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Free to Learn Chapter 7. THE PLAYFUL STATE OF MIND

Author: Peter Gray Publisher: New York, NY: Basic Books. Publish Date: 2013 Review Date: Status:⌛️

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ABOUT THIRTY YEARS AGO, a team of research psychologists headed by James Michaels at Virginia Polytechnic and State University conducted a simple experiment in a real-world setting. They hung around the pool hall in a university student center and watched friendly games of eight ball. At first they observed unobtrusively and counted the percentage of successful shots that each player made, in order to categorize players as experts or novices. They then moved in closer and began watching in a way that made it obvious to the players that they were evaluating their performances. They did this for multiple players over multiple games. Here’s what they found: close observation caused the experts to perform even better than they did without observation, but it had the opposite effect on the novices. All in all, the average success rate of the experts rose from 71 percent up to 80 percent under observation, while that for novices fell from 36 percent to 25 percent.1

  1. Michaels et al. (1982).

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Other experiments, using a wide variety of tasks, have produced similar results. When research subjects believe their performance is being observed and evaluated, those who are already skilled become better and those who are not so skilled become worse. The debilitating effects of being observed and evaluated have been found to be even greater for mental tasks, such as solving difficult math problems or generating good rebuttals to the views of classical philosophers, than they are for physical tasks, such as shooting pool.2 When the task involves creative thought or the learning of a difficult skill, the presence of an observer or evaluator inhibits almost all participants.3 The higher the status of the evaluator, and the more consequential the evaluation, the greater the inhibition of learning.

  1. Allport (1920); Beilock et al. (2004).

  2. Aiello and Douthitt (2001).

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There is every reason to believe that this principle, that evaluation facilitates the performance of those who are already skilled and inhibits that of learners, applies to students in school. Schools are presumably places for learning and practice, not for experts to show off. Yet, with their incessant monitoring and evaluation of students’ performances, schools seem to be ideally designed to boost the performances of those who are already good and to interfere with learning. Those who have somehow already learned the school tasks, maybe at home, generally perform well in this setting, but those who haven’t tend to flounder. Evaluation drives a wedge between those who already know how and those who don’t, pushing the former up and the latter down. Evaluation has this pernicious effect because it produces a mind-set that is opposite from the playful state of mind, which is the ideal state for learning new skills, solving new problems, and engaging in all sorts of creative activities.

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The Power of Play: Four Conclusions

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The four conclusions discussed here—each of which is supported by numerous experiments—are well known to research psychologists who study learning and performance, but not so well known to educators. Taken as a whole, they show that learning, problem solving, and creativity are worsened by interventions that interfere with playfulness and improved by interventions that promote playfulness.4

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  1. Much of the research that I cite in this chapter was conducted by people who don’t use the term “play” or “playful” in describing their hypotheses and findings. They talk instead about “pressured” versus “unpressured” states of mind, or about positive moods versus negative moods, or about self-motivated tasks and goals versus those imposed by others. But from the perspective of this chapter, all such research is about play. Play is unpressured, self-motivated activity, conducted with a positive frame of mind.

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Pressure to Perform Well Interferes with New Learning

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This is the conclusion supported by research such as that described in the chapter introduction. An easy way to apply pressure to perform well in a research study is to observe and evaluate the performance in a way that is obvious to the performer. Dozens of experiments have shown that such pressure worsens performance in those who are not yet highly skilled at a task or who are just beginning to learn it. People “just playing” at pool, or at math, or at coming up with clever rebuttals to arguments, do better than those who are trying to impress an evaluator—unless they are already highly skilled at the task.

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Pressure to Be Creative Interferes with Creativity

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Psychologist Theresa Amabile has devoted a distinguished career, mostly at Brandeis University, to studying creativity. In a typical experiment she would ask groups of people—sometimes kids, sometimes adults—to do a creative task, such as to paint a picture, make a collage, or write a poem, within a certain time period. Each experiment involved some sort of manipulation aimed at increasing the participants’ motivation. She would tell some but not others that their product would be evaluated and ranked for creativity, or that it would be entered into a contest, or that they could receive a reward for creative work.

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When the projects were completed, she would have them all evaluated for creativity by a panel of judges who did not know about the experimental manipulations. Creativity is hard to define, but the judges showed significant consistency in their evaluations. They gave highest rankings to projects that were original and surprising yet also somehow satisfying, meaningful, and coherent.

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The overriding result of the experiments was this: any intervention that increased the incentive to be creative had the effect of reducing creativity.5 In experiment after experiment, the most creative products were made by those who were in the non-incentive condition—the ones who worked under the impression that their products would not be evaluated or entered into contests and who were not offered any prizes. They thought they were just creating the product for fun. In the terminology of this chapter, they were playing.

  1. Amabile (1996); Hennessey and Amabile (2010).

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If you want to increase the degree to which people will pull hard on a rope, or persist at some boring, repetitive task, such as shelling beans or copying sentences, you can succeed by giving them an incentive to perform better. If you enter them into a contest, or watch them conspicuously, or pay them well for excellent performance, their performance improves. But creativity doesn’t work that way. High incentive seems to foul up rather than improve the process. You can’t become creative by simply trying really, really hard. Creativity is a spark that comes when mental conditions are just right, and high incentive seems to mess up those conditions.

