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Players

Jay

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Show Notes

Play is incredibly important. From creativity to learning something new, and from stress reduction to protecting against illness. So let’s go play.

Intro

This is The Waffling Taylors Raw with Jay, a series of shorter episodes that will be of indefinite length - we’re gonna put these out as-and-when. These episodes will cover shorter topics which don’t really fit well within the scope of the show or topics that I want to cover in my own way before we bring them up on the show. That’s not to say that we won’t cover these topics in the main show, but I’d like to take a whack at them here, first.

I can’t guarantee that all of these shorter episodes will be as deep or technical as this one. But I wanted to start big.

I’ve included a whole bunch of references in the show notes for this episode, so it’s going to be worth clicking through and reading those show notes - because there’s loads of books you can read, and web resources.

Anyway, let’s get to it.

Play and How Important it is

Before we start, let’s clarify a term that I’m going to use a lot in this episode: Play. Now firstly, The Waffling Taylors is a video game related podcast, but I’m not referring to video games here. In “Essentialism”, Greg McKeown defines play as:

anything we do simply for the joy of doing rather than a means to an end - whether it’s flying a kite or listening to music or kicking a football

- Greg McKeown : Essentialism

I’d encourage you all to think of a small number of activities which bring you joy or are inherently fun - almost anything will do - and keep it in mind whilst listening

or indeed reading, if you’re reading it

One thing that “serious” people say about play is that it’s for children, and that’s a real shame. It’s my opinion that play is super important to everyone, and can help almost anyone to solve certain types of problem. As an example, I’m a developer in “real life” and in development we have a thing called “Rubber Duck Debugging”. The origin of this is a kind of play activity. In a book called The Pragmatic Programmer

which, if you’re a developer you should totally read

the authors tell a story (from the 80s or 90s, it’s not really made clear) about a developer called Greg Pugh. Now Greg was famous for having a rubber duck next to his monitor, and when he go stuck on a problem he would literally explain it to the rubber duck. This is a wonderful technique for solving problems, because

By having to verbalize some of (the assumptions about the problem), you may suddenly gain new insight into the problem

- Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas : The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary edition - pp95

It doesn’t need to be a rubber duck either. It can be another person, or even a potted plant. The idea is for you to imagine that you’re explaining the problem in great detail to someone else, and you’ll come up with the answer. Try it. I promise you that it’ll work.

So What About Play

Play has been proven to be important for the development of the brain and hand eye co-ordination. Anyone who has watched a Mother playing peak-a-boo with her child will see this in action: it’s surprising to the baby because their brain believes that if something is covered up then it no longer exists, and then the rapid reappearance of the non-existant thing is surprising. It’s teaching the baby that you can cover something up, but that it can still exist.

Play has also been spotted in the animal kingdom. There it is important for the children of the group to learn social norms and essential life skills, and they do this via play. Baby primates, for instane, will learn how to climb, learn how to walk around, will learn how to use rudimentary tools via play

I mean, it’s quite literally a case of monkey see, monkey do, right?

One famous experiment was done by Harry Harlow at the University of Wisconsin, in 1940. He constructed a small puzzle for a group of rhesus monkey’s to solve. It consisted of a pin, a hook and a board.

I would Google this if I were you, because it’s difficult to explain the actual layout of the puzzle. But it’s not as horrendous as it sounds

One of the most shocking things

at least to mid century psychologists, at least

about this experiment was that no one taught the rhesus monkeys how to solve the puzzle, but that the took to it almost instantly - without prompting. One thing to point out was that there was no reward for solving the puzzle, yet every time that Harlow and his team would set th puzzles up, the rhesus monkeys would immediately try to solve them - some of them being able to solve the puzzle in less than 60 seconds.

Anyway, as important as play can be to animals and children, it can be as important to adults.

Edward Deci

I’ve probably mispronounced tha. It’s "D-E-C-I"

ran a similar experiment in 1969 using Soma Cubes. In his experiment, he had volunteers split into two groups. Each person was given a set of Soma Cubes and asked to create a set of very specific patterns with them. One group was offered money for each pattern or shape that they constructed within a set time limit, and the other was not offered (or even told about) the reward. The most interesting

and economically strange

outcome of this experiment was that almost everyone in the group which was offered money would put in less effort overall, than the other group. From this, it was theorised that the motivation of solving the puzzle was more interesting than money.

Play is more of a motivator than earning money. I wonder where I might have heard that before…

Play as a Salve

Imagine that there was something which could cure creative blockages, could reduce stress, could be fun to do, and was completely free.

That’s what play is.

Before we continue, let’s talk about stress and what it does to your brain.

caveat: I’m not a medical professional, and know next to nothing about anatomy or neuroscience compared to an expert. What I’m about to say comes directly from my armchair, and the understanding I have from reading books on anatomy and neuroscience but having never taken a lecture in either

Your brain is made up of lots of different regions. All of them work in tandem to help you to reason about the world around you. The Limbic system is made up of quite a few regions, but two important regions

for this discussion at least

are the Hippocampus and the Amygdala. The amygdala, using Wikipedia’s description is:

shown to perform a primary role in the decision-making and emotional responses (including fear, anxiety, and aggression)

Whereas the Hippocampus is:

part of the limbic system, and plays important roles in the consolidation of information from short-term memory to long-term memory, and in spatial memory that enables navigation

Whenever you are stressed, what’s actually happened is that your body has released a hormone called Cortisol

also known as "the stress hormone"

Cortisol does many different things to the body, but one of the things that it does is divert electrical activity from the Hippocampus over to the Amygdala. One of the reasons it does this it to try and kick start the “fight or flight” response. A drawback of this is that your Hippocampus is associated your short term memory, so you start to forget things like where the house keys are; it’s also associated with navigation and moving about, and spacial memory. So you end up bumping into things and end up getting more angry because you’ve just bashed your toe.

