07/11/2024 / 5 weeks ago / Author: Andy Robertson

We all want our children to be able to play as fully, freely and imaginatively as they can. However, because we have mistakenly separated (and denigrated) digital play from playing in the “real” world we are hampering our efforts to fight for play in all its fullness.

Andrew Solomon, in his book Far From The Tree, calls us to the biggest challenges of caring for children:


It’s a helpful reminder that how children decide to play may not match how we want them to play, based on the memory of our childhood. We can trust children to find healthy ways to deal with the world, that we didn’t provide or experience ourselves. It’s okay if this leans more into digital than physical play.

This isn’t to say that digital play is unproblematic or that we should just let it push out other forms of play. However, our guidance and protection shouldn’t eclipse our ambition, enthusiasm and surprise at how digital play can be as valuable as the non-digital play we better understand.

Starting with Playing Out

The best place to start this journey is from where we are. We all know that physical play is crucial to a healthy childhood. However, there is a worrying decline and deficit in the opportunities for children to play outside.

This is not in small part caused by designing our towns and cities around the needs of the car rather than the child. Voices like the reporter Harriet Grant in the Guardian and Ben Tawil and Mike Barclay at Ludicology are an important and powerful call to arms to turn things around for playing out.

We have a responsibility to notice and act on how the world we create impacts children’s ability to play. In the way we design our cities, organise streets and fund play opportunities we need, as the Ludicology website puts it, “to cultivate sufficient time, space and permission for play across multiple levels of politics, policy, practice and provision”.

However, if we only campaign for a return to the old ways of play and not also embrace the new ways children play now, we do them a disservice. In line with Solomon, we need to work not only to restore what we know is lost but to support and be ambitious for what new ways of being our children are finding.

Going Beyond Common Sense

One of the biggest blocks to this broader championing of play is how we have segregated digital, virtual or screen-based play as less valuable than other forms of playing. It is as if admitting that digital play is good will make it less likely for children to play in other ways.

It feels like common sense when voices like Jonathan Haidt point to the science and make claims about the detrimental effect of screens on children and teenagers. But this rush to blame technology obscures what is actually happening in the world of children’s play. It also gets us off the hook of more deeply considering our wider culpability in the social harms that children grow up under.

I’m not claiming all is well in the relationship between young people and their technology, but thinking we can solve this by restricting, banning or discouraging screens, leaves our children without a way to make sense of this new medium and the new messages it brings to their lives.

To help us clear space to restart our imagination about what is possible, let’s revisit the differences and values of play in the real world and the digital world. My hope is not to convince you that digital is unproblematic or that kids should be left to their own devices. But to help us see clearly what digital play really is, both in terms of similarity and continuity with classic forms of play as well as differences and discontinuity.

Digital Worlds Shot Themselves In Their Foot

Playing on a screen is comparatively new and untested. We don’t fully understand it, or the impact it has on our children. It’s no surprise then, that as is the pattern with new forms of media, we are nervous and suspicious of its presence in children’s lives.

Digital interactive media hasn’t helped itself. It burst onto the broader cultural scene as Cyberspace or Virtual Reality. It offered the Internet as an alternative to the chaotic world of failed politics and financial institutions. It was sold as a new place where the rules of the real world didn’t apply. People were going to disconnect from reality and live in cyberspace instead. Second Life, a popular early online digital game, even has a name that suggests it is separate from the real world.

In spite of this misplaced marketing, the actual experience of playing a game on a screen is remarkably similar to playing in real life. As the Playwork Principles put it, “Play is a process that is freely chosen, personally directed and intrinsically motivated. That is, children and young people determine and control the content and intent of their play, by following their own instincts, ideas and interests, in their own way for their own reasons.”

Like in real life, the geography and supposed purpose of digital play spaces is designed. There are intentions and cultural assumptions about what is and isn’t acceptable. But also, like real-world play, the best of these spaces encourage and accommodate children’s instinct to take or leave the rules with a pinch of salt and find their own ways to progress and enjoy playing together.

Playing a game on a screen is different to playing outside but offers some of those same benefits. It invites the player into spaces that are both empty and full, that are there for them right in their home, that bring children together with a common sense of ownership and purpose, that offer opportunities for socialising and friendships.

If video games were primarily about escaping reality to cut off those around you, Virtual Reality would have been hugely successful as the culmination of this type of play. That’s what many tech companies hoped and ploughed in money to make happen. Its isolating headgear and headphones are the perfect device for an experience that removes you from reality.

However, players have made it clear that while a novel distraction, this by no means replaces their pursuit of digital play on screens. Even now Virtual Reality is cheaper than a console or a smartphone, but it doesn’t come close to gathering the numbers that flat-screen play achieves.

For children, digital play was rarely just about escaping. It is about relating to who they are, what the world is and how the future might turn out, rather than hiding, escaping or denying these things. It's about having fun with friends and making connections for no deeper purpose than that.

Technology Is Just Who We Are

It’s not only cyberspace or virtual reality though, from the beginning we have seen digital technology as something that takes you away from who you are as a person in the real world. The image of someone on their phone is one of a person tricked into not paying attention to what matters; what is happening around them.

However, as Tom Chatfield highlights, technology is just another tool to help you extend your understanding and communication with reality. Whether we choose to engage in life with pen and paper, garden tools, pots and pans, mountain bikes, smartphones or video games, it’s a matter of how we want to engage with the world. These things are all technologies we have created, the newer ones are just more noticeable because we haven’t got used to them (or perfected them) yet.

