On Play and the Evolutionary Genius of Games

by Susan Belchamber

"The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the thing it loves." – C. G. Jung

Once again I found myself yelling down to my 18-year-old son, happily oblivious in the basement, to turn off the X-Box 360 and “for God’s sake, do something productive!” Why was he wasting so much time? For weeks on end we’d been having this same battle. Worse yet was his annoyance with me when I tended to tune out just as he wanted to share yet another story about one of the characters in the RPG, (Role-Playing Game for the uninitiated) that he was currently into. Frankly, I just didn’t get why these games intrigued him so much.

But then something nearly magical happened: I was sent a link to a fascinating TED Talk by Jane McGonigal who unabashedly claims that video games may help save the world – and something just “clicked” as they say… The result was, not only did I get off my son’s case a bit, I realized that this all fit together with much of what I’d been studying for years regarding neuroscience and how our brains deal with fear and stress. So I found myself excited by this new idea: what if video games were actually an evolutionary pursuit?

It turns out, strange as it may sound, learning to play may be one of our very best human defense systems! In a world that is caught at the brink of collapse and fraught with collective paralysis to take essential action, expanding our capacity to play, followed by innovative ways of harnessing the creativity that this can awaken, may well be one of the most productive avenues available to our species. Who would have guessed?

Well, Stuart Brown for one... In his book entitled Play, he reveals that "the opposite of play is not work – the opposite of play is depression“. Depression isolates and immobilizes us, essentially limiting our options down to those we know do not support our well-being. Life without play not only dulls the individual soul, culturally, it limits the creative urge to find solutions to our collective problems.

Neuroscience helps us understand why this is so. It happens that we humans all adapted and survived by honing our “pattern scanning“ capacities. In their ground-breaking article, “The Neuroscience of Leadership“, David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz tell us how our brains are constantly on the look-out for “errors“ in our expectations. We have learned to scan for patterns of what works and doesn’t – for instance, which plants taste good and which poison us, what to approach and what to avoid.

However, here comes the double-edged sword... The very same capacity for scanning that makes us feel safe also, inherently, makes us wary of new things. This essentially limits our capacity for positive experience with unknown elements, and hence, limits our creativity. The same part of our limbic brain that registers change also registers pain, Rock and Schwartz tell us. In fact, a perceived change actually “provokes sensations of physiological discomfort.“ The only time we enjoy and allow ourselves to scan for novelty is when we play. Play essentially calms the amygdala’s (the area of the brain that registers pain) reactivity to the new and lets us creatively engage with novel behaviors. Somehow we can really let go and experiment freely and fully when we label what we’re doing “play“.

Alas, in our current culture, “make believe“ is generally considered child’s play and we adults often become cut-off from this creative outlet. Yet, some of us are beginning to realize that, with all that seems to be failing our grown-up world, perhaps it‘s high time to explore new options. Isn’t it likely that out-of-the-box, adaptive choices might be just what is required? So why is it that we are so often fixated on old patterns that we blind ourselves to new potentials and stick with things we know aren’t really working anymore? (Our oil dependency issue and reliance on big banks are two things that spring to mind...)

What if we could use play to show us a way out of our gridlocked, ill-fated patterns of behavior? Brown suggests: “Play is nature’s greatest tool for creating new neural networks and for reconciling cognitive difficulties...When we play, dilemma and challenges will naturally filter through the unconscious mind and work themselves out.“ Play, it turns out, can not only help release our imagination, it can also loosen our fears of change!

Those amazing mirror neurons:

Like me, perhaps you’ve also been intrigued with the research about mirror neurons, discovered just in the early 1990s. Mirror neurons essentially reflect back what we observe happening to another. As such, they serve as viseral learning tools which can rouse our empathy and generate alignment with others. These neurons help explain our inherent impulse to mimic actions of the people around us and why seeing someone kick a ball into the goal can activate a sense of personal victory, or why even watching someone else get so much as a pinprick can make you winch. It’s due to “a neural snapshot of primal empathy in action,“ says Daniel Goleman in Social Intelligence. We literally react, via our mirror neurons, to seeing the pleasure or pain of others almost as if it were happening to us.

And watching emotions play on the face of another can set up a type of invisible emotional resonance with that person – something that can happen virtually as well as in real life. Shared joy unites us when we engage in creative play. Goleman goes on to explain: “laughter may be the shortest distance between two brains, an unstoppable infectious spread that builds an instant social bond.“

One of my personal heroes, (and a really nice guy), Daniel Siegel, neuroscientist, psychiatrist and expert on attachment theory, talks about mirror neurons as an essential component of

attunement. By developing “resonant states“ that allow for better adaptation to complexity, we can become more “flexible, adaptive, coherent, energized and stable“ (quoting from his recent book, The Mindful Brain.) Such states of interconnection allow for attuned communication, a major factor in our healthy attachment in primary relationships which, in turn, further develop our capacity for adaptive, new actions and our sense of well-being. As Siegel tells us: “what we see we become ready to do.“

So, can play really make us more adaptive, even more resilient?

