Play

I found a youtube video earlier this week that made me pretty nostalgic for Bionicle and, since I was at home, I took out a few that I’d built myself. I’d meant just to look at them, to admire all the time I’d put into making them, but pretty soon I was playing with them. And by playing I mean actually playing, in the kind of uninhibited way a five-year-old plays, bashing them together, speaking for them and making sound effects, the kind of playing that looks totally deranged to anyone else. But, to me, a setting emerged, and so did personalities for the characters, and pretty soon it was a story. Not a story that would work all that well if you wrote it out (the whole thing was premised on nine robots fighting each other for no reason, after all), but a story that I liked, at least in the moment. Afterwards it was shameful, partly because I’d made nine character I halfway liked without any effort, while a week at a writing desk trying to come up with a single decent character got me nowhere, but mostly because I’m supposed to be an adult. And adults don’t do that.

You could say that things aren’t so black and white, but if there’s a totally accepted way for adults to play, I haven’t found it. There are online communities of adults who like Legos, sure, but as someone who has been part of that community, I can say that it’s all about creation and display: the fun part is making the model, not doing anything with it. There are adults who do role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, adults who create stories in writing or inhabit characters in acting, adults who get physically active in sports. But none of those are the same, exactly. They follow rules and create something from the experience and feel like a job sometimes. None of it feels as spontaneous, or fun in the same way.

It makes sense, I guess, that people grow out of play. I’ve often heard that play is an evolutionary adaptation, a way of simulating adult experiences so children will be better prepared when they come of age. Once you’re an adult, play doesn’t make sense anymore, you’re supposed to have learned what to do and started doing it. Movies like the Toy Story series assume that this process works normally: the tragedy isn’t that Andy won’t play with the toys anymore, but that he simply can’t. Even the man-child archetype, pathetic as it is, doesn’t offer a model of adult play: he tends to be a snobbish collector who won’t take the toys out of their original packaging.

I’ve been worried about this for a long time, actually. I remember going through a period of acute anxiety at the beginning of middle school around growing up. Most of that was a natural fear of independence that I’ve mostly come to terms with by now, but part of it was that I wouldn’t be able to play anymore, that all my toys would just be more lumps of plastic in my mind. Now I know that didn’t come to pass, but it brings problems of its own.

I don’t mean to oversell this. The fact that adults don’t feel allowed to play like kids is hardly the most pressing issue in our society at the moment, and anyway, I can still get part of the thrill from writing or D&D. But it’s still a shame that there’s no straight-forward to play as an adult, that you have to be part of a society for Live Action Role Play or a parent humoring your kid. The issue is that people take themselves too seriously, I think, that there’s a sense that your boss is always looking over your shoulder to see if you’re doing a good job at being a grown-up, so you’d better make even your hobbies look like work. 

But it’s kids who really need play, after all, and as someone who spent the past summer socializing almost exclusively with second-graders, I can assure you that they’re doing it. There’s a cantankerous ending here begging to be written about how play is precious and disappearing from our tech-saturated children, but in my experience, so long as kids have unstructured recess time, there’s no danger of that. Sure, these days they pretend to play live-action Minecraft, which gets pretty confusing if you don’t know the lingo (“let’s punch down this tree so we can make a crafting table and make our gold into a railroad!”), but it’s play all the same, and you only need to look at the kids to know that they’re having the time of their lives.