Why do we play?
This simple question has a surprisingly complex answer. The reason we play seems to be based on our inherent biology because of evolution. Humans are not the only animals that engage in play. Other animals do as well, with or without humans. Dogs will play fetch with a human but also engage in rough-and-tumble play with another dog. Predatory animals engage in wrestling and sparring when they are young, which serves as training for survival skills. Dolphins famously play well into adulthood. Potentially, the most important reason to play is it is crucial for socialization. Animals that fail to engage in play with their peers often suffer from inappropriate aggression, anxiety, and social isolation. This is also true for humans as well. *
Researchers "taught" rats how to play hide-and-seek, a complex role-playing game. The rats were not given a food incentive, but instead, the human interaction was "fun enough" for the rats to participate willingly. During the play, brain recordings revealed intense prefrontal cortex activity. The prefrontal cortex is integral for executive functioning, stress control, and decision-making. These skills are simultaneously essential for play and survival. Since these traits are also valuable for survival scenarios, rats (and all animals) predisposed to play had a better chance of survival to pass on their genes successfully.
“One of evolution’s greatest tricks was to link up behaviors and stimuli that are good for us to our reward centers, as a way to drive us to engage those experiences and thereby gain the benefits that they offer.”
Humans playing a game like hide-and-seek must be ancient, probably passed down through oral tradition for hundreds of thousands of years. However, we thought it was exclusively a human game. The hide-and-seek rat experiment sheds light on the fact that the game could be older than humanity. Another interesting fact of the experiment is the scientists would hide in the same spot from one day to another. The rats would "remember" previous game experiences and find them faster the second time. Playing the game stimulated brain memory centers, which, over time, could also be potentiated for learning. Indeed, the rats "learned" the rules for hide-and-seek and how to play it better by playing it with the experimenters. This is exciting evidence for the theory that play is an effective teaching mechanism. The prefrontal cortex activity during gameplay demonstrated that play is an adaptation within mammalian evolution.
A significant difference between animal and human play is animal play seems to be more instinctual. Animals typically stop playing when they are distracted, tired, or hurt. Humans, however, can choose to ignore these biological cues. Animal play seems inherently to practice life skills, which may be why younger animals play more than their adult contemporaries. Less life experience means they need to practice life skills through play. Animals also have more difficulty distinguishing the boundary between play and reality. For example, researchers tried to teach dolphins how to play water polo. The dolphins learned the game's fundamental skills, and they enjoyed hitting the ball into the net as a cooperative group activity. However, their tactics became vicious when dolphins were taught to play defense to stop an opposing group from scoring. They went far beyond what a fun game should allow by using similar tactics to how a pod of dolphins can neutralize a shark or other predator. The similarity of tactics between polo defense and predator defense were too similar for the dolphins to distinguish, and they stopped playing and went into actual fight or flight mode.
Humans do more than just play, however. Since all higher mammals (and some birds) play, it can be deduced that pre–Homo Sapiens also exhibited some sort of play as well. The level of play probably became more complex the closer we got to more modern humans like Homo Sapiens, Homo Neanderthal, and Homo Denisovan. Somewhere down the line, humans transitioned from playing only informal games that animals play to more formal games. This would require an evolutionary leap in brain processing. Informal games are played for fun and are usually unstructured or, at their most structured, have a way to win. Formal games, however, are definite, competitive, symbolic, regulated, cooperative, and interactive. Formal games may have originated around the formation of human hunter-gatherer tribes. Formal games have verbally articulated rules that give purpose and ensure equity within the game. You would want those same traits in the tribe as well. Therefore, formal games could be a teaching tool and practice for the development of society.
Interestingly, informal games are frequently played by children without any verbal communication. Deaf children are fully capable of this informal play without any verbal language cues. Yet the creativity of these informal games is still too difficult for other animals to participate. Maria Montessori noted that human children engage extensively in pretend play in the second half of the first plane into the second plane of development. It is surmised that this imaginative pretend play is the practice the brain requires for the adult imagination to blossom.
For play to emerge, all a human needs is leisure time. Any time not used for survival or work can be considered leisure. Since children are expected to do less of the survival work since they are not physically (or mentally) capable of helping to a significant degree, part of their "work" is "play." We saw a significant shift in leisure time when humans moved towards the Agricultural Revolution and away from hunter-gatherer societies. Agriculture has extended periods of leisure, which could provide a lot more time for play. However, hunter-gatherer societies only use a fraction of their time for those pursuits. Therefore, they would have plenty of time for leisure as well.
I would argue that another necessary condition for play is boredom. Play can be the antidote for boredom. However, if the individual is engaged in something, they will devote their mental energy to the task at hand. However, the brain is allowed time and space to create when there is no apparent task. If we want to encourage creativity, parents and teachers may need to provide opportunities for their children to be bored. This also makes me worry about the excessive screen time young children spend. TVs, tablets, and computers are so engaging that a child can use them for hours on end and never be bored. But if there are no opportunities for boredom, there are no opportunities for creativity and play.
One person's work may be another person's play. It all depends on the viewpoint of the individual. An early human removing meat from bones may have rolled knucklebones into a scrap pile hundreds of times. However, after rolling the bones so many times, there may have been a time when they picked it up and tried it again. And again. And again. All it would take to transform a bone into a dice are symbols and carving.
Another example is how the bow and arrow started as a hunting tool. Practice was necessary for the hunter to use the new tool effectively. However, the practice became a game of accuracy somewhere down the line. Nowadays, few humans hunt for food with bow and arrow, but many more participate in archery as a sport.
Looking at different early humans' abilities to play games through archaeological evidence, we can guess where our abilities began to blossom. Australopithecines were not significantly different from apes and thus probably had the same powers of play and imagination as them. When we get to homo Habilenes, we have the advent of tools and an expanded Broca’s area crucial for language. A tool's purpose can quickly change from work to play, and even a little language can allow gameplay. Once we get to Homo Erectus, we can almost guarantee they were playing informal games with win conditions. Their movement out of Africa required coordinated efforts, necessitating advanced language and communication. Mimetic transmission (of games) was probably happening at this time, influencing all facets of human life. Neanderthals were excellent tool makers and used strategy and tactics to hunt large animals, utilizing their rudimentary language abilities. We also saw cultural advances, from caring for the injured to ceremonial burial. If they were conceiving of ideas about death, they indeed could create sophisticated games as well. Early Homo Sapiens were similar to Neanderthals until about 100,000 years ago, when their migration and cognitive abilities began to expand even further.
Humans may have been leveraging the power of play from an early age, primarily through invested fathers. Humans are one of 5% of mammals with investing fathers and are the only apes. Dr. Anna Machin, an Oxford University-based evolutionary anthropologist, postulates that the role of human fathers is crucial for children, primarily through play. There is plenty of literature on the negative consequences of missing father figures for children, but not so much for present fathers. Fathers' bond with children is built through interaction, which can come from rough-and-tumble play. Play is a mechanism that releases oxytocin and other binding chemicals for their children. This play bonds the father with the child and the child with the father. Intense play superchargers these connections between father and child. Through play, fathers teach children how to interact with the world by assessing risk, taking on challenges, failing, and succeeding. This unique quality of fatherhood promoting play may have catalyzed human society's development.
Dutch historian John Huizinga proposed that humans are not just intelligent thinkers and makers but also playful. The term he used was Homo Ludens. Human play has several critical distinguishing characteristics that require immense brain power, especially imagination. The first is an agreement of rules outside the function of reality. It is encapsulated within a figurative "magical circle," which is the area of this suspended reality. Play must also have an internal and intrinsic motivator, and it should also be fun. Neural activity within the brain regarding motivation and reward is stimulated during play, which gives evidence that play is an evolutionary function. Huizinga believed that play (and then games) were necessary for the development of culture. Suppose human society creates culture, but humans (and animals) play games before being in society. In that case, games are older than culture. He proposed that games helped create the necessary conditions for social inventions like language and law, which are required to make a civilization.
In short, play is in our genes. It is in our biology. It plays a critical role in our evolution. In the next chapter, we will examine the origin of human "games," and how games shape culture.
Bibliography
Behavioral and neural correlates of hide-and-seek in rats | science - AAAS. (n.d.). https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aax4705
Dalton, R. P., & Luongo, F. (2019, December 11). Play may be a deeper part of human nature than we thought. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/play-may-be-a-deeper-part-of-human-nature-than-we-thought/
Parlett, D. (n.d.). Back to square one. Gamester: Origin of games. https://www.parlettgames.uk/gamester/backto.html
YouTube. (2018, July 19). We need to change the conversation about fathers | anna machin | TEDxClapham. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cul4L441x9o
*It is hard to determine the origin of the uptick in inappropriate aggression, anxiety, and social isolation humans experience today. Some argue that we have become much better at identifying and diagnosing mental health conditions, but they have always been around. Others blame our relatively sedentary lifestyle, especially as TV, computers, internet devices, phones, and more can have us staring at screens all day. Maybe we must consider that we are not playing enough.