Because play brings people together.
Our world is changing. The information we demand is becoming more digital, more on demand, more editable, more personalised. We no longer look use the City Library for research, we Google it and in a second are offered a multitude of responses to our command. We no longer wait for our favourite television programme to come on, we download it when we want to watch it at a time convenient to us. We no longer listen to the vinyl record/cassette tape/CD from start to finish, but create playlists on our iPod, omitting the songs we don’t care for and personalising the order of play.
The efficiency of our access to information has excelled at a pace most of us could never have predicted. But in being able to have everything just as we want it, we may have lost something valuable.
‘[M]ost mobile apps will show you the shortest route but rarely provoke or challenge. If we search for a restaurant online we are less likely to try somewhere local to us that is new and unknown. If we follow directions on an interactive map we do not stop to ask people the way to go. If we are staring at the screen of a mobile device we make eye contact with our neighbours less often. Technology can increase the isolation we feel in the city. It can form a barrier between us and chance encounters.
Drew Hemment 2010
Whilst technology makes it easier to connect with those further afield, it can isolate us from those closest to us. So how can we harness the unifying effects of technology to bring people together? Through gaming – the live, interactive, shared experience of play.
‘The best of the technological world is about expanding community, and theatre can learn from it. The worst about the digital technological world is isolatory, too grounded in the hyper-local and theatre can interrogate and reconnect it.’
Hannah Nicklin 2010
Where technology divides us, games can reclaim technologies from their isolatory effect, and allow them to challenge and provoke us to take risks and to seek the re-enchantment of everyday life; to have a live interaction with someone we have never met before, to perform a conspicuous task in public, to wear a costume and play a character completely different to the one you play every day.
Because play can be an empowering experience.
As the information we access becomes increasingly digitalised, our relationship with that world becomes increasingly interactive. Interactivity is empowering because it puts us in control, in the driver’s seat of what we are accessing. We are no longer being dictated to, but are dictating the outcome by choosing the bits we want and discarding the bits we don’t.
Hannah Nicklin demonstrates this effectively in her presentation Theatre in the Age of the First Person. She points out that the generation of young people who turn 18 years old in 2011 will never have known a world without the internet.
Because play celebrates our environment.
In the Victorian age city was the site of bustling industrial productivity. This formed the physical landscape of the city – most evident in Manchester, centre of the textile industry – a city awash with redbrick warehouses dotted amongst the sprawling canal network.
The consequence of the change from an industrial economy to a commercial one meant that our city’s proud Victorian foundations became redundant and neglected whilst flimsy office buildings cropped up amongst them. Most of the working population of the city take the same route to and from work every day.
Without play in our city streets, how often would we take the scenic route? The road less travelled? How often would we be forced to re-imagine our environment as a playground, as a stage, as a canvas for the imagination to take over? Play celebrates our environment and forces us to discover places we never new existed, rediscover those we once saw as mundane, and develop a relationship with our city outside of the commercial reasons for its existence.
Because play makes us better people.
Play is a fundamental part of our development as social beings. Stuart Brown in his talk Play is more than fun refers to his work with murderers and to a study of one in particular, the Texas Tower murderer, who suffered severe play depravation in his early years, which according to the committee of scientists studying the case, led him to be vulnerable to commit the crimes he perpetrated.
Why? Because at play we develop essential social skills such as empathy and trust. Problematically, play after childhood tends to become less and less prominent in our daily lives, but it shouldn’t. What holds us back from adult play is embarrassment and fear, and empathy and trust allow us to overcome this.
Game designer Jane McGonigal argues that we are actually better in games than we are in real life.
We do achieve more in game worlds. [We are] motivated to do something that matters, inspired to collaborate and to cooperate. [W]hen we’re in game worlds [we are] the best version of ourselves, the most likely to help at a moment’s notice, the most likely to stick with a problem as long at it takes, to get up after failure and try again.
