Cyndi Suarez on “The Purpose of Play”
Excerpted from The Power Manual, by Cyndi Suarez
Collage art by Lizzie Suarez. Art depicts Grace Lee Boggs on a mushroom and Audre Lorde canoeing on an orange slice with flowers and a juicy green spiral in the backdrop.
We’re diving into the creative potential of centering joy in food, land, and cultural work, and imagining what the world could look like if we embraced our collective capacity to play. During Around the Table: Play as Portal on Thursday, March 30th—a virtual conversation with artist, creative improv facilitator, and creator of Cattails Comix, Kai Tzeng, and Black, food, culture and history advocate & community organizer, KJ Kearney of Black Food Fridays—we explored play as a resource for shifting power and creating a culture of care for the lands, waters and people who nourish us.
Excerpted below, from her book, The Power Manual, Cyndi Suarez, President + Editor in Chief of Nonprofit Quarterly, digs into play not only as a way of being in the world, but a mindset and a pathway to collective sense-making.
What?
Play, or recreational activity, abounds in nature. The more developed the species, the more it seems to play. Play researchers have observed animals choose play over food and wondered, Why would a living being choose something seemingly extraneous, like play, over something necessary for survival, such as food? Does play have a purpose?
Before exploring the purpose of play, it helps to clarify what play is. This is not simple. One person’s play may be another person’s oppression, literally and metaphorically. Play researchers have, however, managed to identify what appear to be features of play.
Pleasure is a feature of play. Play is fun. It energizes. Play takes one to the edge of body and mind. Play heightens the senses and alerts the mind for the unexpected, body pumping, ready for action. Yet play is also calming because it is relatively safe space for engaging the unexpected, since the outcome does not generally have serious consequences. “It is just a game,” after all. This engaged, calm excitement is pleasurable.
Another feature of play is that it catalyzes creativity and innovation. Play allows experimentation with different potential realities. Through play, one creates and experiences potential future events and preadapts; that is, one practices and fine-tunes one’s response a priori, before the event. Even daydreaming leaves an imprint on the brain. Innovation can be dangerous. One might fail and lose status or, worse, one’s life.
Further, play is about tuning in to the environment and others and engaging difference. Through play, one learns to decipher the intentions of others, for one must anticipate the other in play, either to protect one’s move, reduce the options of the other, or support the other in building something together. This act of moving toward the other reduces conflict. It sharpens understanding of fairness and rearranges relationships because it requires sensitivity to the other. As such, play is mutual delight, for this challenge, or support, of the other must be enough to keep the other engaged, because the fourth and final feature of play is that it is always chosen, never imposed. Play’s reward is poise — spontaneity, grace, and fulfillment.
Ultimately, play is a state of mind, not simply an activity. Its correlating mind state is flow, considered the optimal state of mind. Optimal states occur not when one is making little effort but when one is working at the limits of the self, that is, when one is stretched beyond current capacity, while in the pursuit of something that is challenging and meaningful. Challenging is defined as having skills that are adequate, a task slightly beyond one’s reach, and a feedback loop that lets one know how one is doing against clear rules or guide posts. Challenges are meaningful when the endeavor is in the pursuit of one’s goals. The cumulative effect of experiences in which one meets and overcomes a challenge is mastery in the ability to determine the content of one’s life, how one shapes, as well is shaped by, experiences.
Thus, play is a state of mind composed of pleasure, creativity, and innovation, a tuning in to others and the external environment, and choice in pursuit of something meaningful and challenging.
Why?
What is the purpose? More specifically, why is the play mind state important in the life of human beings?
Emotions figure prominently in considering mind states, or states of mind. An emotion is a mental state that arises spontaneously and is accompanied by physiological changes. Emotions connect the body and the mind. Examples of emotions are joy, sorrow, fear, hate, and love.
Despite the range of emotions available to human beings, one generally toggles back and forth between two key emotional states, anxiety and joy, seeking to minimize anxiety and maximize joy. An interaction that triggers anxiety, a threat response, is emotionally overwhelming and mentally taxing. Anxiety de-energizes. It lowers personal productivity because it diverts and uses up oxygen and glucose, which would otherwise go toward other, more creative, uses. Offloading anxiety increases the likelihood of joy for the offloader. Because play energizes, it increases joy, which helps stabilize body and mood. When play is absent, the mood darkens, one’s sense of hope diminishes, and pleasure is unsustainable. Play supports well-being.
Because play supports experimentation and learning it quickens growth and evolution. Because it allows encountering new situations where one can imagine and experience the future and create possibilities, play allows the practice of skills that help create one’s future self. Play also preserves the best of past social selves. It sculpts the brain and guides adaptation.
Finally, because play helps human beings learn to move through the environment and the rules of engagement with others necessary in social groups, it helps one learn a public self. It helps one learn the rules of engagement that help differentiate between friend and foe. It is a penalty-free space for rehearsing the social give and take of living in community. Play increases the sense of belonging.
In this way, play is central to well-being, adaptation, and social cohesiveness.
How?
