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Get Up!, Step 4

Play! The Pulse of Creativity

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation,” said Plato. What ever happened to kids playing in the playground, a stolen game of basketball at lunch and lovers strolling hand in hand? Play in childhood is necessary not only for physical development, but also for social and intellectual development. Adults play too. Play is a stress valve and a mechanism for socialization. I see people in our chair-release programs get up from their chairs and breathe fresh air into their lives. Play is a part of that. Sometimes you have to put aside your plan, weapons and standard operating procedures, let down your hair and play! Many of life’s tragedies come unexpectedly. In the same way, so too should many of life’s joys. Don’t wait for a storm to pass; dash outside and dance in the rain. Don’t let the chance to spontaneously tell someone you love them slip away; just say it! Get up, shake off the cobwebs and have some fun.

Poverty Playground

I was working in the Kibera slum in Nairobi trying to understand the interaction between people’s NEAT (nonexercise activity thermogenesis) movement and poverty. Kibera is the world’s second-largest slum. Working with local teams, we were planning the Kibera Mapping Project, where we would use advanced camera motion detection technologies to map both the slum spaces and alleyways (which are constantly changing) and also the movement of the 60,000 slum dwellers.

With my driver, JJ, I visited makeshift churches, spoke with people, hung out at beer stands and even got a haircut (tourist price!) at a barbershop with painted cardboard walls. It was filthy, hot and stank of sewage that flowed in open trenches.

One afternoon JJ and I sat in front of a beer hut next to a clearing and drank Tusker beer (tourist price). JJ was about my age, had two kids and an enormous smile. He understood that I did not like to talk and so was happy to drive me around for hours, walk through the alleyways, and hang out with me without saying a word. That afternoon we sat and drank beer. As we watched, a soccer match started on a nearby clearing.

There were about two dozen children playing. The goalposts were T-shirts and tree branches. The ball was a rusted tin can. The children played barefoot. We watched for more than an hour; JJ lay back on the wood platform that fronted the beer hut and fell asleep with a grin on his face.

The kids played. They ran, pushed, shoved, bossed each other around, cried and laughed. They celebrated goals and kicked at the yellow/red dust at missed opportunities. They laughed more than they cried. As the sun began to fall, the game stopped only because a riot broke out nearby over a stolen television, and JJ hustled me out of there.

Play is the domain of neither the rich nor the poor. It is the natural territory of childhood.

The Play Institute

I met Dr. Stuart Brown, the director of the National Institute for Play, at a conference in Los Angeles. Stuart was balding, suntanned and happy. His lecture began with a series of photographs of playing children. Play, he argued, is essential for childhood development of the body and mind. I leaned back.

Stuart explained his link to the University of California, Los Angeles and an entire cadre of scientists. He did not show one or two studies but summary tables of scores of studies about the physical, psychological and social benefits of play.1 He explained how play provided the bumps and stresses for healthy bone development, and he presented data on how play benefits cardiovascular fitness.2

Stuart went on to explain that, through play, children have been shown to develop physical coordination and improved math and spelling scores. He described how, with play, problem-solving thinking and IQ improve. He argued that the essence of creativity is born through play; that play itself is a creative process—just think of the innovated goalposts and tin-can football in Kibera and the jump-truck game in Mumbai.

But then the doctor went on to speak about socialization—how children learn to lead, and be led, through play. He spoke about how social structures are developed on the playground. When someone trips and falls, there is a natural caregiver. When someone kicks the ball over the fence, there is always one kid (the explorer) who goes to fetch it. There are loners, and there are mixers. There are cliques (the preemptor of political parties) and those who reject and are rejected by the cliques. There are winners and losers. The entire social structure is formed on the playground: love, hate, war, peace, leaders and the led.

Playground Gone

Active three-dimensional play is vanishing from childhood. The chair has taken over. There are several reasons for this. First, and most obviously, there is the computer screen and video games. In 2012, more than one billion individuals played computer and video games.3

Video gaming emerged in the 1970s originally as an emulator of physical gaming; Pong, released in 1972, was an electronic table-tennis game, for instance. Electronic gaming improved along with home computers, and now, according to DFC Intelligence,4 video gaming is a $66 billion per year industry that is expected to grow another 20 percent in the next four years. In China alone, online computer gaming is valued at $12 billion per year. Just as word processing has replaced handwriting, so has computer/video gaming displaced active outdoor gaming.