Chatfield goes on to say that we are a species not contained in our bodies, but extending beyond ourselves with the tools we make. “We cannot separate ourselves from technology, because it has been with us since before the beginning, evolving alongside us, shaping our biology and ecology. Contrary to wishful critiques, there is no such thing as human nature or existence in the absence of technology.”

To be human is to reach into the world with technology. This started with axes and fire, continued with printing presses and novels and now with smartphones and video games. We aren’t brains captive to the physical borders of our bodies. We think, dream, love and hope beyond our physical selves with the tools that enable us to reach beyond, around and deeper into what we already know.

To go into the woods with string, hammer and nails and build a den is a way of reaching out with technology that has been around long enough to be considered normal. The sort of play (and player) this supports is different from going into the woods empty-handed.

To go into the woods with a smartphone is another way of reaching through the trees to discover games we might play. Maybe we will discover the places no GPS track has so far gone. Maybe we will coordinate our strategy in a game of Robin Hood with WhatsApp.

To go into a virtual wood in a video game is one more way of reaching into the forest. We don’t go in blindly or leave behind our playful skills. Maybe we will work to complete the tasks the game maker offered us. Maybe we will ignore those and instead pretend to be the adults managing the woodland. Maybe we will invent our own game of tag that requires us to reach parts of the world unintended for players to reach.

The Medium Is The Message

In this way, video games are just a new technology that helps us reach into the world. What’s interesting is that different technology comes with different opportunities and tendencies. As we use them to reach beyond ourselves we find that, as Kester Brewin highlights, they reach back into us to ask questions about who we are and how we can construct the future.

“The medium is the message,” is Marshall McLuhan’s over-quoted phrase, but helpfully highlights that the way we interact with something is as important as the content we are interacting with. “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us,” is how Father John Culkin explained McLuhan’s concept. This is particularly true with digital technologies that we already see can have unintended consequences for its users.

Learning to understand and handle the specific questions and challenges that video games raise about the world, society and ourselves is crucial to our children having a life-long healthy relationship with them. This is work we can only do by experimenting and experiencing this new technology with them. Listening and guiding them through successes and failures is a powerful way to learn how this new form of play works.

This is a medium powerfully described by Any Austin. Discussing what is unusual about Minecraft he doesn’t reach for the Lego-like play or the narrative or characters. For him, it’s the moments of engagement that this medium can create. In Minecraft, this starts with the moment you enter a new world.

“Before Minecraft, there was nothing like Minecraft. You're dropped into a world that nobody else has ever laid eyes on before. In the blink of an eye, a vast untouched landscape explodes onto the screen and for a moment all you can do is take a look around and try to figure out what you're really looking at. These are the five seconds of childlike infinity you experience every time you play. You're the person. It's up to you to pick a spot and make it whatever you want.”

Not Just Child’s Play

Learning to understand the benefits and dangers of this new medium not only uncovers a new way for children to engage, understand, learn and develop but its potential for players of any age. The Ludicology site proudly proclaims that “Playing is Living”, but then goes on to talk about play as something for childhood and youth. “Humans have evolved to embody a playful disposition in their youth. Playing represents children’s primary form of participation in their everyday lives and is central to their experience and enjoyment of living.”

Video games remind us that if play is living, then there is value to playing beyond childhood and throughout life. Reading the work of Tawil and Barclay makes it clear that they know this already. But video games are proving this at scale, creating millions of adults who pour hours into play every week. Rather than find this as something worrying or embarrassing, we need to celebrate play in adulthood too.

How can children find a healthy relationship with play if the adults around them find it necessary to portion off their play as a guilty pleasure or not something as valuable as their peers' love of poetry, theatre, running or gardening? If we treated healthy eating in that way, our children would have a hard time growing up with a positive relationship with food.

The Playwork Principles don’t only apply “to all children,” but to all people. Video games are hard at work making this a reality on a global scale.

Digital Play Is Play

This clears the ground for us to restart our imagination about play. As parents, guardians and adults who want the best for children, we know that play is an essential part of their wellbeing. It’s perhaps no surprise that children are finding ways to play despite the restrictions and barriers in the world. That this is often in digital ways we don’t understand doesn’t mean it’s not valuable or at the detriment of other areas of life.

Digital play shouldn’t replace or compete with children being able to play outside in the physical world or indeed other forms of less physical or inside play. There is an urgent need to increase the opportunities that children have for the sort of play we know and understand.

But let’s not pretend that the screen-based childhood has replaced the play-based childhood. Children are in fact playing just as much as ever. We need to observe, listen and carefully watch new ways of playing they are creating and discovering to support and protect these new precious spaces.

Of course, it’s important to keep an eye on safety, dangers and risks, whether this is in the woods, the playground or online. But this broader perspective opens the possibility of new ways of play emerging, and trusting our children’s instincts to find them. We can take up that imperative from Andrew Solomon to “love must love them for themselves, and not for the best of ourselves in them.”

Andy Robertson

Written with input from Wendy Russell, researcher, educator, evaluator on children's play/playwork and Mike Barcaly play sufficiency lead for Wrexham Council.

References:

• Tom Chatfield Wise Animals: How Technology Has Made Us What We Are
• James Bridle Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence
• Andrew Solomon Far From The Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity