Play

Last week, I had the opportunity to revisit many childhood games and apply principles on the importance of play in a child's development.  After playing through several games, these are my extremely scientific findings:

Game 1: Operation

Poor man; having surgery without anesthetic.

Operation terrified me as a child.  It was like I was defusing a bomb rather than playing a game.  I was completely underwhelmed when I revisited it.  Maybe it's just that my fine motor skills have improved since childhood, but the game was super easy.  Too easy.  Ray and I never even came close to hitting the edge.  In fact, my current theory is that the game publishers have made the game easier, widening the holes and making the pieces easier to grab.  When I was younger, many of the holes were in the shape of the piece you were trying to remove, and they were much smaller.  The chance of you striking the metal edge with the clamp was much greater, and therefore the risk of losing was higher.  This led me to think: what are the benefits and risks of making games easier for children? The benefits seem obvious: if it's easier to play, then it's easier to win, which results in fewer tantrums and upset feelings.  However, by lowering the risk, you also lower the reward.  If it's easy to win and everyone can win, then there's no real satisfaction in winning at all.  I don't know which is better for a child, since these are more adult thoughts on winning and losing.  Young children probably don't think about this ramification, and they enjoy winning regardless of the difficulty of the task.  I don't know which is better; all I'm saying is that the game was much more memorable for me when the risk of accidentally killing your patient was much higher, increasing both my fear and my enjoyment.

In hindsight, it's a good thing I never went into medicine.

Game 2: Battleship

Aww, look how cute they are, annihilating each other's military fleets.

Battleship was fun, and still is.  I played with Ray, and we were neck and neck for most of the game, with me barely scraping a victory. Battleship was always one of my favorite games to play (next to Clue) because there was strategy involved rather than physical skill, and I was always better with strategy than I was with my physical prowess.  That's also why I liked chess.  Strategy can be learned and improved through study and practice (like most things, I realize, but I preferred studying to working out) and I always liked playing games where my odds of winning were higher (this will prove hypocritical when you read my next entry; maybe I only like games that I win. Huh).  What impressed me this time was how much of Battleship involves learning to read your opponent.  The rules are simple: you place your ships, you call out random coordinates, they tell you if you missed, hit, or sank a ship.  But I realized that seeing your opponent's reactions when you call coordinates is just as important as the coordinates you call.  After the game was over, Ray showed me how many of my guesses were really close to her ships.  I realized that most of the time when I called coordinates close to her ships, she would hesitate longer before responding.  If I had paid more attention to her in the game, I might have seen her accidentally giving away this information with her responses and body language.  Instead, I focused on a grid strategy that I half recalled from my childhood, attempting to shrink the field into more manageable squares.  In focusing solely on strategy, I forgot about other important factors in the gameplay.  These are important skills for a kid to learn.  When they play with others, they learn to read body language, tone of voice, and other nonverbal social cues.  They learn what is appropriate and what is not.  By interacting with others through playing games, kids learn skills that they can apply in social situations at school, church, on dates, etc.  So even though it seems frivolous, it's still vital that kids play games with each other so that they can learn to understand nonverbal communication and further develop into adults.

Game 3:Mario Kart

I couldn't think of a caption, but it felt wrong not to give it one. So here ya go.

While playing Mario Kart on the Wii, I was reminded of why I didn't like playing competitive video games as a child (or for that matter, sports in general).  I was never very good at operating the Wiimote, so I did very poorly in every race.  Every time I lost, I was mocked, insulted, and put down. Just the usual kid stuff, really.  It reminded me of why I hated playing these kinds of video games. I never (or rarely) won Smash Bros as a kid, or Halo, or Call of Duty, or anything similar.  I remember one particular day when my cousin and I played Halo, and I didn't win a single match, no matter what the weapons or setting were.  Part of the reason for this is that I didn't grow up with an Xbox or Playstation, so I never practiced and got better. I also didn't care for 1st person shooters as a kid.  But I think the main reason I didn't like playing these games was because almost without exception, I would be mocked every time I lost.  Every. Single. Time.  That's a slight exaggeration, but I'm not kidding when I say that I lost a lot and that I got mocked for losing a lot.  It wasn't enough for the winning player/team to win the game; it was more important for them to make sure the other side felt bad about losing.  Now, a lot of this commentary may seem bitter, and it's probably biased by my past experience and nostalgic lens, but I'm glad I had these experiences.  They influenced the way that I see the world now.  I still like to play games, and I still love to win, but it's not that big of a deal when I lose.  Why does it matter if one person is better than another in some dumb game?  And in a larger sense, in life.  Everyone is going to be talented in some areas and not others, and I personally think it's more important to praise the talent rather than to mock those without.  But I think it was also an important lesson to learn as a child.  Most of the world functions on ranking and judging people, trying to ascertain who is the best and who deserves the best.  There's job competition and romantic competition, and competition in almost every aspect of life, and there's no better way to learn this lesson as a kid than by playing games with other kids. Kids need to learn how to lose, how to win, and how to react to others who win and lose.

So in conclusion, kids play games to learn more about each other, more about themselves, and how to develop skills that they'll need in everyday life.  Plus, games are just fun, and one should never underestimate the importance of fun.





Final random note: my favorite toy to play with as a kid was string. Just regular shoelaces.

No, seriously.

I could play with those bad boys for hours.  This probably had more to do with my Tourette's syndrome than anything else (hard to explain; the string just felt right), but I would twitch that string around in my fingers and come up with all kinds of stories. So play is different for everyone.