sense of safety, invite communication, and “humanize” or lower inhibition in a good way by exposing more of who the other person is. [BTW, the bear came back to play with the husky every evening that week, Brown says, and nobody got hurt.] “Nothing lights up the brain like play,” he said: “three-dimensional play fires up the cerebellum, puts a lot of impulses into the frontal lobe, the executive portion of the brain, and helps contextual memory to be developed,” good health, and many other benefits Brown lists in a TEDTalk he gave last year. And there are so many kinds of play – solo play, social play, body play, object play, imaginative play, spectator play, exploratory play, ritual play, rough-and-tumble play (the Institute has organized them into seven patterns of play
All forms of play have value, Brown seems to say, and he doesn’t exclude videogame or virtual-world play in his interview with Tippett this past week, “mp3 file
“>Play, Spirit and Character.” The more 3-D they are and the more body movement they involve the better, he indicates. Of course these elements are being added to tech-based games. And we’re seeing that the richer and more unpredictable the virtual environment, the more imaginative, experimental, and exploratory play are involved. So I would love to get some great virtual worlds I’ve encountered – e.g., Dizzywood, WeeWorld, and Teen Second Life – talking and participating in research with the National Institute for Play. We need to know more about the role of virtual worlds in the beneficial effects of play for people of all ages – as well as about how play can mitigate antisocial behavior.
If you can catch the Brown interview, listen for what he says about parenting throughout too, especially the part, about halfway through, where he says that taking risks (though certainly not excessive risk) is an important part of play, “necessary to the well-being and future of the species. I think it’s safer for the person who is a player to maybe take a few hard knocks … in childhood than it is to insulate them from the possibility of that. I think [insulating them] constricts their psyches and their futures much more,” Brown said. He also talks about the problem with helicopter parenting, sounding a bit like Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-Range Kids, and the New York Times’s Lisa Belkin in “Let the Kid Be.”
I’ve long felt that empathy training and other efforts to reduce the impact of online disinhibition (helping kids understand those are human beings with feelings behind those profiles, screennames, avatars, and text messages) are important keys to beating cyberbullying. But now I’m thinking there’s probably a role for play!
* “The Serious Need for Play” in Scientific American
* Play deficit: In a just-released Harris Interactive survey for KaBOOM, “96% of parents said that playing outside was critical to keep kids physically fit, but only 17% thought children played enough outside.” Parents say their children spend less than an hour a day engaged in unstructured play outdoors, on average, and “92% of parents say that children today spend less time playing outside than they did when they were growing up.”
* The opportunities lifelong play presents, according to the National Institute for Play: transforming Education, Personal Health, Relationships, and Corporate Innovation
* “You Play World of Warcraft? You’re Hired!” in Wired and “Home-schooling with World of Warcraft” earlier here in NFN
* WeeWorld.com, Dizzywood.com, and Teen Second Life