Recently, my sister referred me to an article that made quite a splash on the Wall Street Journal by Amy Chua: “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior”. (Read it first if you have not). The article is certainly polemical, and it paints a bleak picture of the Chua household: no sleepovers, no playdates, no being in school plays/drama, no watching tv or playing computer games, and above all “no grade less than an A”, etc etc. This is the familiar stereotypical picture of a household run purely on achievement, instrumentality, outcomes and accomplishments. It is a familiar morality tale that could come from the confines of an upper-class household in Victorian England.
Excluded from that life, by definition, is anything that will not lead to a positive outcome in the parent’s eyes (these of course are defined economically: getting a high-paying job, graduating magna cum laude at an Ivy League school, receiving educational awards). I have no opinion on whether or not Amy Chua (a professor of Law and economic commentator at Yale) is a good or bad mother, or whether her children are good or bad people. Those conversations have been had.
Instead, I want to know: if a family excludes play from the household or puts major restrictions upon its expression, what kinds of values are being ignored or denied to the child?
What is Playing Anyway?
Play, by its nature, is difficult to confine in any strict definition. It includes all kinds of activities, from pushing around Tonka toys in a sand box, to kids building a hidden fort in the forest, to jamming in an improvisational jazz session. There is something playful and unexpected in all of those activities: the child in the sand box is not moving around sand for any serious purpose, the children in the forest are not architects trying to erect an office building, nor is the jazz group trying to perfect a piece that they have all memorized. In all of these cases, people are exploring the limits of their expressive abilities, creating different kinds of social relationships with other people, or discovering new kinds of properties or relationships that things have. All of these involve re-imagining and transforming our spaces with or without other people.
What Kinds of Play are found in Minecraft?
Games, for some, serve as a means for play. Playing Minecraft with other kids in The Art Guild has taught me just how powerful play is as a form of expression. Over the last few weeks my guildmates and I have been building a community on our Minecraft server. Some of them play, each day, for hours – constructing elaborate fortresses and underground mines with no particular schematic or final product in mind. Others jump in and explore the map, poking around in dark corners and building staircases hundreds of feet high, just to get an overview of the place. Others yet mine obsessively, dwarven-fashion, delving greedily into the Earth for any coal, diamonds or redstone that it might yield to them, jealously guarding their treasures in secret tunnels and hideaways that their guildmates could not hope to find. Others play Minecraft simply to chat and be in the same virtual space as their guildmates, swapping stories about Guild life or talking about events in the game.
The Values of Play
In all these cases, a very complex and thick social fabric is developing where one did not exist before. Yes, some of these teenagers know each other from school. But in the vast number of cases, they barely know one another – they are just acquaintances. Minecraft, as with all the video games that we play together in the Guild, creates a space in which people can come to share collectively, or fight and argue, or love and cherish, or hide secretively, or obsessively collect, or laugh and jibe about. Some of these are more playful than others: those who explore and build for the sake of expression enjoy a form of play that is clearly more playful than those who log in and needlessly squirrel-away resources. But in all of these cases, children are becoming people of certain kinds – whether they are helpful, combative, secretive or impulsive – through the space that the players of the game create in their style of playing it. They are developing new friendships, discovering new emotions (one player recognized for the first time that he is “greedy” with his resources), or learning new social skills (i.e. bartering). The value of the game is precisely in offering opportunities (spaces) in which people can express, and in expressing themselves, become certain kinds of people with desires and motivations and styles of social relating of their own. Play-spaces (of all kinds, not just in games) create moments for social and personal enrichment primarily through expression, and not through institutionalized learning, education, and cognitive or technical skill-building. Play precedes, and is the forerunner to, all forms of adult institutionalized knowledge.
What is Lost?
This all being said, creating a household in which play (of all kinds) is denied serves to create a child who experiences their world in terms of means-ends, instrumental goals, and cognitive or technical skills. Lost in this, I think, are the tacit forms of understanding developed in playing with other people: expressing and dealing with one’s emotions, developing deep friendships, and interpreting the world in terms of one’s imagination rather than relying upon the stock images provided by parents or social institutions. In essence, denying play leads exactly to the kind of ruthless North American society in which we live in today: one defined by work, end goals, and social anomie.
