You’ve Got Game The power of play serves us well through every age

From virtual to reality, the art of play, Bert Archer discovers, has a connective and rejuvenating power that serves us well through every age

EARLIER THIS YEAR, ON THE island of Kadavu in Fiji, I followed 15 entrepreneurs from Canada, the U.S. and Costa Rica who had paid as much as US$7,500 (plus airfare) to spend a week kayaking, surfing, diving and playing games with each other. And though it was meant to be fun, they weren’t on vacation.

They travelled halfway around the world because Mike Brcic, the Toronto founder of Mastermind Adventures, figures this sort of thing makes people better people and, as a result, better at business.

“I’ve been in the adventure travel business for 22 years,” Brcic told me as we sat on a wooden stoop overlooking an ocean whose colours make the Caribbean seem like a rough draft. “What I observed was that when you put people outdoors with these activities and confronting challenges, they tend to come together much more quickly than in other environments, like a conference room.”

Among the idiomatic phrases that have passed out of existence in the last few decades – Bob’s your uncle; That and a quarter will get you a cup of coffee; Things are going to hell in a handbasket – there is one that is more telling than most: Quit playing around, often followed by Grow up.

The past couple of hundred years have given play pretty short shrift. Play was something children did and, even then, it was only really tolerable because it was seen as a form of practice: playing house acclimated boys and girls to their future gender roles and responsibilities; tea parties were training for future social obligations; video games were good for hand-eye co-ordination. It was kids learning in their childish ways to become adults. Cute but to be indulged only for so long before kids had to buckle down.

But then play started to creep. Video games and role-playing games, once the purview of the young and socially awkward, began entering the mainstream. The business world started replacing workshops and seminars with team-building exercises that were mostly forms of play. And higher up the corporate ladder, pick-up basketball, laser tag and trivia nights joined golf and racquet sports as acknowledged social and professional lubricants, ways to make connections, both interpersonal and creative. By the time Swedish video-game celebrity Felix

Kjellberg, a.k.a. PewDiePie’s star rose in the mid-2010s, the YouTube videos of him talking while playing video games having collected more than 20 billion views, it was clear Western culture had become profoundly, unabashedly playful.

Waves of books, columns and tweets followed, lamenting the latest generation’ s( X, Y, Z) inability or refusal to be adult, mostly written by people who could still be overheard, glasses of Jack and Seven in hand, mumbling about your Uncle Bob.

But here’s the thing about play: in the middle of a maelstrom of mal content, of coarsening politics, widening wealth gaps and our impending climatological cataclysm, the evolution of play and its successful melding with so many cultural and social habits and systems is all kinds of right.

But just as we didn’t set out to change the climate, the fact that we’re going in the right direction with play seems to have been an accident.

Though these things are what you might call multi-causal, Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari, had more to do with it than most. Video games were originally imagined as an evolution of the pinball machine (with Allan Alcorn’s Pong being the first, in 1972). The thing about pinball, like pool and darts, is that unless you had quite a large or idiosyncratic house, they were things you did in public, at bars, clubs and diners. This put it in the same category as sports, something hived off, to be planned, an outing or possibly a spontaneous indulgence. But once Pong begat Space Invaders and Space Invaders begat Frogger and Frogger begat Wolfenstein 3D and Bushnell realized that there were more homes out there to sell games to than arcades, video games – which unlike board games and most card games could be played alone and ad infinitum – became more like reading or listening to music. With the Atari 2600, quickly followed by Intellivision, Coleco and the rest, people could obsess. With the amount of time spent playing no longer contingent on opening hours or how many quarters you had access to, people – kids – really dove in. High scores, cheats and Easter eggs entered the language, and while parents tsked, gamers – as they came to be known–gamed, developing new ways to understand, interact with and, before long, change the world. THOUGH WE WEREN’T GOING to know it, at least not scientifically, for several decades, it turns out that play is not practice. Psychologist Jean Piaget had an early insight, writing in the 1960s, “Play is the answer to the question: how does anything new ever come about?”

More recently, more pointed study has been devoted to play, in response at least in part to its increasing pervasiveness, and the findings are all pointing in the same direction. Whether it’s studying animals or people, it’s becoming clear that play is the way we get to know each other, get to know the world and ultimately get to spend more time in it. Bears spend most of their cubhood playing with each other, despite the fact that they grow up to be solitary creatures. And kit tens who play at hunting more than others do not grow up to be better hunting cats, either domestically or in the wild.

Dr. John Pruitt, an American who came to McMaster University in Hamilton, has noticed that a species known as social spiders spend an awful lot of time playing mating games, going through mating scenarios without actually copulating, time, Pruitt notes, that could be spent more productively weaving silk to feed and protect themselves. At first, he and others studying this breed of spider couldn’t understand why, until Pruitt discovered that the more the spiders played, the more reproductively successful they became and the less likely the females were to eat the males after sex. Though the games and their outcomes are obviously related, the significance of this discovery lay in the fact that mating games didn’t so much make the spiders better at sex as it made them more successful spiders. (The females, anyway. According to Pruitt, it’s not entirely clear if the males know the difference between sex and not-sex.)