Let’s revisit that definition from McKeown for a second:

anything we do simply for the joy of doing rather than a means to an end - whether it’s flying a kite or listening to music or kicking a football

- Greg McKeown : Essentialism

flying a kite, listening to music, kicking a football, playing a video game

or indeed a board game

and even experimenting with some technology or code can be seen as play. In fact, listen to a programmer talk about whether they have any experience with some new technology and they’ll usually say something like:

I haven’t had a chance to play around with it

or

I’ve only played with it in my personal projects

Interesting.

Play as experimentation and exploration was what a child building a fort out of boxes or a child putting LEGO pieces together are actually doing. So why can’t we do this as adults? Anyone who has played Minecraft, the Little Big Planet series, or any other sandbox game has done this: experimenting and exploring within the environment and rules provided by the game leads to all sorts of creativity. Dungeons & Dragons, one of the most famous pen and paper games of the 20th century, is actually built on this very idea.

What’s most interesting about play is that it can rebalance the amount of Cortisol in your brain. By focussing on something that you enjoy doing - playing cards, knitting, playing football, colouring in, writing, whatever - most people feel a wave of calm come over them

maybe not when the opposition score a goal, or when you lose another life on Super Mario Bros., but you get the point

Not only that, you can very easily enter a state that psychologists call “flow”.

Have you ever been doing something that you enjoy, then become truly engrossed in it, and then look up at the clock and realise that it’s been three hours? Well if you have, then you’ve been in flow. Flow is that magical state that your boss wishes you were in all the time - it’s when you are the most productive, and it can last from 5 minutes to a whole number of hours. If only you could tap into that at will…

Whenever you see children at play, they are in the throws of flow. Football players get into flow mere moments after the whistle blows. Programmers

myself included

can spend an entire day in flow, missing meals and phone calls in the process. By allowing your creativity to run wild, you can see problems from a different point of view.

When was the last time you were playing a video game, got stuck on some puzzle, and then started to mess around rather than solving the puzzle? Sometimes the most lateral thinking puzzles cause me to wander off

in game

and start to explore the environment. When I do this, I find that the solution to the puzzle comes to me. Why is this?

It could be that my subconscious takes over, but it could also be because creativity lets you see other solutions, and lets you try other solutions; some of which you’d have never thought of otherwise - speedrunners do this all the time, finding new glitches and exploits in order to shave seconds off of their record times.

Creativity As a Business

Let’s take a look a the offices at Pixar. The employees at Pixar are often encouraged to decorate their offices in ways which they think will bring out their creativity. Why? Because creativity and play help to solve problems, and you can see issues from a different angle.

I would recommend Googling "Pixar offices" to a visual on this. I tried to explain it, but…

In Creativity Inc. Ed Catmull

ex-CEO of Pixar

writes about how many employees dial this up to 11. There are stories of offices full of action figures, blow up pink flamingoes, employees using scooters to get about the campus, and the fact that they don’t have a uniform but encourage their employees to dress to reflect their character and mood.

You could argue that all of this is new-age, touchy feely garbage - I totally don’t. But you can’t argue against the fact that the folks ar Pixar are some of the best storytellers of a generation, and that they routinely push CGI forward with every film they put out - feature length or short film.

I’ve worked alongside one project manager who had an “Easy Button” in their office. For those who don’t know what that is, it’s a large red button with “Easy” written on it in white writing. When you press the button, it plays a

That was easy

sound. This particular project manager would encourage employees to hit the button on the way out of their office if the chat with them went well. I’m not going to lie, it was almost always fun to do, and I found myself actively trying to help out in meetings in order to get to a point where someone would be able to hit that button.

A small victory, I know. But it forged creativity… through play. Because it was always fun to hit that button.

In Closing

So, in closing:

  • Play is important to all of us, regardless of how old you are
  • Play, in this instance, means any activity which brings you joy, fun, or enjoyment, and that you peruse without a particular end goal in mind

So the next time you’re doing something for the joy and the sake of doing it, rather than to achieve some goal, take solace in the fact that you’re playing, and that you are reducing your stress levels, but also kind of evolving your brain. Then invite the person you’re talking to to come and join in playing whatever you’re playing.

Anyway, in the words of Shredder’s right-hand-man Tatsu:

Go. Play.

- Tatsu : Teenage Mutant Ninja Turltes (1991)

Relevant Books

  • Essentialism by Greg McKeown
  • Play Matters by Miguel Sicart
  • Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul by Dr. Stuard Brown, MD
  • Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull
  • Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink

Music

Links to the music used in the podcast can be found below. Definitely check them out, because they're amazing tracks by awesome musicians.

All copyrighted material contained within this podcast is the property of their respective rights owners. Please see the above list for copyright details pertaining to music used.

Games Covered

We mentioned 4 games in this podcast. In the following order, those games where: