"They don't have much to do with immediate working life," says Sutton-Smith, "but that doesn't mean they're a waste of time." He calls play—are you ready?—an autonomous intrinsically motivated activity. We do it spontaneously, just because it's fun.
Like art and music, play has a verbal and body language all its own. Even studies of children at play show that language use is different during play than during normal conversation. For one thing, it takes place mainly in the past tense. A typical exchange between playmates might go: "And then let's say that we went to your place and your mother wouldn't let us in so we had to go home and my mother was out and so we had to make this meal that we are making now. OK? Is that OK?... OK. And what else did we do?" "We did a poop. Ha-ha!"
Play is also stylized, with regulated ways of behaving. Games have rules. Still, people are very active within its frame. In other words, when you're chased, you run. "Play is always a fantasy, but once you get into the frame it is quite real, and everything you do is real. You put acres and acres of real movement and real action and real belief in it," says Sutton-Smith. So you scream with fear when you're being chased.
Sutton-Smith is betting that neuroimaging studies of the brain will eventually reveal a ludic center in the brain. And he locates it somewhere in the frontal lobes. What play does, he says, is simulate and make more flexible fear responses that are reflexes in the more primitive organism or in more primitive parts of the brain. "What we have in play is a simulation of an anxiety attack," he says.
With one all-important difference. It's anxiety—complete with uncertainty—but without the adrenaline and endocrine response. Studies in dogs show that "they're rushing around as if they're in extremity, but adrenaline is not being pumped into the system. Play looks like an emergency but isn't. It's a simulated emergency. The frontal lobes win out over the reflexive phenomena in the back of the brain."
In the simulated explosions and aggressions of play, we get to explore and experiment with feelings. It is one of the few times we are in charge of circumstances. We have much more autonomy that usual, and exchange habit and boredom for novelty and the exercise of our own competencies. And that creates excitement.
Somewhere down the line, some creature was untethered from strict necessity and afforded the luxury of an excess action, and then repeated making the move that wasn't strictly necessary. "That animal was in some way turned into a more surviving animal as a result," says Sutton-Smith.
We play because it reflects the brains we have and the cultures we live in. By and large, he points out, "the connections in the brain fade away unless used. We know that early stimulation of children leads to higher cognitive scores. Playful stimulation probably hits all kinds of synaptic possibilities. It is all make-believe and all over the map. The potentiality of the synapses and the potentiality of playfulness are a beautiful marriage."
When adults play, notes Sutton-Smith, citing a series of Dutch studies of video-game playing, their memory is better. They are cognitively more capable. And they are happier.
The same is true for kids. In one study, Austrian children were offered a cache of toys—once they got their work done. As a result, the children were more eager to go to school. The teachers liked being in the classrooms teaching and being with the kids more, and the parents liked the school more. And pointing to a homegrown study at Temple University, children arriving in grade one with a reading background were compared with kids having a more old-fashioned play background. The children who got the reading instruction performed better during the first grade but not by the end of the year. And, Sutton-Smith reports, "they were much more depressed. The opposite of play is not work. It's depression."
Although we all need to play, we don't all play the same way. We differ significantly in play style, Penn State's Garry Chick has found. In studies of tic-tac-toe players, Chick observed differences along several dimensions. First there were those he calls high-velocity players; for them, the fewer strokes the better. Low-velocity players, on the other hand, were engaged in the play of play; they simply enjoyed making the moves. Players also differ by strategy. Some people play to win. Others play not to lose; for them, a draw is as pleasurable as a win.
Some of us like to play in ways that test physical skill. Some prefer games of pure strategy, like chess. Others of us opt for word games and puzzles at any chance we get. Some of us—the very lucky ones?—get to play in our work. Scientists and writers, for example, regularly play with ideas.
How we play is related, in myriad ways, to our core sense of self. Play is an exercise in self-definition; it reveals what we choose to do, not what we have to do. We not only play because we are. We play the way we are. And the ways we could be. Play is our free connection to pure possibility.
It is a day at the beach.
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