Electronic gaming has gained technical sophistication but lost social integrity. Computer games virtually arm children with weapons and help them visualize scenes of violence and sex they might have never encountered otherwise. In a school focus group in Iowa, a ten-year-old boy told me: “When I get stressed out, I go into the basement and shoot a whole bunch of people.” He paused. “Then I feel a lot better.”

As electronic gaming evolved, so too has addiction to it. Internet Gaming Disorder is now listed in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.5

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) is the technical term used to describe the most popular type of role-play web-based computer games, where large number of players role play with one another within a virtual world. This is how play is converted from physical interaction to an electronic interface. There are about 500 million MMORPG gamers strewn across the world; one game, World of Warcraft, has 8 million players worldwide.6 Rates of addiction can be as high as 50 percent or as low as 1 percent of gamers, depending on the population being studied.7 Chair-based, screen-based gaming no longer displaces only active outdoor play; it even displaces other sedentary activities, such as television watching. Children who play video games are more sedentary than even children who watch television.8

An extreme situation has emerged in Japan and South Korea, where some groups of children are so addicted to gaming that they do not leave their rooms or go to school. Instead, they have trained their parents to deliver food to their doors. Their rooms are dark and are fitted with wall-to-wall computer screens. These children have forgone all physical social connections; their world is artifice, and their bodies are crumbling as a consequence; 24 percent of these children require hospitalization to reverse their addiction.9

In Iowa City, I met an 11-year-old boy who plays World of Warcraft with peers across the world. The battles are scheduled at certain times, and, like a good soldier, he has to show up. The battles can start at 7 p.m., he told me, and end ten hours later. Once a B+ student, now he’s failing. “I’m in the Army of the Dead. I’ve got hundreds of friends,” he told me. “Any living friends?” I asked him. “Yeah,” he replied, “they’re all living.” But gaming addiction is not limited to youth; Jeremy is a 38-year-old accountant who, because of his addiction to gaming, lost his marriage, children and job. He used gaming to escape from his real-life stressors.10

In addition to video and computer games, there are other reasons why play has mutated from active physical play to chair-based pursuits. We examined data for the Centers for Disease Control for sedentariness across more than 3,000 counties in the United States; these counties cover the majority of the nation’s population.11 People’s zip codes predict how active they are. Those who live in a poverty-dense zip code—with higher rates of poverty and lower house prices—are four times more likely to be sedentary and to have obesity. Children living in poor areas sit more and engage less in active play. No one chooses to live in a poor neighborhood; perhaps personal choices have less to do with the chair sentence than we think.

But It’s Not Just Play

Two victims of state school underfunding are physical education teachers and art teachers. I recently lectured at a high school in Minneapolis. There was no art teacher for a school of 800 students; instead, art had become IT. The kids had lessons using PowerPoint, Adobe and Microsoft Paint on computer screens. The tactile experience of molding clay or holding a brush was gone. Gone too was the mess of clay and the smell of paint. Gone were classroom clay fights when the teacher was not watching and the physical interaction of the body, hand and arm with art.

Think how a sculpture exists in three dimensions and how you can walk around it, touch it and smell it. It casts shadows as you move. I met an artist in her studio in Boston; she explained that she mixes infinite hues and shades of colors on her palette. As we spoke, I could smell the oil paint. Art on a flat computer screen, she told me, does not possess this dimension; colors are pixelated and selected from a predefined array of colors. You don’t walk around a computer screen to admire computer art—you sit in front of it.

Human studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging scanners show that the brain formulates images differently from a computer screen compared to the free-living real world.12 In the same way that video and computer play has become a flat experience, so too in art; sculptures and paintings created with pixels and PowerPoint are static, seated versions of what was once dynamic.

Poverty Chair Sentence

I was intrigued with why poverty is such a driver of inactivity in US children (and adults); surely rich kids have greater access to video gaming, I thought. In 2011, I conducted focus groups in the Euclid area of Cleveland, one of the poorest parts of the city. After a few hours of talking with the first focus group, it was clear why poor kids play less and sit more. A mother said, “I don’t let my kids play outside. They get involved in drugs or get shot.” Before the evening was over, I heard five gunshot volleys.

