Why you seriously need to play more
Monthly Issue: The neuroscience and philosophy of play.
Hey Big Thinkers,
I was texting this morning with Jonny Thomson, Big Think’s resident philosopher, who told me that the question, “What is a game?” is an inside joke among philosophers. You can thank Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose Philosophical Investigations showed how the meaning of a word isn’t necessarily found in its definitions. Games were his famous example.
Case in point: Solitaire and water polo are both games. What do they have in common? You can think of an answer, but it’s unlikely to be one that would help a Martian who’s never played a game immediately understand what “game” means in all contexts.
“Play” is a similarly slippery term, though it may be even harder to define. Yes, you are playing when you’re passing a football to a wide receiver, but you’re also playing when you’re improvising a jazz guitar solo, solving a crossword puzzle, or somersaulting down a hill. The Martian looks on, scratching his head.
Wittgenstein and definitions aside, we can’t help but know exactly what it means to play. It’s a deep-seated evolutionary drive not only in humans but across the animal kingdom — we use it to learn, practice, enjoy ourselves, bond with each other, and, in a handful of secure buildings across the U.S., study how we might avoid World War III.
That instinct is what our latest digital issue, The Power of Play, is all about.
Read on,
Stephen
Why play brings us pleasure
By Alex Hutchinson
The desire to play as children serves an evolutionary purpose, giving us a low-stakes way to practice skills we may need as adults. But not everything that helps us survive is fun (see: eating our veggies). So what makes play so rewarding? In this article, science journalist Alex Hutchinson digs into a theory that the pleasure we get from play is the brain’s way of rewarding us for exceeding certain expectations — and that there are valuable reasons to keep chasing the feeling as we age.
How playgrounds reinvented childhood
By Frank Jacobs
Labyrinthine caves. Overgrown graveyards. (Mostly) uninhabited islands. Mark Twain’s young protagonists, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, roamed all over their fictional hometown of St. Petersburg, Missouri, in search of adventure. Until the late 1800s, that kind of unsupervised wandering was commonplace for real kids in most parts of the U.S. But then came the playground. In this edition of Strange Maps, Frank Jacobs looks at the conditions that convinced society to confine play to a set location — and how that decision changed what it meant to grow up in America.
Animal play may be about more than survival
By Jason Bittel
Play is often practice for young animals, just like it is for young humans — when lion cubs wrestle, they’re rehearsing the moves they might later use to take down prey. But some playful activities seem to serve no obvious purpose. Could animals be doing them simply for fun? In this article, science journalist Jason Bittel talks to biologists about the stranger, less understood reasons animals make time for play.
More Articles
The hidden cost of taking yourself too seriously by Francesca Tighinean
From Pong to 18 quintillion planets: The evolution of our digital play spaces by Kevin Dickinson
Stephen Johnson is the executive editor at Big Think.
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As a Play Instigator for better corporate culture, you’re preaching to the choir. My fellow Play experts/practitioners, etc, have known the power of Play for a long time. Dr. Stuart Brown started the National Institute for Play and it’s the coolest thing on the planet!
We play to work out how to avoid World War III. That's sitting in the essay almost as an aside, and its the whole thing. Wargaming is play with the stakes left in.
Strip the labels and every example here is the same move. A cub wrestling, a kid on a seesaw, a jazz player chasing a wrong note, a war planner running a scenario. each one is a simulation you get to run before reality charges admission, and Hutchinson's reward theory is just the brain paying you to keep running them.
The most serious thing our species does, trying not to end itself, runs on the same instinct as two lion cubs in the grass. We never stopped playing. We just raised the stakes until we had to call it strategy.