To Play - Dread or Alive?

Why is it that something we did all the time, in our minds, with our bodies and language, as the obvious way of exploring and understanding the world, have become something we shy away from, expecting it to be unnecessary at best and humiliating at worst?

I love play – and it can make me deeply uncomfortable. In this I guess Im like most people. I asked on LinkedIn “Can you play on command?” and the comment-section filled up with horrible experiences of being pushed into somebody elses idea of fun, but also experiences of safe places that allowed you to play on command and reflections on how sometimes you need to step into something challenging to access the deep joys of play.

What is Play

What is the wisdom of play? Do we need to reclaim something we lost, invent new ways to play or is it just something silly and even potentially destructive to the organizations of grown-ups?

I want to argue that play, both as mindset and activity is of utter importance in these serious times. And the reason why might contain the answer to our fear of it.

Richard Schechner, one of the founders of performance theory, organizes play, games, sports and ritual under the same heading. These activities share some commonalities, a particular relationship with time, a particular relationship to objects and non-productivity in terms of goods. Schechner talks about inner and outer constraints as conditions for the freedom of play. No constraints create loss and confusion rather than freedom. If the outer constraint is tight (like a rigid set of rules) the inner can be looser, and vice versa.

Johan Huizinga is the historian that became famous for writing about how play is part of forming a civilization. Play can be competition and it can be artistic expressions.

Here I would like to direct my focus to what could be called creative competences or maybe play 2.0 (or perhaps more accurately play one million.0)

How to think Play

Play is not normal. It is a challenge to what we generally agree on as the way things are done (in this school/family/village/workspace)

The more we learn about how we are supposed to sit on chairs as opposed to using them to climb on or were them as oversized hats, the more we defend sitting at chairs for one simple reason – we don´t want to be the outcast. We sit on chairs and hope that we are an acceptable part of the group no matter what we think or feel about sitting on chairs. A couple of people have replied to my question about if you can play on command, that it would be like making love on command. I find this utterly interesting since it implies two things. One is that play is in and of itself something deeply intimate that would be ruined if subjected to an imposed structure. And that we are totally fine being subjected to that structure in other contexts. (Wonderful to imagine saying “I can’t do this staff-meeting or presentation – it´s like forcing me to make love).

Play is suggesting something out of the ordinary. Considering that the ordinary has put us in a lot of trouble, we desperately need suggestions of something else. When we are looking for this something else, we are inevitably exposed to our fear of the unknown.

Learning to play is rewiring your mindset into loving the unknown.  And that is probably something most of us have done before. As kids, we didn´t eat snow or wait in hiding in an uncomfortable position or climbed painstakingly on top of the playhouse because it was business as usual or the easy way out. We did it because it was interesting and challenging and we didn´t know what would happen next.

Play and learning

Most of us have been brought up in learning-environments where play and acquiring knowledge where separated. It was about getting it right – not getting it wrong in the most fun way, about the correct answer rather than the most useful questions. And it was about sitting still and forcing your brain to play by the rules.

It´s unfortunate in multiple ways. In Annie Murphy Pauls book The extended Mind; Thinking outside the brain, one can read about all the multiple ways we cognitive science show that we increase our intelligence by interaction – be it with nature, each other, tech, making things with our hands.

In Joined Up Thinking by neuro-scientist Hanna Chritchlow, we can learn how the collective outsmarts the individual.

Interaction and community is different from individual efforts. Doing something on your own also aloe you to make mistakes fast and stick with them. You can grant yourself the luxury of certainty, wish is addictive as a drug. If you place yourself in interaction and collaborative thinking, uncertainty and ambiguity is a given. You need to negotiate, fumble, challenge your own ideas and wait.

How to stay in uncertainty without freaking out – play. If we think about play as ways to understand and explore topics together, that opens for novelty, play can mean making images, using storytelling, building things with your hands or using the space in new ways.

What can play do

Play shifts the hierarchies of people, language and actions. If play is to successfully support collective learning there needs to be a shared space of liminality. The word liminal comes from the Latin word for threshold. This is the curated spaces in-between certainties. This is where in the anthropological context you go for example between childhood and adulthood. A liminal space needs to be agreed on and there has to be a shared willingness to step away from the roles of the ordinary.

When hierarchies are shifted (even temporary) and new roles can be experimented with, it brings knowledge to the table that might previously have been obscured, silenced or ignored.

Therefore play acts as a format of innovation, a holder of collaboration and a utilizer of competences and experiences that are needed but not asked for.

Play can be auditioning our tomorrow.

Play is also a way of seeing - understanding everything as material for something else. When you are deep into the ways of playfulness it stops being a project and start becoming a way of understanding the world. You are constantly asking what if. What if this could function differently, what if I did something I didn’t do yesterday but also and most importantly; I wonder what this person (absolutely anyone) can teach me.

How to make your space a playground:

*Come at things from at least three angles

*Separate trial and error – create in one space and evaluate in another.

*Speak at least as much about fragilities, fears, ambivalence (but don’t try to fix it – just share it and sit with it) as about goals, KPIs and motivators.

*Promote questions and use them not to be answered but to be explored (where could we go with this question, who to talk to about this question, if this question was divided into five sub-questions, if this question was a party, a prototype…)

*Spend a little time with whatever you think is weird everyday (and best of all together) – poetry, wrestling, drama, pottery, pan flute, whatever.

*Try everything on that someone in your team proposes, with joy and curiosity (it works equally well when you fake it)

The worst thing that can happen is that you learn something.

 On my nightstand;

The Power Of Language; Mutilingualism, Self and Society             Viorica Marian

Our Strangers                   Lydia Davis

A Black Gaze; Artists Changing

How we see the world         Tina M. Cam