At the time, there were streets in Cleveland where one out of three homes was going through foreclosure. Many deserted homes were falling into abject disrepair. Corporate collaborators had an idea to buy some of these homes (some were on sale for $20,000), level them and create local, neighborhood-based playgrounds. Houses were leveled, and supplies for playgrounds were brought in. In a few cases, all of the supplies were stolen from the vacant lots. Nonetheless, several playgrounds were built on these inner-city lots. I went to see one of them; it was empty. One mother told me that she would not let her kids play there even though it was only a five-minute walk from her house because the playground had become a center for drug dealing and was controlled by a local gang. “They [the drug dealers] love it,” she said. “If the cops come, they run straight behind the houses at the back.” In these neighborhoods, active play was too dangerous for kids to participate in. No wonder kids took to their chairs.

Paulette Baukol, from the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, set out to investigate whether it is lack of money or the inner-city urban jungle that has eroded childhood play.13 She examined whether Native American kids living on open reservations are more active than Native American kids living in urban neighborhoods. Interestingly, she and her team discovered that children living on reservations are just as inactive as urban native kids. Native kids overall are less active than white children of similar age. I asked, “Why are children living on wide-open native reservations so inactive?” Paulette swung her long black hair and pierced me with a tight brown stare. “Do you know how dangerous some of our reservations are?” she asked. I looked blank. On some reservations, physical and sexual violence are unchecked, and drug and alcohol use are epidemic; these kids have nowhere safe to go.14 The challenges in the urban environments are different to those on reservations; Native American kids living in urban areas cannot play in inner-city playgrounds because there is a hierarchy of violence. Native kids, who are at the bottom of the social order, get beaten up, mugged and shot the most often.15 It is no wonder that parents do not let their kids play in the inner-city neighborhoods; for these children, television and game consoles are lifesavers.

If you want kids to play as they are meant to, you have to create safe places for them to do so. As I found out, the availability of land isn’t the only requirement; the space must be safe and be kept safe. Critically, mothers in particular have to support efforts to keep their kids healthily active.

Active Gaming

Recognizing that millions of children are stuck in chairs playing only in virtual worlds, thought leaders began to ask in 2005 whether we could convert chair-based video gaming into active video gaming. If the answer was not throwing away the gaming console, maybe screen-based gaming could become active.16

I noticed that one scientific group in Hong Kong seemed ahead of many others. Chair-centric play is ubiquitous in Hong Kong, which is one of the most cramped and tech-rich cities in the world. Here not only is play space extremely limited, but video gaming carries social cachet. In Hong Kong, children’s social status is determined more by their video game level than by the brand of shoes they wear.

I flew to Hong Kong to investigate. Dr. Alison McManus was the leader of the scientific group focused on active gaming. Judging by her resume, I expected a rather crusty academic. But no sooner had I arrived in Hong Kong on Sunday morning than Dr. McManus arranged a hike with her team up a local mountain trail; then she invited me to join her husband and kids for a swim at the beach.

That evening Alison invited me out for dinner. We sat, drank and ate. Suddenly someone rushed forward, and a camera flashed. “Dr. Levine, I caught you sitting,” the man said. “I’m putting it up on Facebook.” Even in Hong Kong, I could not escape The Chairman’s reach!

Alison studied whether children could play video games while walking on a treadmill. The experiment generated fascinating insights. She discovered that children will try gaming while walking on a treadmill, but because they perceive that walking hurts their gaming skill, they often get off the treadmill and return to their seats.17 The game comes first, and they’ll subvert any system that threatens that. A better answer was needed.

Later that year, back in the United States, I was invited to be a judge at the New York Toy Fair with ABC Television—
specifically to provide commentary on how games were evolving to improve activity levels in children.

The toy I awarded the gold medal to was the simplest. It was a pair of hard-plastic carpet skates: pieces of plastic you Velcro over your shoes that allow you to skate over carpet. I bought three pairs—two for my kids and one for me. I gave second prize to a plastic tennis racquet with a sensor in its handle; you use it to play tennis with a virtual opponent on a television screen in front of you. This was the predecessor of the Wii.

The Wii, launched at the end of 2006, was a critical moment in gaming. It demonstrated several key points. The first was that Nintendo, the manufacturer, could make a lot of money with active gaming. This is important because without a funding stream, a change in gaming will never occur. The second point was that parents lapped up the concept of active gaming. They could buy video games for their children and not feel guilty that they were condemning their children to ill health. The third point was that active gaming could be marketed as a family connector (rather than as something a child does alone). The marketing was directed at families participating in Wii together. All good. But it was the fourth point I found to be the most important.

