#6. Qualities of Play that Make It Ideal for Acquiring Skills

Mother Nature not only gave us play, but she designed it beautifully for learning.

Dear friends,

Mother Nature (the goddess of natural selection) created play so we, especially when young, would practice skills that help us survive and thrive. That was the message of Letters #4 and #5 in this series. Now I expand on that message by pointing out qualities of play that seem perfectly designed for effective practice.

The Repetitive Nature of Play

Repetition is key to practice, and most play involves lots of repetition. In fact, repetition is one of the clues that helps researchers identify an activity as play.

Think of the difference between a cat preying on a mouse and a cat playing at preying on a mouse. The former takes the quickest route to killing the mouse. One strike and it’s over. The latter tries various ways of catching the mouse and lets the unlucky rodent go each time, so it can try again.

Children at play, likewise, engage in much repetition. A few years ago, I read a complaint from a mom who said she wanted to play with her young son but found she quickly tired of it because he wanted to keep doing the same thing over and over. She wrote of one activity, “Admittedly it was fun the first 500 times, but now it’s starting to wear thin.”

In Letter #5 I gave the example of babies playing with the sounds of the language they hear, by babbling the sounds repeatedly, with slight variations, and later playing with phrases, in crib speech, by saying the same things over and over, again with slight variations. As another example, think of a toddler learning to walk. Back and forth she goes between the sofa and the chair. Sometimes she falls, but she gets up and toddles again. Over and over and over. It’s play because it’s self-initiated and self-directed, intrinsically motivated, has structure, and is creative (she creates each variation), so it fits the definition of play given in Letter #2.

Children constructing snow forts, or anything in play, persist for remarkably long times, and when one construction is complete to their satisfaction, they go on to another. I knew years ago of a group of young boys who would spend many hours a day, over many days, building a perfect scale model of a village, with houses, factories, roads, cars, and more, out of plasticine, and then, when it reached perfection, they would hold a “war” and destroy the whole thing, so they could mash the plasticine and start creating a new village.

As another example, think of the repetition engaged in by artists—maybe a child who keeps drawing horses, or Monet who kept drawing haystacks (and later in life water lilies), with variations each time. Art is one kind of play that, for some, continues into adulthood.

Video games are attractive to so many kids because they offer endless opportunities to practice difficult cognitive and perceptual skills. You keep at it, until you succeed, and then you move on to the next level. Next time you watch children of any age play anything, notice the amount of repetition and the systematic variation. Perfect for practice.

The Goal-Directed Nature and Challenge of Play

It is sometimes said that play is activity that has no goal, but that is not true. Play always has a goal. The goal is to do well—by your own judgment of what “well” means—whatever it is you are playing at. Once you are as good at it as you can be, or want to be, so it is no longer a challenge, you stop that form of play and move on to something else.

The toddling child stops walking back and forth once she is good at it, and then she moves on to a more challenging form of locomotor play—maybe running, jumping, or skipping. Tic tac toe is fun for beginners, who will play it repeatedly, but once they’ve discovered that there are only a handful of possible moves and X’s will always win if both players know the moves, it’s no longer fun because it’s no longer challenging, so they move on, maybe to checkers. Video gamers don’t stupidly keep playing the same game at the same level. Once they have mastered one level they move on to the next, more difficult level, or on to a different game with new challenges. I suppose Monet finally felt he had haystacks down as well as could be, so he moved on to water lilies.

One reason some adults see children’s play as wasted time is because children seem to be doing the same thing over and over, often a thing that holds little interest to the adult. Unable to get into the child’s mind, the adult has no idea why this activity is so fascinating or what the child is gaining from it. Aside from the specific cognitive or physical skills that a child is mastering in any type of play, the child is learning something more general: “I can master a difficult task. I can overcome obstacles and do it.” I once heard a talk by a successful business entrepreneur, who credited his business success to the thousands of hours he had spent at video games as a teen. If I can master those games, he thought, I can master just about anything.

The Freedom to Fail in Play

Part of the definition of play is that it is intrinsically motivated, not done for some reward outside of itself. You are not doing it for an A, or a gold star, or a trophy, or praise from a parent or other authority figure. You are just doing it because YOU want to do it. Because there are no real-world consequences for what you are doing, no judgment from authorities, you are free to try things you aren’t good at or have never tried before. There is no harm in failure, so you are free to experiment with new ways of doing things, free to innovate.

Many research studies have shown that when people are asked to perform a task under the watchful eye of a judge (or teacher), a condition that is not play, they generally opt for some previously well-rehearsed, not very interesting way to do it. That is not a good situation for trying something creative, because it could turn out to be a mess, or perceived by the judge to be a mess, and you will be judged poorly. Better safe than sorry. But when people are asked to perform the same task anonymously, just for the fun of it, with no judgment of individuals’ performances, they often come up with new, creative, and sometimes brilliant ways to do it. (I discuss some of this research in my book Free to Learn.)

Freedom to innovate or create requires freedom to fail, and play is a state in which that freedom reigns. The cat trying new ways to catch the mouse in play tries means she has never used in serious predation, but she just might in this way build a repertoire that will prove useful in future predation.

The Joy of Play

The real stroke of genius on the part of Mother Nature was to wire up our brains in such a way that we experience great pleasure in the playful practice of skills, pleasure that motivates us to keep at it.

Practice, when it is not play, is often tedious, dull, boring. I’m thinking of the many hours I wasted in youth “practicing” the clarinet, because, for some reason that I can’t now recall, I thought it would be good to learn an instrument and join the high school band. But I had no interest in it, no internal drive. For another person practice of that same instrument is play and joyful, even if supplemented with formal lessons. That’s the person who becomes not just a technician with the instrument but one who plays with soul and stirs our souls as we listen.

It's a shame that Mother Nature didn’t give us better reasoning powers than she did. If we were reasonable, we would recognize that our school system, which refers to tedious practice as “learning” and play as a break from learning, has things backwards.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

Notes

Please feel free to comment, with any questions or thoughts you have about this letter. I will read all comments and reply if I have something useful to add.

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