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As Amabile herself points out, her findings are no surprise to people who make their living by being creative. Many highly successful novelists, playwrights, artists, musicians, and poets have written, or stated in interviews, that to think and produce creatively, they must forget about pleasing an audience, or pleasing critics, or winning prizes, or earning royalties. All such thoughts stifle creativity. Instead they must focus fully on the product they are trying to create, as if creating it for its own sake. For example, when the eminent novelist John Irving was asked whether he worried, when writing, about whether a book would sell, he responded, “No, no, oh no. You can’t, you can’t! … When you’re writing, only think about the book.”6

  1. Amabile (2001).

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Inducing a Playful Mood Improves Creativity and Insightful Problem Solving

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In an experiment performed after most of Amabile’s classic studies, Paul Howard-Jones and his colleagues demonstrated a way to improve artistic creativity. In their experiment, young children were asked to produce collages, which were then assessed for creativity by a panel of judges. Before producing the collage, some of the children were put into a playful mood by allowing them twenty-five minutes of free play with salt dough. The other children spent that twenty-five-minute period at a nonplayful task, copying text. The result was that those in the play condition made collages that were judged to be significantly more creative than did those in the nonplay condition.7

  1. Howard-Jones et al. (2002).

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Other researchers—most notably psychologist Alice Isen, who is now at Cornell University—have studied the effect of mood on the ability to solve insight problems. Insight problems require some kind of creative leap, which allows the person to see the problem differently than before. Such problems often seem impossible up until the moment of insight, after which the solution seems obvious. A classic example of such a problem, used in countless psychological experiments after its development in the 1940s, is Duncan’s candle problem.

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In this task, research participants are given a small candle, a book of matches, and a box of tacks and are asked to attach the candle to a bulletin board in a way that the candle can be lit and will burn properly. They are allowed to use no objects other than those they are given. The trick to solving the problem is to realize that the tacks can be dumped out of the box and the box can then be tacked to the bulletin board and used as a shelf on which to mount the candle. In the typical test situation, most people, including students at elite colleges, fail to solve this problem within the allotted time period. They fail to see that the tack box can be used for something other than a container for tacks. In Isen’s experiment, some of the college student participants watched a five-minute clip from a slapstick comedy film before being presented with the candle problem. A second group saw a five-minute serious film about mathematics, and a third group saw no film. The results were dramatic. Seventy-five percent of the students who saw the comedy, compared to only 20 percent and 13 percent of the students in the other two groups, respectively, solved the problem successfully.8 Just five minutes of humor, which had nothing to do with the candle problem, made the problem solvable for the majority of participants.

  1. Isen, Daubman, and Nowicki (1987).

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In other experiments, Isen and her colleagues showed that mood manipulations can improve insight in many other situations as well, including situations that could have life-or-death significance. In one such experiment, the researchers presented real physicians with a case history of a difficult-to-diagnose liver disease. The case included some misleading information, which created a barrier to identifying the relevant information and arriving at the correct solution. Mood manipulation was accomplished by giving some of the doctors a little bag of candy before presenting them with the problem. Consistent with Isen’s expectations, those who got the bag of candy arrived at the correct diagnosis more quickly than those who didn’t. They reasoned more flexibly, took into account all of the information more readily, and were less likely to get stuck on false leads than were those who had not received candy.9

  1. Estrada, Isen, and Young (1997).

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Isen and other theorists who refer to her work describe such experiments as showing that a “positive mood” improves creative, insightful reasoning. I would be more specific and suggest that the particular type of positive mood that is most effective is a playful mood. I suspect that the slapstick movie led college students to feel, “Hey, this experiment is about having fun, not a test,” and I suspect that the little bag of candy had a similar effect on the physicians. Of course, the real trick for a physician is to maintain that mood during the serious business of real diagnosis.

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A Playful State of Mind Enables Young Children to Solve Logic Problems

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In experiments conducted in England, M. G. Dias and P. L. Harris found that young children could solve logic problems in the context of play that they seemed unable to solve in a serious context.10 The problems were syllogisms, the classic type of logic problem originally described by Aristotle. A syllogism requires a person to combine the information in two premises to decide whether a particular conclusion is true, false, or indeterminate (cannot be determined from the premises). Syllogisms are generally easy when the premises coincide with concrete reality, but are more difficult when the premises are counter-factual (contradictions to reality). The prevailing belief at the time that the British researchers conducted these experiments was that the ability to solve counterfactual syllogisms depends on a type of reasoning that is completely lacking in young children.

Here’s an example of a counterfactual syllogism the researchers used:

All cats bark (major premise). Muffins is a cat (minor premise). Does Muffins bark?

  1. Dias and Harris (1988, 1990).

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Previous research—including research by the famous Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget—had shown that children under about ten or eleven years old regularly fail to solve such syllogisms correctly—that is, they fail to give answers that logicians take as the correct answers. When the British researchers put syllogisms like this to young children in a serious tone of voice, the children answered as Piaget and others would expect. They said things like, “No, cats go meow, they don’t bark.” They acted as if they were unable to think about a premise that did not fit with their concrete, real-world experiences. But when the researchers presented the same problems in a playful tone of voice, which made it clear that they were talking about a pretend world, children as young as four years old regularly solved the problems. They said, “Yes, Muffins barks.”

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Think of it: four-year-olds in play easily solved logic problems that they were not supposed to be able to solve until they were about ten or eleven years old. In fact, subsequent experiments showed that, to a lesser degree, even two-year-olds solved such problems when presented in a clearly playful manner.11 I’ll explain later why these results should not be as surprising as they seemed to many people. But perhaps you can already see why they shouldn’t.

  1. Richards and Sanderson (1999).

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ALL OF THESE FINDINGS tell us something about the power of play. Learning, creativity, and problem solving are facilitated by anything that promotes a playful state of mind, and they are inhibited by evaluation, expectation of rewards, or anything else that destroys a playful state of mind. But this raises a new, big question: What exactly is play, and what makes it such a powerful force for learning, creativity, and problem solving?

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What Is Play?

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Play is a concept that fills our minds with contradictions when we try to think deeply about it. Play is serious, yet not serious; trivial yet profound; imaginative and spontaneous, yet bound by rules and anchored in the real world. It is childish, yet underlies many of the greatest accomplishments of adults. From an evolutionary perspective, play is nature’s way of ensuring that children and other young mammals will learn what they must to survive and do well. From another perspective, play is God’s gift that makes life on earth worthwhile.

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It is not easy to define play, but it is worth our while to spend some time attempting to do so, as play’s defining characteristics are strong clues for explaining its educative power. Here are three general points about play that are worth keeping in mind.

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The first point is that the characteristics of play all have to do with motivation and mental attitude, not with the overt form of the behavior itself. Two people might be throwing a ball, or pounding nails, or typing words on a computer, and one might be playing while the other is not. To tell which one is playing and which one is not, you have to infer from their expressions and the details of their actions something about why they are doing what they are doing and their attitude toward it.

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The second point toward definition is that play is not necessarily all or none. Play can blend with other motives and attitudes, in proportions ranging anywhere from zero up to 100 percent. For that reason, the adjective playful, which is understood as something that can vary by degrees, is often more useful than the noun play, which tends to be interpreted as all or none. People can, to varying degrees, bring a “playful attitude” or “playful spirit” to whatever activity they are doing. In general, pure play (activity that is 100 percent playful) is more common in children than in adults. In adults, playfulness most often blends with other attitudes and motives having to do with adult responsibilities. We don’t have metrics for these things, but I would estimate that my behavior in writing this book is about 80 percent play. That percentage varies from time to time as I go along; it decreases when I worry about deadlines or how critics will evaluate it, and it increases when I’m focused only on the current task of researching or writing.

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The third point is that play is not neatly defined in terms of some single identifying characteristic. Rather, it is defined as a confluence of several characteristics. People before me who have studied and written about play have, among them, described quite a few such characteristics, but they can all be boiled down, I think, to the following five: (1) play is self-chosen and self-directed; (2) play is activity in which means are more valued than ends; (3) play has structure or rules that are not dictated by physical necessity but emanate from the minds of the players; (4) play is imaginative, nonliteral, mentally removed in some way from “real” or “serious” life; and (5) play involves an active, alert, but non-stressed frame of mind.13

  1. A shorter version of this discussion of the defining features of play appeared in Gray (2009).

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The more fully an activity entails all of these characteristics, the more inclined most people are to refer to that activity as play. By “most people” I don’t mean just scholars. Even young children are most likely to use the word play to label activities that most fully contain these five characteristics. These characteristics seem to capture our intuitive sense of what play is. Notice that all of the characteristics have to do with the motivation or attitude the person brings to the activity. Let me elaborate on these characteristics, one by one, and expand a bit on each by pointing out some of its implications for thinking about the educative value of play.

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Play Is Self-Chosen and Self-Directed

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Play is, first and foremost, an expression of freedom. It is what one wants to do as opposed to what one is obliged to do. That is perhaps the most basic ingredient of most people’s commonsense understanding of play. In one research study, for example, kindergartners identified as “play” only those activities that were voluntary—the things they did at recess—and as “work” all of the activities that were part of the school curriculum, including those that were designed to be enjoyable, such as finger painting, running relay races, and listening to stories.14

  1. Particularly useful sources in generating this list of play’s defining characteristics were Huizinga (1944/1955), Rubin et al. (1983), Smith (2005a), Sylva et al. (1976), and Vygotsky (1933/1978).

  2. King (1982).

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The joy of play is the ecstatic feeling of liberty. Play is not always accompanied by smiles and laughter, nor are smiles and laughter always signs of play; but play is always accompanied by a feeling of: Yes, this is what I want to do right now. Players are free agents, not pawns in someone else’s game. Players not only choose to play or not to play, but they also direct their own actions during play. As I will argue soon, play always involves rules of some sort, but all players must freely accept the rules, and if rules are changed, then all players must agree to the changes. That is why play is the most democratic of all activities. In social play (play involving more than one player), one player may emerge for a period as the leader, but only at the will of all the others. Every rule a leader proposes must be approved, at least tacitly, by all of the other players. The ultimate freedom in play is the freedom to quit. Because the players want to keep the game going, and because they know that other players will quit and the game will end if they are not happy, play is a powerful vehicle for learning how to please others while also pleasing oneself. I referred to this in earlier chapters, and will elaborate further in Chapter 8.

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This point about play being self-chosen and self-directed is ignored by, or perhaps unknown to, adults who try to take control of children’s play (and thereby ruin it). Adults can play with children, and in some cases can even be leaders in children’s play, but to do so requires at least the same sensitivity that children themselves show to the needs and wishes of all the players. Because adults are commonly viewed as authority figures, children often feel less able to quit, or to disagree with the proposed rules, when an adult is leading than when a child is leading. And so the result often is something that, for many of the children, is not play at all. When a child feels coerced, the play spirit vanishes and all of the advantages of that spirit go with it. Math games in school and adult-led sports—with their adult rules—are not play for those who feel they have to participate. Adult-led games can be great fun for kids who freely choose them, but can seem like punishment for kids who haven’t made that choice.

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What is true for children’s play is also true for adults’ sense of play. Research studies have shown repeatedly that adults who have a great deal of freedom as to how and when to do their work commonly experience that work as play, even—in fact, especially—when the work is difficult. In contrast, people who must follow others’ directions, with little creative input of their own, rarely experience their work as play.15 Moreover, dozens of research studies have shown that when people choose to perform some task, they perform it more fully and effectively than when they feel compelled by others to perform it.16 When compelled, they tend to do the minimum necessary to meet the requirements. I’m sure these findings come as no great surprise to you; social scientists sometimes go to considerable lengths to prove the obvious. It is interesting, though, that people so often forget these obvious points when thinking about children. Everyone, regardless of age, prefers freedom and self-direction to rigid control by others. When we compel children to “learn” in school, they are inclined to do the least possible learning that they can get away with, just as adults are in similar circumstances.

  1. Kohn (1980); Kohn and Slomczynski (1990).

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Play Is Motivated by Means More Than Ends

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Many of our actions are “free” in the sense that we don’t feel that other people are making us do them, but are not free, or at least not experienced as free, in another sense. These are actions that we feel we must do to achieve some necessary or desired goal. We scratch an itch to get rid of the itch, flee from a tiger to avoid getting eaten, study an uninteresting book to get a good grade on a test, work at a boring job to get money. If there were no itch, tiger, test, or need for money, we would not scratch, flee, study, or do the boring work. In those cases we are not playing.

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To the degree that we engage in an activity purely to achieve some end, or goal, separate from the activity itself, that activity is not play. What we value most, when we are not playing, are the results of our actions. The actions are merely means to the ends. When we are not playing, we typically opt for the shortest, least effortful means of achieving our goal. The nonplayful student, for example, does the least studying that she can to get the “A” that she desires, and her studying is focused directly on the goal of doing well on the tests. Any learning not related to that goal is, for her, wasted effort.

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In play, however, all this is reversed. Play is activity conducted primarily for its own sake. The playful student enjoys studying the subject and cares little about the test. In play, attention is focused on the means, not the ends, and players do not necessarily look for the easiest routes to achieving the ends. Think of a cat preying on a mouse in contrast to a cat playing at preying on a mouse. The former takes the quickest route for killing the mouse. The latter tries various ways of catching the mouse, not all efficient, and lets the mouse go each time so it can try again. The preying cat enjoys the end; the playing cat enjoys the means. (The mouse, of course, enjoys none of this.) Another way of saying all this is to say that play is intrinsically motivated (motivated by the activity itself), not extrinsically motivated (motivated by some reward that is separate from the activity itself).

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Play often has goals, but the goals are experienced as an intrinsic part of the game, not as the sole reason for engaging in the game’s actions. Goals in play are subordinate to the means for achieving them. For example, constructive play (the playful building of something) is always directed toward the goal of creating the object the player has in mind. But notice that the primary objective in such play is the creation of the object, not the having of the object. Children making a sand castle would not be happy if an adult came along and said, “You can stop all your effort now. I’ll make the castle for you.” That would spoil their fun. Similarly, children or adults playing a competitive game have the goal of scoring points and winning, but if they are truly playing, it is the process of scoring and trying to win that motivates them, not the points themselves or the status of having won. If someone would just as soon win by cheating as by following the rules, or get the trophy and praise through some shortcut that bypasses the game process, then that person is not playing.

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Adults can test the degree to which their work is play by asking themselves this: “If I could receive the same pay, the same prospects for future pay, the same amount of approval from other people, and the same sense of doing good for the world for not doing this job as I am receiving for doing it, would I quit?” If the person would eagerly quit, the job is not play. To the degree that the person would quit reluctantly, or not quit, the job is play. It is something that the person enjoys independently of the extrinsic rewards received for doing it.

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B. F. Skinner—the famous behavioral scientist whose views dominated psychology during the mid-twentieth century—developed an entire psychology built on the idea that all behavior is done to achieve desired ends, or rewards, or what Skinner called “reinforcers.” Psychology has moved beyond that narrow view, but a variation of it still dominates among economists. Economists tend to see us as rational accountants, whose reasoning is geared toward achieving the maximum amount of money or goods with the minimum amount of effort. Modern economic theory, like old-fashioned Skinnerian psychology, works rather nicely for explaining how to get people (and rats) to do things they don’t want to do, but falls apart entirely as soon as we turn our attention to play. Since play, to some degree, infuses most of what we humans do, Skinnerian psychology and modern economic theory have limited utility for understanding human behavior.

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Researchers have shown that rewards in some cases actually reduce the likelihood that a person will engage in an activity, by instilling the idea that the activity is work rather than play. Of course, Mark Twain, who demonstrated more understanding of human behavior than any behavioral scientist I know, told us about that principle long ago. Tom Sawyer got his friend Ben to whitewash the fence not by paying him for it, but by acting as if Ben should pay him for the privilege. In a classic experiment conducted in the early 1970s, a group of researchers at the University of Michigan did the reverse of what Tom Sawyer did—they turned a previously enjoyable activity into work for a group of preschool children by rewarding them for it.17 Initial observations showed that all of the children enjoyed drawing with colored felt-tip pens; they spent a good portion of their free time doing that. In the experiment, the children were divided into three groups. Those in the expected-reward group were told in advance that they would receive an attractive “good player” certificate for drawing a picture with felt-tip pens. Those in the unexpected-reward group were asked to draw a picture and then were given the certificate as a surprise afterward. Those in the no-reward group were asked to draw a picture and received nothing. The experiment was conducted in such a way that the children in each group did not know what was happening with the other groups.

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The experiment had two significant results. First, those in the expected-reward group produced significantly worse drawings than did those in the other two groups, as judged by evaluators who did not know which group the drawings came from. Second, those in the expected-reward group spent only about half as much time drawing with felt-tip pens, in subsequent free-play sessions, as did those in the other two groups. No differences were found between the children in the no-reward and unexpected-reward groups. The researchers interpreted these results as evidence that the expected reward had caused children in that group to reframe their view of drawing with felt-tip pens. The children came to see such drawing as something one does for a reward rather than as something fun to do for its own sake. Therefore, when they had to draw, they put less effort into it (only enough to get the reward), and they tended to avoid drawing when no reward was available. The unexpected reward didn’t have this effect, because that reward could not have served as a motivator. Those children did not know they would get a certificate, so they could not have said to themselves, “I’m only drawing this picture to get the certificate.” Dozens of follow-up experiments, with adults as well as with children, have produced similar results using a wide variety of activities and rewards.18

  1. For an analysis of some of these studies, see Patall et al. (2008).

  2. Lepper et al. (1973).

  3. For a review of such experiments, see Lepper and Henderlong (2000).

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The implications of such findings are pretty obvious. It is possible to ruin play by focusing attention too strongly on rewards and outcomes. This happens in competitive games when the goal of winning overtakes that of simply enjoying the game. When a game becomes primarily a means of proving oneself to be better than someone else, or of supporting the team’s felt “need” to win, it becomes something other than play. All sorts of play can be ruined when rewards are made to appear to be the main reason for engaging in the activity. I suspect that many more of us would play in the realms of history, mathematics, science, and foreign languages were it not for our schools’ attempts to encourage them through rewards and punishments, turning those potentially enjoyable activities into work.

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Play Is Guided by Mental Rules

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Play is freely chosen activity, but it is not free-form activity. Play always has structure, derived from rules in the player’s mind. This point is really an extension of the attention to means in play. The rules of play are the means. To play is to behave in accordance with self-chosen rules. The rules are not like rules of physics, nor like biological instincts, which are automatically followed. Rather, they are mental concepts that often require conscious effort to keep in mind and follow.

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A basic rule of constructive play, for example, is that you must work with the chosen medium in a manner aimed at producing or depicting some specific object or design. You don’t pile up blocks randomly; you arrange them deliberately in accordance with your mental image of what you are trying to make. Even rough-and-tumble play (playful fighting and chasing), which may look wild from the outside, is constrained by rules. An always-present rule in play fighting, for example, is that you mimic some of the actions of real fighting, but you don’t really hurt the other person. You don’t hit with all your force (at least not if you are the stronger of the two); you don’t kick, bite, or scratch. Play fighting is much more controlled than real fighting; it is always an exercise in restraint.