As a therapist and coach for many years, I’ve done a lot of work with stress-reduction and helping people develop more resilience in mind, body and spirit. I’ve noticed in my clients‘ lives, as well as my own, that when we loosen up and become playful, we often access personal answers that may have been floating around the fringes of our consciousness all along. Plus we certainly become more enjoyable to be around.

The thing is that our moods and emotions affect us, and all those by-standers around us, in profound ways. According to Martin Seligman, the founding father of Positive Psychology, our positive emotions can have a major impact on the happiness of others. Happy people, it seems, display more empathy and altruism than unhappy people – perhaps because, when happy, we become less self-focused.

In his most recent book, Flourish, Seligman contends that “flourishing“ is composed of five primary elements: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and achievement (or PERMA). And it seems that PERMA elements are not only measurable and teachable, they are also potentially “gameable“. Seligman believes that games can definitely play a part in promoting human "flourishing". As an avid bridge-player himself, he points to research that suggests "people who play bridge into old age are less vulnerable to dementia.“ Further, it seems that by teaching players to repeatedly move past obstacles and challenges, games may well provide a useful form of resilience training.

Seligman has recently been working with Jane McGonigal, (the brilliant gaming researcher from the TED Talk that so changed the conversation between me and my son), to create games which can engage the PERMA principles – a subject area that seems near and dear to McGonigal’s heart. In her recent book, Reality’s Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change The World, McGonigal identifies four specific attributes of gaming (in this case video gaming) that certainly could support anyone dedicated to positive social change:

- Urgent optimism - the desire to act immediately with the sense that accomplishment of the task at hand is possible.

- Blissful productivity – the deep appreciation of the task at hand and the sheer joy of what you are doing -- knowing you are supported in this by the belief that success is possible! You are never given a task higher than your capacity to succeed.

- Creation of tight social fabrics - playing games builds bonds and social relationships more quickly than any other activity. The level of complexity of the most exciting games necessitates cooperative teamwork – knowledge of and reliance upon team members‘ individual skills and capacities is not only important, but crucial.

- Epic meaning - gamers have awe-inspiring missions and they build epic stories (or histories) which help establish the strong impetus to reach an epic win.

McGonigal’s research has found that by inspiring creativity to problem-solve, people become so deeply engaged in their efforts to “win” that this joyfulness begins to lessen their sense of personal limitation. Interestingly, it seems that the joy one experiences from achievements in a game is experienced in the brain just as if this satisfaction came from real life achievements. (Those wonderful mirror neurons at play again!)

Further, McGonigal points to the idea that playing games can truly help build resilience – especially since gamers learn to try again and again, seemingly unfazed by failure, perhaps egged on by the plausible expectation that their effort will eventually lead to success. Joy, resilience and satisfaction -- an impressive list of positive gains to acquire just by playing along!

So, what if game-playing just might be part of what leads us towards conscious evolution? We’ve already seen games emerge such as Journey to the Wild Divine (which teaches meditative skills within an engaging story) and Spore (which asks “How will you create the Universe?” offering an ingenious series of choices to design-your-own creatures which continually evolve.) And one of my friends just told me about a leadership course she took that used multi-player games to teach team-building. Perhaps games which open the door to further personal and social transformation are just around the corner...

We are left with some fascinating questions about where games may be able to take us: What if we continue to push the envelope and learn to utilize those mirror neurons in socio-economic games that awaken deeper levels of interconnection and altruism? What if we use play to practice not only our individual resilience skills but also our social alignment in service to complex cultural problem-solving? Perhaps the same thing that allows us to move beyond the known into fearless creativity – our capacity to play – might be a crucial key to learning how to redesign our collective future!

Now when my son begins talking non-stop about a ground-breaking new MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) coming out just in time for his holiday break from college, I have a slightly different attitude. I sometimes even get excited to hear about how he and his online friends will save the world! Yes, it’s just a virtual world, but who knows how this high-tech team-building and complex problem-solving will translate into real-world adaptability and solutions? Perhaps his heroic gaming skills might turn out to be pretty useful…

Susan Belchamber

Lifespan Development

7021 Persimmon Tree Road

Bethesda, MD 20817

240-447-0585 (voicemail)

Susan@Lifespan-Development.com