What was “play” when you were a child?
Posted on December 9, 2007
Filed under Reflections
I’ve been thinking about the avatars I know in Second Life, my avatars and what we all “do” in SL and how that is different than playing games.
Dama is always creating. She builds, rearranges, and customizes her second life on an ongoing basis. She has a friend who’s into scripting and they trade ideas. I don’t think Dama’s ever attended a workshop or class to learn what she knows. And like me, she’s not a gamer, she doesn’t come to SL with a gamer mindset. Maybe that’s why she’s so content playing as she does.
I’ve been chewing on the crisscrossing literature and discussions about gaming, virtual environments, education and learning. It’s broad and full of “emerging” theories, designers who want to know how to design educational games (that are also fun), and educators who want to capitalize on the potential of SL. It’s all a bit like the left half of the brain is not talking to the right sometimes, the way some of these conversations intellectualize and rationalize the issues, and others retreat into the mist of anecdotes and affect. I’m trying to find those conversations that traverse the various landscapes picking up artifacts and tidbits along the way. Two questions that interest me right now are: What kinds of play are we talking about in a virtual world like SL and are virtual worlds really all and only about play?
I spent the majority of my childhood playing roles, playing fantasy. When I think about fun and being a kid and what we were doing it was: playing house, playing tent, playing army, building and playing in our forts, our snow-forts, our tent-houses, refrigerator-box houses, playing dress-up, putting on a “show” for our parents, going on expeditions through the woods, explorations on our bikes, pretending we were explorers, escapees, wanderers–pretending and creating with our environment and the things at hand. We made everything up, as we went, including the rules, because when you make stuff up, anything goes and everything isn’t fair. If we played army there had to be rules about where you could hide. We figured them out, agreed and got to the play.
We took over our cellars, living rooms, backyards, neighboring wilderness (and golf course) and made it our own. Sometimes our play extended over days and weeks. Our forts were places we built and lived in; we created stories and scenarios with(in) them. Our dolls’ lives paralleled ours, they’d be sitting in their corner of our bedrooms waiting for us to return.
When I think of the games we played, I think of monopoly, parcheesee, checkers and chess. I’m sure there were more, but they’re a blur. Games seem to have been the placeholders for real play, the stuff that made our minds reel with ideas, we couldn’t wait to do. Play extended beyond the actual time we played, into our imaginations. Games started and stopped. Sometimes we finished them, sometimes we didn’t.
As an adult, my play/game habits are the same. SL enables the kind of play I prefer, the playing roles, the wandering, exploring, fort-making.
On the one hand, I’m not sure what this kind of play has to do with learning…say algebra. Likely nothing. On the other, it’s got a lot to do with inventive thinking, effective communication, high productivity and digital Age literacy. My underlying assumption is that virtual worlds are and will continue to become legitimate spaces for, and locations of everyday life, which makes the play in them that much more meaningful and relevant.
Learning in and about a virtual world to then not “have a life” there, seems a waste of time which might be why the majority of people never really inhabit their SL avatars. One lives in a world, and plays a game.
And finally, the passion and enthusiasm of childhood play never became an obsession or addiction, sure you almost missed dinner, or you got so cold your lips turned blue. And?
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Thanks so much for sharing about how our SL play is subconsciously informed by our childhood notions of play! Yes, much of my childhood play was fantasy, like yours, in which we created personas, homes, special places and situations out of our imagination using the simple objects we had. As I reflect on this, much of our play was subconsciously informed by our interpretations of media, popular culture and literature. Tom Sawyer’s imaginative play was informed by the connections he made to the literature and popular culture of his day. This work of Twain was informed by his own play experiences as a child. In SL, we are truly creating our own narrative play and constantly expanding our notions of digital literacy. Being and educator and writer myself, I guess this could be one of the reasons that I enjoy SL so much. Here is a link to another post about how we create ourselves and our SL surroundings as informed subconsciously by literature and art: Happy New Year! Cheers! Dama