Back in Fiji, Brcic led the group through about an hour of muddy forest and mangrove swamp to a waterfall and had everyone climb up it. He didn’t tell them in advance what they’d be doing. There were rules for getting up (so you wouldn’t fall), it was difficult but not mortally threatening, everyone was free to quit at any point and there was no purpose to it other than getting to a serene basin between two levels of the falls and frolicking in it. The laughter, cajoling and hijinks the group naturally fell into as they made the climb and the post-descent discussions and verbal replays attested to the fact that this was the very definition of play. This was followed up a few days later with an adult version of truth-or-dare that produced roughly the same ratio of laughter to tears and moping the teenaged version usually does.

“Play is important in and of itself because we need time for moments of joy and moments of awe,” Brcic told me ,“but those moments foster something even more meaningful, which is connections between people.”

Current research into play, happiness and health supports his approach.

“When we can laugh and joke,” writes Emma Seppälä, science director at Stanford’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education and co-director of wellness, Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, in Psychology Today UK, “We are remembering our joint humanity, our mutual desire for

happiness and love and our fundamental interconnectedness.” BOTH BRCIC AND SEPPÄLÄ ARE relying in part on a meta-study conducted in 2010 that looked at 148 studies covering more than 300,000 subjects that stronger social relationships result in a 50 per cent reduction of risk for mortality.

That’s huge. To put it in context, the U.S. National Institutes of Health have found that quitting smoking reduces your risk of dying by 13 percent.

Where the boomer generation bequeathed the world an abiding love for 4/4 music with a backbeat, genX has given us play. The older ones were in grade school when Pong came out, middle school for Space Invaders and made sure in high school that early versions of Castle Wolfenstein had enough capital to introduce one of the world’s first first-person shooter in time for their gen-Y nieces and nephews.

Unlike previous generations, who left their Radio Fly er sand BB guns behind when they got to middle school, gen-X kept their joysticks at their sides into college and beyond, giving permission to younger siblings and following generations to do the same. As tech got better, multi-player games – known as massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs – incorporated realtime social connection into the play itself, and it can hardly be a coincidence that it was gen-Y, the millennials, who popularized social media, and that gen-X took to it so naturally.

The offices of mega-millennial corporations like Facebook and Google now feature foozball tables and videogame rooms as a matter of course to entertain their engineers. And play has started spilling out of the office playgrounds. Half a million people have visited Jared Paul’s Happy Place as the “multisensory immersive rooms” filled with confetti, gumball machines, oversized highheeled shoes and lots and lots of primary colours for no particular reason have travelled from L.A. to Chicago, Toronto and Boston. There’s a whole science devoted to games; John Nash won a Nobel for his work on it, and people speak of the “gamification” of everything from marketing to government services, health to education. You’ve probably been given nine squares and asked to pick the ones that contain traffic lights or bridges to convince your device you’ re human. Even the science behind our ubiquitous loyalty programs is essentially playful, offering us points to level up to increasingly attractively named status tiers.

You may have recently seen an excerpt from Carl Sagan’s 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World that has gone viral for its “foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time” that eerily describes the climate change-denying, truth-defying, crystal-rubbing world Sagan’s children and grandchildren now live in. This is a common trope, and we’ve become used to seeing dystopic snippets from George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Neil Postman pop up on our feeds and take us aback.

But there’s another voice from that same inter war period that is considerably lighter in outlook. Despite being Dutch and very aware of the growing German threat, about which he also wrote, in 1938, Johan Huizinga wrote a book called Homo Ludens. Latin for The Playing Person, its thesis is that “civilization arises and unfolds in and as play.” It’s a remarkable proposition, made more remarkable for having been written during Europe’s darkest days in a hundred years. It’s a work of high scholarship, academic and not nearly as quotable as 1984, but where Orwell et al. are discouraging, Huizinga is exuberant; where the dystopians work from the assumption that there is something inherent in the human condition that makes the horrors their protagonists face practically inevitable, Huizinga spends a good deal of his book wrestling with the fact of fun. It is a necessary part of play, he writes, and since play is the essential building block of civilization, society and humanity as we know it, we are not only a fun-loving people but a funneeding people, possibly even a funexuding people, oozing fun the way a firefly radiates light.

As that trip to Fiji wound down, these lone-wolf entrepreneurs, focused builders of businesses with revenues of anywhere between about $1 million and $50 million, most of whom had not met before signing up with Brcic, had gotten in touch with their inner alpha-puppies, hugging each other at breakfast and opening up about their fears and insecurities.

There are plenty of problems in the world, but we can take some solace in the fact that in this one significant regard, we seem to be on the right track. Far from going to hell in a handbasket, we are in the process of stepping out of our own way and embracing something basic about ourselves and getting healthier and happier in the process.