“Nothing lights up the brain like play. Three-dimensional play fires up the cerebellum, puts a lot of impulses into the frontal lobe — the executive portion — helps contextual memory be developed, and — and, and, and.” -Dr. Stewart Brown, speaking @ TED.

Dr. Stewart Brown, of the National Institute for Play, published a fascinating book named “Play: How it shapes the brain, opens the imagination and invigorates the soul”. In this book, Dr. Brown enumerates seven “forms of play”, a sort of psychological Periodic Table listing the building blocks through which all forms of play and games can be understood. In this list we find “Attunement Play” — the kind of interaction which happens between a baby and a mother, while making faces and funny noises, they suddenly connect. We also find, “Object Play”, which can be found in animals as well, and describes the kind of play in which we extract enjoyment by interacting with a ball or a simple toy. Brown elaborates on the importance of “Body and movement play”, “Creative play”, “Imaginative and Pretend play”, “Storytelling-narrative play” and more.

Dr. Stewart Brown speaking at TED. Credit: TED website

The bottom line of this book, as you can understand from the title is: Play is awesome, it’s one of the most exciting psycholigical features that we possess as humans, it has an incredible impact on our development as healthy, happy people. Reading this book I couldn’t help but thinking how much we are missing out in the current, dominant forms of games. Setting aside the obvious distinction between play and games (play is found in many many other places), I argue that most of today’s digital games are neglecting many of the forms of Play which we learn about from Dr. Brown.

Consider boardgames for a minute. A few friends hanging out, late at night, playing Monopoly (or better yet, killing it in a session of Settlers of Catan). So many levels of play are present. You are being social, physical, if you are the geeky type, then some sort of “Imaginative and Prentend Play” is going on. If you’re playing with a partner you must be attuned to each other. Your brain is on fire, you are completly alive.

Now compare with the experience of playing Candy-Crush on your iPhone, or even playing the latest Call of Duty on a PC. You are very much engaged: a few decades of huge developments in the field of Game Design and a fair share of psychological research make these experiences very pleasant, addictive even. But think about all of You that isn’t there. Where is your body? Where are your eyes? Where are your friends? Are you inventing, telling stories? If these form of games had conquered the world, we will surely be reduced to being a pair of gazing eyes and a thumb (and a wallet, of course).