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From Svente:
What about creativity?
I’ve written and deleted so many things i’ve thought about that WSJ article…
Do i want this for my kids? No. I want them to become independent. And i dont want to live in China. Just like the author of the article.
I like my Democracy….democratic. I love it to have an idea and having the right to pursue that dream. Where’s the Chinese Steve Jobs anyway?!
P.S.
Just think about the suicide rates in Japan and what kind of achieving society they have.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Self-inflicted_injuries_world_map_-_Death_-_WHO2004.svg
From chris:
Thanks for the reply Svente. Yes, this article caused quite a stir – especially for more “Western” (I shudder at that word) parents who see play as a form of expression.
I noticed in that geographic representation of suicide that Russia has a surprisingly high number of suicides?
From Lipedal:
Amazing article, Chris. I recently read some works of the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russel on this matter, namely “In Praise of Idleness” and “‘Useless’ Knowledge”, both going in the exactly opposite direction from this Crazy Motherness stuff. In both articles, he praises the relevance of play, of doing activities per se, without any goal or utilitarian purpose in mind. Johann Huizinga also does that with Homo Ludens.
On the “useless knowledge” matter, these girls certainly will know how to play the piano and the violin, or how to get only A grades in school – but I bet they don’t know Isaac Asimov, Arthur Clarke, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock or Hayao Miyazaki’s works, they obviously don’t know Shadow of the Colossus or Super Mario Galaxy, and in fact they probably don’t know anything their teachers or their mother didn’t ask her to know (i.e. Wikipedia knowledge). To me, that sounds like a sad and robotic way of living a life.
From chris:
Thanks much Lipedal for the encouragement. Fascinating – I did not realize that Russell had something to say about play, but I am not surprised, as he had something insightful to say about so many subjects! I will most definitely add him to my list of scholars to read (I ashamedly admit that I have two of his philosophical books sitting on my bookshelf unread!). And thank you for the connection to Huizinga. One day, when I have done a much more thorough job of reading Homo Ludens, I will write some articles that much more directly address his view on play – which is what I consider to be one of the only truly cultural theories about play out there.
Interesting that you mention Miyazaki in connection to this story. I’ve always found his attraction to the playful (and dark) side of childhood to be the most endearing part of his work. He does – in my opinion – some of his best work when he is simply depicting how children play (i.e. My Neighbour Totoro).
In reply to your comment about Mrs. Chua’s children – if Huizinga, Miyazaki and Friedrich Schiller are right – I suspect that they will find their own ways of playing that are outside of her strict household. If play is part of what makes us human, then no amount of parental restriction can stop it from appearing in the child. It is much more likely that the play is evident in other parts of their life (i.e. the imagination or private places like the bedroom) that their parents have no access to.
From guttertalk:
As a father of two kids (8 and 11) in gifted programs, that article did make me wonder if we have too much play at our house (http://fromthegutter.org/?p=1520), if I didn’t push enough. But last year, I pushed my son quite a bit because I thought that he needed to improve in his diligence and prioritizing tasks. This year, I backed off, and he’s improved in both areas. As a result, he’s doing far better this year.
I think you’re dead on about the value of a tacit knowledge learned in games. First, there is a problem solving mentality that is part of most games. My kids tend to come to me when a game stumps them, but I try to use it to teach them, to see *how* to solve the problem. Basically, I try to walk them through a problem solving methodology
* Are there things in the environment to solve the problem?
* Is the problem solvable?
* Have you actually tried all the things you can do?
For example, my son was playing Arkham Asylum, and he was stumped by the part where he had to turn off the 3rd fan. The environment told him what he had to do: break the weakened roof. He had tried all his Bat-weapons. The one thing he didn’t try, he was afraid to. I reminded him that the game would simply start over if he did that ONE THING, and it failed. As it turned out, he had to work against what the environment also told him not to do.