Before the Wii became massively popular, another active game called Dance Dance Revolution already had a strong following. It consists of a plastic mat that is placed on the floor and is connected to the television. The mat is divided into nine numbered squares, and the television, with accompanying music, instructs users on which square to put their feet on. The songs start off slowly but get faster, and soon sweating kids are bopping around like crazy. It seemed too good to be true, a video game that made you dance.18 Large studies examined whether deploying Dance Dance Revolution would help kids lose weight and become healthier.19 To the surprise of the scientific community, it failed; there was no sustained weight loss through “exergaming,” as it became known.20 Results indicated that already active kids liked Dance Dance Revolution, but overweight kids could not keep up and became discouraged. After these findings were known, data on the Wii started to come out.

To play with the Wii, a user holds a thick wand that contains sensors that communicate with the console and television. To swing the virtual tennis racquet, you swing the wand. At least that is what researchers assumed. What actually happens is that kids learn to game the system. Instead of swinging their arm, they learn to simply flick their wrist. The wand senses the wrist’s motion, and the racquet moves wildly on the television screen. The trouble is, a wrist flick consumes almost no calories.

I learned this the hard way when I played Wii tennis with my daughter. I was flying around the living room while she sat still, giggling and simply wriggling her wrist. Sweat poured off me; amusement emanated from her. She won the tennis match from the sofa. Data were reinforcing the early lessons I’d learned in Hong Kong.

This was the fourth point about the Wii. In games that are designed to promote activity, kids frequently learn to cheat the system; the game comes first. In another example, children had to cycle on a stationary bike to watch television, but the kids learned to bypass the lock system and watch the TV while sitting.21

Kids are just too smart! The game comes first. Even active gaming does not necessarily make the player more active or reverse the harm of excess sitting.

Regardless of these technical limitations, the trouble with all types of video and computer gaming is that we are overlooking that the fundamental aspects of play are broader than swinging an arm or flicking a wrist at a television screen. With recess times becoming only 20 minutes, which includes eating lunch, where will kids learn the rough-and-tumble of the playground, how to scrape their knees and interact with each other and develop a sense of social hierarchy?

I think back to the joyous yelps of the girl when she kicked a goal barefoot in the Nairobi slum and the wild happiness on the faces of the children playing in the open water faucet in the Mumbai slum. I then think of the Iowa boy killing people on his video console in the basement to ward off stress. Physical play is a vital part of happiness, and modern gamers are losing out. Modern kids are as much prisoners of cars and electronic screens as their parents—they have been sentenced to lethal sitting just as we have.

Animal Play

On one of my trips to Nairobi, I stayed at the Stanley Hotel, an old colonial hotel frequented by the likes of author Ernest Hemingway. I was sitting in the Thorne Café with some colleagues from the Red Cross. A few tables away sat a middle-aged blond woman. “That’s Jane Goodall,” I was told.

The premise of Dr. Jane Goodall’s work is that you cannot study chimpanzees in confined laboratories. In order to understand their true natures, you must study them in their natural ecology. I feel the same thing about human science. So much of what we discover in research labs is irrelevant because societal factors—the weather and poverty are examples—are overlooked. Jane and I began to correspond.

A few years later, Dr. Goodall wrote to me, “Have you seen our latest data?” Her most recent paper summarized the behavior of chimpanzees living in the wild as they were designed to do.22 The report was beautiful. She demonstrated that chimpanzee play is not only critical in child development but also that play is important in adult primates.

Jane described the play of adult chimpanzees, specifically how play paralleled tool development behaviors and mental inquiry. She described how chimpanzees use shaped sticks to clear tree hollows (akin to modern gardening), how grooming is an essential part of socialization (rather like a massage) and how play-fighting is normal adult chimpanzee behavior (like “high-fiving” or back slaps). She went on to describe chimpanzee activities that resemble sports—throwing objects to each other and competitive racing. Sexual overtones and activities (including self-stimulation) were part of normal play activity too. Of course she described restfulness, napping and sitting as well, but these broke up the various types of play rather than displaced it.

Play is a forgotten part of adult human life too. Play is fun, joyous and healthy. Whether it is a spin class with friends, making out with your partner, going for a walk with a parent or playing chess on a hot day in the park—play is a pivotal part of life. Play is the pulse of creativity.

Playfulness is rare in corporate America. Adults rarely play—they email. People forsake a conversation for a text. Sometimes I too get caught up in the nonsense of modern everlasting work. How much fun have I forgone for worthless meetings? How much play have I lost for another unfunded grant application? How many games of tag have I missed with my kids? When was the last time you played? Play is one way to achieve happiness, and humans are neurologically wired to play and be happy.23

Now it is time for me to log off, get up and play.