Why Games Matter (to advisor James Richards)
I have been lucky enough to be one of the advisors to the ‘Research and Enterprise in Arts and Creative Technology’ (REACT) project from the beginning and have been involved with almost all of the sandboxes. In preparing for the Play Sandbox, I started to have a think about my own history of playing games, and realised that they are pretty important to me, so I thought I’d set a few thoughts down.
Mention the notion of play to people and you get a range of strange responses. For a lot of grown up people play means childishness. Play is what kids do in the park. Playgrounds and playfulness are the preserve of kids, and the notion of adults playing is strange, and perhaps even a bit weird. During her training my sister in law who is an occupational therapist was googling for examples of adult play, and the results that came up may still be seared onto her consciousness.
Adults allow themselves to play through sport. Its the acceptable face of playfulness with rules, leagues, uniforms and equipment that ensure no one feels silly or that they might be showing themselves up. The emotional pressure valve of the play that kids experience is abstracted into the passionate following of teams, essentially watching other people play skilfully. The beautiful game is talked about, and is admittedly only one part of a highly complex series of relationships and dependencies which are still fundamentally about playing.
Play is innovation and innovation is play, and working as I do in the world of digital innovation and development, being able to play and innovate, innovate and play with new and old ideas, content, methods, theories and approaches, is essentially at the heart of what we do. In order to do it well you have to be able to let go, to kind of lose yourself in the moment. Children can do that very easily when they play. They are closer to the ground and their imaginations are expansive and marvellous. Parent’s often tell stories of how their kids will have played with the cardboard box that an expensive new toy arrived in, but the fact of the matter is that a plastic toy car garage will only ever be that, but a box can be a spaceship, a castle or a boat. When you’re small you can get inside things, get down onto the floor and look into and through things in a way that adults very rarely do. When was the last time you lay down anywhere other than your bed or the sofa? Lie on the floor and see the world from a new perspective.
Being able to play is one of the fundamental rights that we should all have. We hear terrible stories of children in war zones who have forgotten how to play, but who with kindness and care can be taught how to play again. New technologies, behaviours and connectedness are creating fantastic and playful opportunities for all of us. Gamification, although an overused concept is a progressive instinct to appeal to people’s playful natures, although it is too often assumed as a smokescreen designed to obscure the boring or unengaging.
As an adult I feel really fortunate to have rediscovered the love of board games that I had as a kid. I was very lucky at school to have had a brilliant history teacher in Ian Wright, who had large collections of 28mm tall metal wargaming figures, Napoleonic and English Civil War.
He gave us his time and infectious enthusiasm so that on a Friday evening together with my friends we would battle. It was a great experience at a somewhat awkward age, to be able to find a playful outlet and it was enormous fun to see hundreds of these figures on a tabletop landscape battling over the farm at Waterloo or some other imaginary battlefield. There were (quite complex) rules governing movement, formation, casualties and even the effect of the weather on the battle. Play is escape, and it was possible to reach a playful place and become in the moment someone lost in the game. There were subtle and resonant delights in leading an army of small metal figures to victory or defeat, and in the course of these games I began to understand a bit about history.
This passion for historical miniatures gave way to other delights. Whole holidays elapsed in imaginative play as friendships were tested and cemented over the boards of Diplomacy, Kingmaker and Star Fleet Battles. We exercised our imaginations with role playing games likeDungeons and Dragons, Space Opera and Merc, which were really just vehicles for sitting around and making and sharing stories. All of those games have (for better or worse) literally made me the person I am today.
As a grown up now, my family love to sit down around the table and play games. When the kids were small it was Piggy in the Middle andKerplunk, which in turn gave way to Scrabble Junior and Connect Four. They were supplanted by Piratatak, Cluedo, Risk and Monopoly. We now play games like Carcassonne, Settlers of Catan, Elder Sign, Ticket to Ride, Pandemic, Small World, Cargo Noir and Zombies!!!. My son and I have started to paint figures for a steampunk miniatures skirmish game called In Her Majesty’s Name, which is daft fun, and which gives us all yet another reason to spend time together playing.
The REACT Play Sandbox is a brilliant chance to create credible and child driven new ways to play that make sense to young people, rather than the sort of things that adults think that children want or should be playing. If one of the projects ends up being the digital equivalent of a cardboard box I would be delighted. The sandbox schemes and the talented and passionate people who make it work, are committed to being enablers and provocateurs rather than prescriptive conductors, and I am certain that we’ll see some great games come from the project. I hope that these games become experiences which young players will still be thinking about as adults. Games that make them think about the world, that encourage and cement their friendships, take them out of themselves to new imaginative worlds. Games offer a chance to play, and the chance to play is an amazing gift of real value, with an importance that shouldn’t be underestimated.
James Richards – @kidhelios
