiquated remnants of an Industrial Age. Harassment? Are you kidding me? Deception? Maybe when Tom Brady fakes the jump pass and hands off to his running back, but in marriage? There is a case to be made for deception in war, I suppose, but there’s also a strong case to be made that we’re not fooling anybody but ourselves these days in Iraq or Afghanistan, and that maybe deception is overrated. As far as business is concerned, this is the era of transparency and collaboration — between countries, organizations, individuals. This is Twitter time, baby. I got your foul play right here, in your DNA.
To be fair, Henig researched her article exceptionally well, interviewing a lot of thought leaders in the field of play. She also describes, interestingly, how many writers and educators like Stephen J. Gould think play enables us to evolve as a species. “The adaptive advantage has often gone to those who ventured upon their possibility with cries of exultant commitment,” Henig further quotes Sutton-Smith.
But here’s the Holland Tunnel-sized hole in the logic of the material: It defines play as something that children do to prepare themselves for adulthood.
Beg your pardon?
The idea that play is the exclusive realm of children (and that it is a purely physical activity) disses the playfulness abiding in every entrepreneur launching a new business, every group of ladies sewing a quilt for the church picnic, every old dog who ever chased a frisbee. In failing to examine the importance of play at every age, by selling short the power of play to bring about positive change in the grown-up realm, Henig and the New York Times dropped the stickball on this one.
Einstein played, and unlocked new worlds. Bill Gates plays, one could say it’s a great big game of Risk, and one could say he’s rich because he’s good at playing it. Julia ‘Butterfly’ Hill played by sitting in a tree for a year, and got the logging industry to change its behaviors. Sam Walton played by wearing a grass skirt and dancing a hula down Wall Street in 1983 to pay off a bet to his employees, and we all know what happened after that. A 100-year old woman plays a drum for an online film, and becomes part of a story seen around the world. You see, far from being useful only to the young, play can be an engine for generating breakthrough behaviors, art, commerce and overall positive energy throughout our lives.
By pigeonholing play, and writing for an audience of ‘parents concerned that their children are maybe not playful enough, with mommy and daddy being so busy all the time and everybody so over-scheduled with their Suzuki violin and SAT prep lessons and and soccer practice and everything that we all need medication’ (my quotes), the Times misses some significant elements of the story. Here are a few of those elements:
Play is culture. Because it is built on agreement, play connects us with one another, our neighborhoods, our communities, in constructive ways. This weekend, I’m attending BarCampLA, two days of informative, loosely-structured play that connects, builds and strengthens geek culture in L.A. Play combines fun with a sense of purpose, resulting in new friendships, new business, new art — in possibilities that did not exist before the game transpired.
Play is productive. With games we understand the rules that make productive participation possible. The rule of law is essential, but it only explains what is illegal. To say that anything productive can come from laws and policies is like saying you can play football by understanding only the penalties. The rules of games, on the other hand, invite us to play to the limits (and extend beyond what we believe to be the limits) of our potential.
Play evolves. Just because we learn behaviors and strategies as children that come in handy as we get older does not mean that play ends with childhood. Quite the contrary. The more experienced we get in the world, the more complex and serious our games become, the deeper the lexicon, the more arcane the rules, the higher the stakes. Ask anyone who has ever gotten a drug approved by the FDA about the game they had to play. Ask anyone who ever needed their passport renewed in a day about the game they had to play.
The question posed in the Times headline, “What do We Learn From Play?” can be answered differently by every one of us. We learn to swim. We learn to fall. We learn teamwork. We learn to avoid trouble. We learn the resourcefulness it takes to get passports renewed in a day. If it’s final answers ye seek, here be mine: We learn who we are, and who we are to one another. We learn to be both realistic and imaginative. We learn to extend life’s possibilities. We learn how to have fun. We learn to improvise. Arrrgh.
Tags: Brian Sutton-Smith, Children, GameChangers, Games, Improvisation, NY Times, Play, Productivity, Robin Marantz Henig