Let's Play

It’s midmorning, and a cardboard box carrying stuffed animals, a box of Ziploc bags, and a paper plate scoots across the hallway floor. Two 5-year-olds with bouncing red curls crawl behind it in blue floral dresses. To an outsider, they are shuffling the box full of toys and household items through the halls of Hoosier Courts Nursery School. But to the children, it’s a spaceship carrying them through the galaxy.

Two days later, IU sophomore Carey Wagoner saunters into an upstairs gym in the School of Health, Physical Education, and Recreation building. He takes out five red balls and tosses them into the air one at a time, staring at a fixed point above him as they move. He catches them and releases them, over and over, one by one, until he is ready for a new challenge. Over the next few minutes, he adds more balls, then switches to clubs, and tries bouncing a miniature soccer ball on his head while he juggles.

Twenty minutes later, Wagoner, the president of the IU Juggling Club, is passing seven clubs back and forth between him and a friend while they use their heads to trade the miniature soccer ball between them. To change it up, Wagoner starts passing objects under his legs and spinning in circles while the clubs are in the air. As the tricks get harder, the clubs fall to the hardwood floor.

Wagoner watches and chuckles.

This is how Wagoner plays — three hours a day, throwing and catching balls and clubs and whatever he can find. It’s different from the daily play of the children of Hoosier Courts Nursery School, but it’s an evolved version of the same human function. Play continues, scholars say, albeit in a different form, throughout life. We need it. We crave it. Life just gets too complicated and heavy if we don’t let loose sometimes. Play is not just a way to entertain ourselves. It’s a way to express how we feel, to learn, and to relieve stress.

Bryan McCormick, an associate professor in the Recreation, Park, and Tourism Studies Department, teaches a graduate-level Philosophy of Leisure class. He lists four descriptions of play: Play is engaging, it is bounded in time and space, it has specific rules, and the outcome is in doubt. Even when children play, order is still enforced, he says. Children pretending to be in a spaceship still must do what people in spaceships do, and they must explain and accept all the irregularities.

But it’s difficult to discuss play with people, because everyone sees it so differently, Tony Mobley, former HPER dean says. “The problem in the field has always been definition,” says Mobley, who has also taught a class on the philosophy of leisure. “What is play? How does that compare to recreation? And generally after you go through all the fancy theoretical theories and studies and definitions, you end up with ‘Play is what kids do; recreation is what adults do.’” Mobley goes on, saying recreation is something people do in their “free time,” another term that’s difficult to universally define.

Many people go by the Puritan definition, where play is the opposite of work, but play can also be serious. Using McCormick’s criteria for play, which he borrowed from previous scholars, a trial in a courtroom, a duel, and sometimes a religious ceremony are all forms of play. For example, a courtroom trial is engaging to the participants and is bounded in time and space — the trial only takes place in the courtroom during time that is specifically set aside for the trial. The rules are specific, and the outcome is always in doubt.

Yuliyana Gencheva, a graduate student who taught the Communications and Culture class “Of People and Play — A Cultural Perspective” during the summer, says play is a way for people to relax and lose themselves, a short vacation from the obligations of life. Adult recess, if you will. In her class, Gencheva focused on aspects of play in society. She says performances, puzzles, riddles, sports, and computer and video games are all common forms of play. In addition, some use shopping as play — an activity that helps them get away. The class also completed a unit on Las Vegas, a place Gencheva calls “a constructed world presenting play as a way of living.”

“I think we have many reasons to play,” she says. “We sort of feel that inner necessity to express ourselves and to create a space in a moment of time and space that would be a break from ordinary life. So in a way, through play, we project — and I talk about children and adults — we project who we want to be.”

For everyone, but especially for children, playing is a way to learn and explore.
Joyce Alexander, an associate professor in the Department of Counseling and Education Psychology, observed 215 children in southern Indiana schools for five years to find out how children developed interests. She found that when kindergartners ask teachers questions in class, they tend to coincide with the experiences they had while playing. For example, a young boy who liked to gather information while playing and loved dinosaurs might ask a lot of factual questions, even if they weren’t about dinosaurs. It wasn’t the topic that transferred, Alexander says, but the way the students interacted in play.

In their play, children practice social situations and learn how to interact in them. Alexander uses the example of two children pretending to be mommy and daddy in a kitchen. It’s practice for the future, but they don’t see it as practice. They see it as using new things they’ve learned. “I think play solves different problems for different kids. I think a lot of it is that kids just need time to explore and sort of figure out, ‘Hey, maybe I want to be a mermaid someday, you never know,’” Alexander says. “But I don’t think it’s all very causal like that. I think a lot of it is just exploring ­— they’re developing. Around the time that kids start to learn to play and pretend play, their cognitive abilities are really developing, so I think a lot of its just practicing all those new cognitive abilities.”

Growth and exploration are exactly what Tim Dunnuck, coordinator of child care services for IU, aims for with the play-based curriculum of the University’s daycare facilities. Dunnuck says children up to the age of 8 learn better through play than by listening to a teacher in a classroom. “Rather than sitting at a desk and teaching them,” Dunnuck says, “the research shows that the kids really internalize it much better and it stays with them much longer if they initiate it themselves.”

On a typical day at Hoosier Courts Nursery School, children move freely through the center. In one room, a child bangs on a piano, while another reads a book, and a third plays with sand. Outside, boys and girls in winter coats climb on a jungle gym. As two ponytailed girls  push baby carriages into the block area, Dunnuck says they’re learning all kinds of things by practicing social negotiation and grown-up roles.

Each classroom is organized by learning centers, or areas of the room designated for a specific type of play (although children are not confined to the intended use if they can find another way to play in the center). There is a blocks center, a dramatic play center with costumes, a work bench with real tools (“And every once in a while they’ll hit their finger, but that’s how you learn to use a hammer,” Dunnuck says), a reading area, a science station with magnifying glasses and pinecones, and an area to play with sand and water. Beyond the obvious educational benefit of some learning centers, such as the science area and the reading station, Dunnuck says the interaction of play teaches children social skills, such as negotiation and compromise.

Lessons in socialization are things teenagers and even adults look for in play, often through video games, says Lee Sheldon, an assistant professor of telecommunications who has written and designed 18 video games. He uses the example of interactive virtual world games, such as the popular online game World of Warcraft. In it, players use characters to play but also to interact with other players’ characters over the Internet. Both players can react to the exchange. “People are learning skills — social interaction skills. Some of them who didn’t have any good ones in real life, but when they are looking like a gorgeous elf or a muscular warrior, are able to come out of themselves and role play and learn how to socialize, which I don’t think is a bad thing.”

Senior Marcela Poffald is what Sheldon calls a member of the “game generation.” Though her play as a child took place in the backyard and the playroom, much of it also took place in front of the TV.

Poffald, who is majoring in conceptual design for virtual worlds and video production, says video games shaped her childhood. “My older brother probably made me hold a controller as soon as I was old enough.” She says the games sharpened her critical thinking and gave her a fun way to fill her time as a child. “I know video games are gory, and they’re controversial and whatever, but they’ve actually done a lot of good things for me.”

Sheldon is a strong believer in the positive effects of this new form of play. While he says gratuitous sex and violence are harmful to the game industry’s purpose and image, video gaming has created a different kind of learner. The interactive play learner now joins the visual learner, the audio learner, and the text learner, something that needs to be considered in education, says Sheldon, whose last series of video games are based on Agatha Christie novels, where players solve mysteries with critical thinking.

Sheldon says video games fit right in with the evolutionary function of play. “I don’t think they’re that alien to what we’ve already been doing,” he says. As a child, Sheldon and his friends played a game called “Alien Creature,” where one child, the alien creature, would try to tag all the children. Anyone tagged would become an alien creature and join in the effort to tag the others. “It’s just a variation of that,” Sheldon says. “That role playing, that need to add story to our play, has been with us since the beginning.”

Not everyone plays video games, and few college students play “Alien Creature,” but adults still play, says Alexander, the researcher who observed children during playtime. Play evolves over time, but Alexander says almost anything people do to give themselves “down time” is play. For adults, that often translates to hobbies and even volunteer work. The play changes, she says, because abilities and skills change, but adults still do it.

“We don’t pretend we’re mermaids anymore,” she says. “But I do think adult hobbies are a big extension of young children’s play. Those are things that we can get involved in, we can be motivated and engaged in.” Alexander says this happens with adults when they strum a guitar or play a round of golf.

A big difference between children and adults, Gencheva says, is that play tends to be what children’s lives revolve around, whereas it’s a break from work for adults. For children, playing is their main source of exploration and learning, whereas adults get those opportunities through places such as work. If you watch, though, Gencheva says, “children play more playfully,” and many adults gravitate toward competitive or even risky play. And the line between play and work blurs once again.

“By studying play we’ll learn about ourselves, about who we want to be,” Gencheva says. “We learn about the child in us, because I believe that we all carry a child in ourselves.”

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