Tim Noyce Advies

I am an avid player of computer games and pen-and-paper RPG games. I enjoy shooting hordes of zombies, building and deploying armies and being part of a team in a fantastic and dangerous world. I have always valued games for themselves, but it has only dawned on me recently that they must have great survival value. Research has shown that playing is hard-wired into humans, the great apes and well, pretty much all mammals as far as my cursory search goes. Something that is built-in, instinctive to people, dolphins, rhinoceroses and foxes is probably crucial and very generally useful. We share play with species that have no hands, no language, vastly different intelligence levels and which live in environments that would kill us. Play is so useful that it has elbowed its way into the evolutionary bandwidth. It is genetically ingrained in the species and gets time and energy allocated alongside the crucial business of finding food, shelter and a breeding partner. It is obviously doing something vitally important. So what is it for and why do humans think they need to stop playing as adults?

Play is extremely functional. It is in fact a pleasure signal hard-wired to learning. It ensures that young animals make every effort to discover and manipulate the world around them, because they enjoy doing so. It continues in social settings quite simply because social settings are fluid. As an adult primate you may have played in the branches enough to perfect your balance, but your place in the hierarchy of the troop is mutable, so you need to “stay in the game”.

We associate play with childhood. Human children, during their long journey to adulthood, play endlessly, but when they actually arrive at their maturity they are supposed to “put away childish things”, stop playing and start working. Though the impulse is still there, something that was normal and is apparently useful is suddenly labelled useless and frivolous. Few people would actually say that adults should not play, but most think it. If you admit to playing games as an adult you are admitting a weakness, unless the games are Chess or Go or the kind we call “sport”. When I wrote above that I was an “avid gamer” I felt as if I were standing in a “Gamers Anonymous” meeting and being regarded with sympathy and patience by my fellow addicts. I would never put that on my CV: it is asking for trouble. Many capable professional people game, but they do not admit to it because of the negative connotation of playing games.
I speculate that the negative attitude towards play and games is a hangover from an older, simpler time when work was a well-defined task that needed to be executed assiduously to put bread on the table. If the fields need tilling then playing is out of the question until harvest home. These attitudes are highly appropriate to a society in which play and learning are only needed to teach children basic social and communication skills before moving on to the static, enduring jobs adults do. Play is then compartmentalized to the weekend basketball game or perhaps a bridge session.

Such attitudes are outdated in a society where jobs change all the time and the line between leisure and work has become porous. You probably carry a smartphone (probably one with Angry Birds on it) jangling with push e-mail and appointments. You have a job your parents would barely recognise. It is almost certainly not the same job you were hired for, or even did last year. It is now expected that adults will need to learn new skills and adapt to new working practices throughout their lives. They need to continuously do what they did when they were children: learn to handle a new world, because it’s a new world all the time now.

Computer games have changed the world and they are not finished doing so. It used to be true that solitaire play was limited to one-shot puzzles, like Patience or jigsaws. If you wanted a game that would last and continue to challenge your growing skill, you needed a human opponent to play chess with you. Now, for the first time in history, you can indulge an instinctive love of complex and ever-more-challenging games without needing a human opponent. The dynamic in any computer game is very fundamentally different: instead of a large reward achieved at the end of a complex game, we can now get many small rewards, meted out as we achieve smaller goals: it is as if I were rewarded for making a single good chess move. Games also change the kind of challenge they present as you advance – you do not just need to perform faster or more precisely, but you also need to do something new. Not at all coincidentally, this corresponds to an optimal learning strategy: many small rewards and a steady stimulation of new skills. Games have adapted to the fragmented nature of our lives now: casual and social-media games are designed to be picked up and dropped. You can play them for a minute and then do something else. You can also play in teams. Online games offer multi-player challenges in which teams of humans play against teams of computer opponents, or other human teams, or both. The universal connectivity of the Internet allows me to game competitively or cooperatively with French, Russian and Korean players. It even supports basic forms of communication that sidestep the language issue.

Stepping back a moment – games are engineered to help us learn to play them and defeat them. Modern computer games are extremely complex beasts and are heavily engineered to engage and educate their users. They interweave with social networks and voice communication. They are piggybacking on the pleasure trigger we get from learning, from play. The body gives you endorphins when you run fast: it’s a survival thing, but now we use it for jogging. The body rewards you for learning and adapting to new situations for the same reason and we use it to play games.

Computer gaming has been an integral part of our culture for forty years. Pretty much the entire professional population at this point has at least a passing acquaintance with computer games. Better yet, the most technical and cutting-edge people are the ones still playing them actively. These people love the complexity and challenge, but are faced with a work environment in which gaming is seen as an unproductive distraction and are unable to “unhook” from their main task. Naturally this is about as realistic as an unenforced speed-limit. Statistics abound on how many work-hours are “wasted” on browser-based games. People want to play.

Let me throw into this mix the latest trend in games: pervasive games. These are games that are designed to be interwoven with another activity, like attending an event.

Imagine a world in which you could play professional games at work that helped you hone business skills, learn a new habit, think more clearly.

Imagine playing a game against your boss that made you both better communicators. Imagine playing a Disaster game where tested and found flaws in the company disaster planning. Imagine playing a game that taught you how to run a project successfully, with other employees of your company as playing as project personnel and opponents (believe me, every project has opponents!). This is where we need to go now. Educational games have the reputation of being bad games and poor education. They are limited to word-learning and maths tutors for the pre-teens. Business games (the ones I have seen) are often poorly designed, needing a consultant to run them and having no replayability: like a jigsaw they guide you to a single reward and then cease. They are stuck in the 18th century, because nobody currently sees a need. There is a market for Halo and Skyrim, but nobody has made the sell to the business world that casual gaming, pervasive to their business, could do the heavy lifting in the education area. That is all the more needed given the downsizing of so many corporate education functions.

Let’s sum up. I claim that working and playing are being woven together by the changes in the working environment. Playing games is a core, hard-wired part of human motivations. Playing and learning are joined at the hip: they are inseparable. Modern work requires continuous learning and adaptation. This means that the ideal form of learning is in form of pervasive, pick-up-and-drop games that engage many members of your staff.