In Minecraft, some friends and I are playing Survival Multiplayer, and we’re NOT looking at the wiki for recipes but trying to find them on our own. This adds a whole dimension to the game that I love. Most recipes have a certain logic to the patterns and ingredients, and I’ve been very deliberate in how I test, which I’ve documented on our group’s wiki. Plus, when the 1.2 patch came, we found climbing spiders, so we had several ideas how to stop them and used a spider spawner to test all of them. It’s this kind of experimentation that I think greatly helps, particularly kids.
Second, related to this is the idea of playing different roles. The obvious is playing a character that is different than the real you. Gamers can be the evil jerks that they aren’t in person. Or they can be more subtly different–like more outgoing than in real life.
For years, we’ve used gaming with the kids to learn how to work in team–how to communicate, how to be nice even when frustrated. This is the real world. And practicing math or music by yourself will never teach you these lessons.
From chris:
Yow! Your response is worthy of an article of its own guttertalk!
Your comment about your son gave me a few thoughts. When a parent senses that their child needs to learn diligence or persistence, it seems sensible to me that those are values worth pursuing – even if it means that “play” has to be suspended for a while. You note that after a period of diligence/prioritizing (i.e. more “task-oriented” thinking)… and then a loosening up in those… your son both became more diligent and playful. That says to me that play must find some kind of richer structure that is not just unbounded wildness. As children grow, it seems to me, they themselves desire play that is increasingly rule-bound as they make their entrance into adulthood. Sounds like you’ve found a healthy balance there.
Interesting re: your story about environmental learning. I often find that the kids that I work with at the Art Guild all have the same kind of problem: there is some solution that they ‘know’ of, but refuse to try it out of fear or shyness or a lack of will. I’m seeing varying amounts of experimentation within our own Minecraft server – some kids are happy to follow recipes and play with the outputs of them, others spend time carefully discovering/documentation new recipes themselves. I’ve found that each style of play expresses a particular kind of personality in the player – but as you say, the style of play might not be totally representative of their personality. What I found fascinating is that each player is totally accountable for their actions on the server because every week we discuss, as a group (in person!), what happened in Minecraft and “who did what to whom”…. often hilarious, but sometimes tense or emotionally-charged (i.e. last week someone stole 20 diamonds from a player’s chest).
I want to address your “A Look at Gaming Spaces” article in the future. Your article is inspired, and it will take me a whole article to respond to it.
From guttertalk:
Thanks for the positive response. There’s more to say, so I might write all of it up.
But on failure in particular, I’ve tried to teach my kids that failing doesn’t have to be personal (especially my son who used to get very upset with being told he got his work wrong)–that failing doesn’t mean they are failures. And that’s a hard, hard lesson to learn. (Although I’m impressed with much of my children’s schools and teachers, I think their approach to science still misses the failure that is necessarily part of it. In high tech, that’s what we now call a part of iterative design.)
Used to be, my kids hit a hard spot, and they would sometimes give up. But when they played Kirby’s Epic Yarn together and encountered a tough boss, I saw them persevere. Now, a couple of times, they turned to a walkthrough but usually only after many attempts. I didn’t mind them doing that because I heard them talk about what they learned each time–when to attack, for example. And I listened to them actually develop strategies, though not always successful ones.
I honestly do not think that there is any environment, any activity, like games that kids can engage in at an early age and be able to learn all these things and to have a place where they can fail and learn from failure.
As for rule-bound play, I agree: pure sandbox play is not so interesting to them, and I don’t think they learn as much from it. But I think that’s how many tiger parents and other game critics regard video games in general.
And we’ve not really even touched the ethics and morality learned in games.
As always, I enjoy your posts and comments.
From chris:
Thanks for coming back with an update. (Sorry for the late reply by the way.)
Interesting that you link failure with education – I suspect that’s what I’m struggling against with some of my players – they have been brought up in an educational milieu that is based on the idea that failure is the ultimate punishment, that it’s an end in itself. Awful stuff.
Interesting to hear that your kids have developed their own styles of play (i.e. waiting to use the walkthrough). I’ve found so much difference between each child’s style of play in the guild – some will jump straight to a walkthrough and follow it slavishly, others will refuse to use the walkthrough because they feel the game is a personal accomplishment, others turn the walkthrough out of frustration or disappointment. I am looking forward to seeing how these habits change over time, as our Minecraft server itself has become a developmental community.
Playground ethics has become my byword as of late! I’ve learned that children have extremely complex ethical relationships between each other that most adults never get to see. Recently, one of our players was banned from the server for 3 days for abusing their moderator status – the other kids got together to sentence and punish him. (I stayed out of it). The situation spiralled into name-calling, anger in the family home, charges of unfairness and abuse of authority, etc. I realized that even in the very limited environment of a Minecraft server, tempers can run high.
Thanks again for the insights! Always love hearing them.
From guttertalk:
I know my comment above is long, and I probably don’t need this example. For Christmas, I got the family a couple of coop board games–Forbidden Island and Pandemic. Forbidden Island is the simpler of the two, but still, it’s somewhat complex with the rules and the dynamics. Both games have a time pressure complicated with different goals–decide which cards or cities are key to save, decide how to trade and who should do what, decide how to win the game. Again, I’ve worked a lot in teams in academia and corporations where this all applies.
Games give us a chance to fail without major consequence. Schools and particularly certain parents do not allow for failure, thinking that it has no value. Yet, it does, particularly in learning through experience and experimentation.
Not recognizing the value of failure (which is that it is a teaching method) is to emphasize a one-solution mentality, a focus on the ends exclusively. If we scare kids with “Don’t Fail” we take away from them the ability to try things, which even a cursory reading of science history tells us is critical.
From chris:
Interesting re: your comment about failure. I’ve found that some kids, especially those who are used to doing well in school and avoid failure at all costs, are some of the least creative in gaming! Opening a child up to the possibility of failure, and *enjoying* failing, has been one of the toughest jobs I’ve had over the last year. Understanding failure as a value is one of the most important, and least recognized, aspects of gaming discussed today.
Thanks again for your thoughts – wow, gave me a lot to reconsider!
From Marc:
Spot on. I work with young children (4-8 years) and it is widely recognized by educationalists that play is the natural and most effective way for children to learn. I would go one step further and say that children who are brought up in a play-free environment are being deprived of their basic needs. Janet Moyles’ book, The Excellence of Play is a great starting point for anyone interested in how play enriches an educational environment and contributes to a child’s cognitive, linguistic and social development.
Our government (UK) is currently doing its best to ignore the findings of the Cambridge Primary Review which concluded that young children need to spend more time playing and less time in seated lessons and formal testing.
Interestingly, even educationalists that do believe that play is *the* way to learn totally ignore the positive developmental benefits of video games.
From chris:
Hi Marc. I too was tempted to see a restriction on play as a form of deprivation. Indeed, there is something (to me) “missing” in children or adults who are not playful. I’m excited about The Excellence of Play – I have not heard of the book until now. Added to my reading pile! It’s exciting to hear of a scholar that integrates child education, cognitive/linguistic and social development… and right up my alley, since my dissertation takes a very specific stance on those issues in psychology.
I suspect that given the changes in our “Western” social milieux, a new form of education that makes play (rather than “learning”) central to education and understanding, will be in demand very soon.
I too have come across, over and over again, the idea that “play is good yet playing video games is bad”. I co-wrote an article with a colleague of mine recently that attempts to address that irony. It is a very sticky issue – especially when (in my opinion) the vast number of video games out there are not very conducive to playfulness, and the vast number of gamers do not play games in a very “playful” manner. Yet, the possibility of play exists and I hope that one day we’ll have educational theorists who *understand* games write about them!
Thanks for your response Marc. I really appreciate having your insights, especially because you get to work with such a young age group.. one that is now steeped in video gaming from day one. Looking forward to hearing from you again.
From travelrtw2011:
This is an awesome post.
My son is five and has been playing minecraft for the last four months. I am amazed by the whole process.
Thanks for the writing. I really enjoyed it.
From mellytan:
Video games, “idle” activity that they are, immediately popped into my head when I read about that Tiger Mother business back when it was a-buzzing. Great writeup on the siren of play vs the Tiger Mom’s “battle hymn.” Asking ourselves what might be (will be) lost in our ruthless quest for increased productivity and “success” as defined by society is vital. That reminds me, I’ve been meaning to read “In Praise of Idleness”…