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Among the most complex forms of play, rule-wise, is what play researchers call sociodramatic play—the playful acting out of roles or scenes, as when children are playing “house,” or acting out a marriage, or pretending to be superheroes. The fundamental rule here is that you must abide by your and the other players’ shared understanding of the role you are playing. If you are the pet dog in a game of “house,” you must walk around on all fours and bark rather than talk. If you are Wonder Woman, and you and your playmates believe that Wonder Woman never cries, then you refrain from crying, even when you fall down and hurt yourself.

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The category of play with the most explicit rules is that called formal games. These include games such as checkers and baseball, with rules that are specified, verbally, in ways designed to minimize ambiguity in interpretation. The rules of these games commonly are passed along from one generation of players to the next. Many formal games in our society are competitive, and one purpose of the formal rules is to make sure the same restrictions apply equally to all competitors. Players of formal games, if they are true players, must adopt these rules as their own for the period of the game. Of course, except in “official” versions of such games, players commonly modify the rules to fit their own needs and desires, but each modification must be agreed upon by all players.

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The main point here is that every form of play involves a good deal of self-control. When not playing, children (and adults, too) may act according to their immediate biological needs, emotions, and whims, but in play they must act in ways that they and their playmates deem appropriate to the game. Play draws and fascinates the player precisely because it is structured by rules the player herself or himself has invented or accepted.

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The student of play who most strongly emphasized play’s rule-based nature was the above-mentioned Vygotsky. In an essay on the role of play in development, originally published in 1933, Vygotsky commented on the apparent paradox between the idea that play is spontaneous and free and the idea that players must follow rules:

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The … paradox is that in play [the child] adopts the line of least resistance—she does what she most feels like doing because play is connected with pleasure—and at the same time she learns to follow the line of greatest resistance by subordinating herself to rules and thereby renouncing what she wants, since subjection to rules and renunciation of impulsive action constitute the path to maximum pleasure in play. Play continually creates demands on the child to act against immediate impulse. At every step the child is faced with a conflict between the rules of the game and what she would do if she could suddenly act spontaneously… . Thus, the essential attribute of play is a rule that has become a desire… . The rule wins because it is the strongest impulse. Such a rule is an internal rule, a rule of self-restraint and self-determination… . In this way a child’s greatest achievements are possible in play, achievements that tomorrow will become her basic level of real action and morality.20

  1. Vygotsky (1933/1978).

  2. Ibid., pp. 99–100.

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Vygotsky’s point, of course, is that the child’s desire to play is so strong that it becomes a motivating force for learning self-control. The child resists impulses and temptations that would run counter to the rules because the child seeks the larger pleasure of remaining in the game. To Vygotsky’s analysis, I would add that the child accepts and desires the rules of play only because he or she is always free to quit if the rules become too burdensome. With that in mind, the paradox can be seen to be superficial. The child’s real-life freedom is not restricted by the rules of the game, because the child can at any moment choose to leave the game. That is another reason why the freedom to quit is such a crucial aspect of the definition of play. Without that freedom, rules of play would be intolerable. To be required to act like Wonder Woman in real life would be terrifying, but to act like that in play—a realm you are always free to leave—is great fun.

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Play Is Imaginative

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Another apparent paradox of play is that it is serious yet not serious, real yet not real. In play one enters a realm that is physically located in the real world, makes use of props in the real world, is often about the real world, is said by the players to be real, and yet in some way is mentally removed from the real world.

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Imagination, or fantasy, is most obvious in sociodramatic play, where the players create the characters and plot, but it is also present to some degree in all other forms of human play. In rough-and-tumble play, the fight is a pretend one, not a real one. In constructive play, the players say they are building a castle, but they know it is a pretend castle, not a real one. In formal games with explicit rules, the players must accept an already established fictional situation that provides the foundation for the rules. For example, in the real world bishops can move in any direction they choose, but in the fantasy world of chess they can move only on the diagonals.

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The fantasy aspect of play is intimately connected to play’s rule-based nature. Because play takes place in a fantasy world, it must be governed by rules that are in the minds of the players rather than by laws of nature. In reality, one cannot ride a horse unless a real horse is physically present, but in play one can ride a horse whenever the game’s rules permit or prescribe it. In reality, a broom is just a broom, but in play it can be a horse. In reality, a chess piece is a carved bit of wood, but in chess it is a bishop or a knight that has well-defined capacities and limitations for movement that are not even hinted at in the carved wood itself. The fictional situation dictates the rules of the game; the actual physical world within which the game is played is secondary. Through play the child learns to take charge of the world and not simply respond passively to it. In play the child’s mental concept dominates, and the child molds available elements of the physical world to meet that concept.

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Play of all sorts has “time-in” and “time-out,” though that is more obvious for some forms of play than others. Time-in is the period of fiction. Time-out is the temporary return to reality—perhaps to tie one’s shoes, or go to the bathroom, or correct a playmate who hasn’t been following the rules. During time-in one does not say, “I am just playing,” any more than does Shakespeare’s Hamlet announce from the stage that he is merely pretending to murder his stepfather. Adults sometimes become confused by the seriousness of children’s play and by children’s refusal, while playing, to say that they are playing. They worry needlessly that children don’t distinguish fantasy from reality. When my son was four years old he was Superman for periods that sometimes lasted more than a day. During those periods he would deny vigorously that he was only pretending to be Superman, and this worried his nursery school teacher. She was only partly mollified when I pointed out that he never attempted to leap off of actual tall buildings or stop real railroad trains and that he would acknowledge that he had been playing when he finally did declare time-out by removing his cape. To acknowledge that play is play is to remove the magic spell; it automatically turns time-in into time-out.

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An amazing fact of human nature is that even two-year-olds know the difference between real and pretend.21 A two-year-old who turns a cup filled with imaginary water over a doll and says, “Oh oh, dolly all wet,” knows that the doll isn’t really wet. It would be impossible to teach such young children such a subtle concept as pretense, yet they understand it. Apparently the fictional mode of thinking, and the ability to keep that mode distinct from the literal mode, is innate to the human mind. That innate capacity is part of the inborn capacity for play.

  1. Leslie (1994).

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The fantasy element of play is often not as obvious, or as full-blown, in adults’ play as in children’s play. That is one reason why adults’ play is typically not of the 100 percent variety. Yet, I would argue, fantasy occupies a big role in much if not most of what adults do and is a major element in our intuitive sense of the degree to which adult activities are play. An architect designing a house is designing a real house. Yet, the architect brings a good deal of imagination to bear in visualizing the house, imagining how people might use it, and matching it with some aesthetic concepts she has in mind. It is reasonable to say that the architect builds a pretend house, in her mind and on paper, before it becomes a real one. A scientist, generating hypotheses to explain known facts, uses imagination to go beyond the facts themselves. Einstein referred to his own creative achievements in mathematics and theoretical physics as “combinatorial play,” and he famously claimed that his understanding of relativity came to him by imagining himself chasing a beam of light and catching up to it, and imagining the consequences.22 Geniuses often seem to be those who somehow retain, into adulthood, the imaginative capacities of small children. In all of us, the capacity for abstract, hypothetical thinking depends on our ability to imagine situations we haven’t actually experienced and to reason logically based on those imagined situations. This is a skill every normal child exercises regularly in play.

  1. Einstein (1949).

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When I say that my writing this chapter is about 80 percent play, I am taking into account not just my sense of freedom about doing it, my enjoyment of the process, and the fact that I’m following rules (about writing) that I accept as my own, but also the fact that a considerable degree of imagination is involved. I’m not making up the facts, but I am making up the way of stringing them together. Furthermore, I am constantly imagining how they will fit into the whole structure I am trying to build, one that does not yet exist as concrete reality. So, fantasy is moving me along in this, much as it moves a child along in building a sand castle or pretending to be Superman.

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Play, then, is a state of mind that promotes imagination. In a playful mood, the college students in Isen’s experiments could imagine the tack box serving as a shelf on which to mount a candle. In a playful mood, the four-year-olds in Dias and Harris’s experiments could imagine and think about a world in which all cats bark. In a playful mood, without external incentives to disrupt them, the participants in Amabile’s experiments could imagine creative ways to produce drawings, collages, poems, or stories. In a playful mood, Einstein could imagine the relativity of motion and time. What a crime it is that we deprive children of play in school, and then we expect them to think hypothetically and be creative!

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Play Is Conducted in an Alert, Active, but Non-Stressed Frame of Mind

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This final characteristic of play follows naturally from the others. Because play involves conscious control of one’s own behavior, with attention to process and rules, it requires an active, alert mind. Players do not just passively absorb information from the environment, or reflexively respond to stimuli, or behave automatically in accordance with habit; they have to think actively about what they are doing. Yet, because play is not a response to external demands or immediate biological needs, the person at play is relatively free from the strong drives and emotions that are experienced as pressure. And because the player’s attention is focused on process more than outcome, and because the realm of play is removed from the serious world where consequences matter, the player’s mind is not distracted by fear of failure. The mind at play is alert, but not stressed.

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The mental state of play is what some researchers call “flow.”23 Attention is attuned to the activity itself, and there is reduced consciousness of self and time. The mind is wrapped up in the ideas, rules, and actions of the game and relatively impervious to outside distractions. Many researchers who do not consider themselves to be studying play have described this state of mind as the ideal state for learning and creativity. In my mind, they are studying play.

  1. Csíkszentmihályi (1990).

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A few years ago, on the basis of research like what I described in the first section of this chapter, psychologist Barbara Fredrickson developed what she calls the “broaden and build theory of positive emotions.”24 According to her theory, positive emotions broaden our perception and range of thought, which allows us to see what we didn’t see before, put ideas together in new ways, experiment with new ways of behaving, and in these ways build our repertoire of knowledge, ideas, and skills. In contrast, negative emotions narrow our perception and thought to focus almost exclusively on the most salient source of distress—the fearsome tiger, the hated enemy, the evaluator, or the negative consequences of failure. Such distress also activates our autonomic arousal system, which facilitates performance on tasks that require a burst of physical energy and a narrow focus on the goal, but interferes with creativity, learning, and reflection. From an evolutionary perspective, negative emotions, especially fear and anger, arose to deal with emergencies, and emergencies are not the proper occasions for trying out new ways of thinking and behaving. In an emergency, you want to use methods of coping that are already habitual, not experiment with new ones.

  1. Fredrickson (2001, 2003).

Note: expanded and contracted consciousness

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Fredrickson’s theory captures nicely much of what I have said in this chapter. But I would call it “the broaden and build theory of playfulness.” Or, to be more complete, maybe “the broaden and build theory of playfulness and curiosity.” The positive states of mind that broaden and build, in most if not all of Fredrickson’s examples, are states that generate play and exploration.

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The Power of Play Lies in Its Triviality

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People often think of play as frivolous or trivial, and they are right. As I have explained, play is activity conducted for its own sake rather than to achieve serious real-world goals such as food, money, praise, escape from a tiger, or an addition to one’s résumé. It is activity that takes place at least partly in a fantasy world. So it is indeed trivial! But here is the most delicious of play’s paradoxes: the enormous educative power of play lies in its triviality. Play serves the serious purpose of education, but the player is not deliberately educating himself or herself. The player is playing for fun; education is a by-product. If the player were playing for a serious purpose, it would no longer be play and much of the educative power would be lost.

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Because the child at play is not worrying about his or her future, and because the child at play suffers no real-world consequence for failing, the child at play is not afraid of failure. The playing child feels free to try things out in a pretend world that would be too risky or impossible to try in the serious world. Because the child at play is not seeking approval from adult judges, the child is unhampered by evaluation concerns. Fear and concerns about evaluation tend to freeze the mind and body into rigid frames, suitable for carrying out well-learned habitual activities but not for learning or thinking about anything new. In the absence of concern about failure and others’ judgments, children at play can devote all their attention to the skills at which they are playing. They strive to perform well, because performing well is an intrinsic goal of play, but they know that if they fail there will be no serious, real-world consequences.

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Play is trivial, but not easy. Much of the joy of play lies in the challenges. A playful activity that becomes too easy loses its attraction and ceases to be play. The player then modifies the activity to make it harder or moves on to something different. Toddlers who have mastered the art of two-legged walking move on to more advanced forms of loco-motor play, such as running, leaping, and climbing. Young animals similarly challenge themselves by playing at increasingly more difficult skills as they develop. In one study, wild goat kids that could already run well on flat ground were observed to concentrate their running play on steep slopes, where running was more difficult.25 Similarly, young monkeys playfully swinging from branch to branch in trees choose branches that are far enough apart to stretch their skills, but sufficiently low to the ground that they would not be badly hurt if they fell.26 Teenagers playing video games move from one level of difficulty to another in the game. There would be no thrill in always playing at the same level. Einstein’s combinatorial play continuously challenged his mental abilities and pushed them to new heights. When children are free to play, they play naturally at the ever-advancing edges of their mental or physical abilities.

  1. Byers (1977).

  2. Symons (1978).

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Another aspect of play that suits it well for its educative functions is repetitiveness. Most forms of play involve repetition. A cat playfully stalking a mouse keeps releasing the mouse in order to stalk it again. A baby playfully babbling keeps repeating the same syllables or the same sets of syllables, sometimes altering the sequence slightly, as if deliberately practicing their pronunciation. A toddler playing at walking may keep walking back and forth, over the same route. A young child playfully reading may “read” the same (memorized) little book, over and over again. All sorts of structured games, such as tag or baseball or twenty questions, involve repetition of the same actions or processes over and over. One of the defining characteristics of play is the focus on means rather than ends, and repetitiveness is a corollary of that characteristic. The player produces the same action repeatedly in order to get it right.

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But the repetition is not rote. Because the repetition derives from the player’s own will, each repetitive act is a creative act. If each act looks just like the previous one, that is because the player is deliberately striving for exact repetition. Most often, however, each “repeated” act is different in some systematic way from the previous one; the player is deliberately varying the act in some way to fit the game or to experiment with new ways of doing the same thing. A side effect of such repetition is the perfection and consolidation of the newly developing skill. The repetition in play may sometimes lead parents and other observers to think that nothing new is being learned, but if that were true the child would stop and do something else.

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A CONCLUDING THOUGHT: Imagine that you had omnipotent powers and were faced with the problem of how to get young humans and other young mammals to practice the skills they must develop to survive and thrive in their local conditions of life. How might you solve that problem? It is hard to imagine a more effective solution than that of building into their brains a mechanism that makes them want to practice those very skills and that rewards such practice with the experience of joy. That, indeed, is the mechanism that natural selection has built, and we refer to the resultant behavior as play. Perhaps play would be more respected if we called it something like “self-motivated practice of life skills,” but that would remove the lightheartedness from it and thereby reduce its effectiveness. So, we are stuck with the paradox. We must accept play’s triviality in order to realize its profundity.

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