How do we play? Given the description of what play is and its purpose, the process of play must support adaptive variability, self-organization, and mutuality.
Play researchers have identified six elements of play.
The first is anticipation. There has to be the disposition to play: that is, play is something that is chosen. It is never coerced. At its core, play requires choice and free will.
Surprise is also an element of play. Play allows one to break through habitual responses. This supports the emergence of new ideas and ways of being.
Pleasure not only is a feature of play, as mentioned, it is an essential element. If it is not fun, people will not engage, will not choose to play. So play requires fun, which is generative, life-giving. Play increases joy.
Play builds understanding. Tuning in to others in an atmosphere of low risk and fun can deliver emotional empathy. One can imagine what it is like to walk in someone else’s shoes. This often leads to intellectual insights. One begins to see how another makes sense of the world, and one takes that into account in learning to live together better.
Play also helps build strength. It trains physical skills, sharpens mental abilities, deepens social insights and capabilities, and builds mastery and control. As such, play builds strength of body, mind, social interactions, and self.
Finally, play eventually leads to poise, the state of balance. Through ongoing, thoughtful, successful engagement with the external world, one builds confidence and self-possession, the ability to determine as much as possible for oneself in light of the fact that one shares the world with others. This disposition helps one move through the world with ease and allows one to direct one’s life energy toward growth, expansion, and evolution.
Collage art by Lizzie Suarez. Collage shows Toni Cade Bambara dancing in a bowl of okra soup, a couple dancing behind her, and a Himalayan dance ceremony, among flowers and a juicy green spiral.
Play is a source of power and grace, and this shows up in different ways. Play researchers have found that people have play personalities, that is, a preference for certain types of play over others, usually formed in childhood. There are at least eight play personalities.
The joker is the quintessential player, showing up in archetypes, folk tales, myths, and religions across the world. In Jungian psychology, it is the jester who uses humor to reflect the paradoxes and hypocrisies of life. In African and Caribbean folktales, it is Anansi the spider, a symbol of resistance who is able to evade the oppressor through cunning and trickery. In Native American mythology, it is coyote, a cultural hero with the magical power of transformation. In Indian religion, it is Krishna, the divine prankster whose trickery has a moral purpose.
The kinesthete is the player who engages play through the body. The kinesthete focuses on movement, not winning. Pushing the body and feeling the outcome is the goal. The kinesthete needs to move in order to think.
The explorer engages play through exploration and the imagination. On a physical level, the explorer likes new places. On an emotional one, the explorer pursues new feelings, or the deepening of feelings. Relationally, the explorer likes meeting new people. Intellectually, new subjects and points of view are welcome.
The competitor likes competitive games and plays to win. Competitors prefer clear goals and keeping score, whether the game is solitary or social. Competitors are easy to spot in social groups because they enjoy high status.
The director likes to be in charge. Planning, coordinating, and organizing is the director’s idea of fun because they enjoy directing other people. They are dynamic and often the epicenter of social groups.
The collector wants to have the most, the best, and the most interesting objects and experiences. Arranging and systematizing is the form of play. Collectors may go to great lengths in efforts to collect. They may collect in a solitary manner or with other collectors, with similar obsessions.
The artist / creator enjoys making things. This includes arts and crafts, inventing, constructing, designing, and decorating. Artist/creators are sensitive to shape, color, and texture. The goal is to make something new, fix something, or make something look great.
Finally, the storyteller uses imagination to create new worlds. Storytellers enjoy imagining, perfecting reality through playful enhancements. They invite others into their world. Writing, reading, performing are all examples of storytelling play. Because the imagination is always available, this type of play is available in almost any situation. In contrast to the competitor, the storyteller enjoys a good match.
Most people are a mix of play personalities. Identifying one’s play personality can lead to greater self awareness and provide clarity about the most effective ways to interact with others. Since one’s play personalities are typically formed in childhood, thinking back to how one played as a child is a good start in identifying one’s play personality.
Through play is often considered extraneous to everyday life, except perhaps in the lives of children, play researchers have come to see it as critical to evolution. In fact, play is viewed as part of a general theory of human relationships. Human relationships are about engaging otherness. Therefore, a general theory of human behavior is a way of understanding how humans engage difference. These modes of engagements are pathways for experience, that is, recognized trajectories that help us understand what to expect from events. There are at least four: work, play, communitas, and ritual.
Humans use work to accomplish objectives outside of the work event. One may enjoy one’s work; however, the main focus is the product or end result. Play, in contrast, focuses on process. Players seek position through balancing privilege and engagement; that is, they seek advantage while trying to stay engaged with the other. In both work and play, people assert their will.
In contrast, in communitas and ritual, people surrender to external direction. Communitas are public experiences, such as carnivals or musical concerts, in which people wander seeking satisfying experiences. Rituals, however, have clear goals. Their focus is transformation from one’s state to another.
To be human is to be in relationship. To be in relationship is to be aware of one’s standing vis-a-vis others. Issues of status are part of this awareness. Play is one of the four ways that humans make sense of engagement experiences, or interactions, which are a key structure for experiences in the world.
Read more from this chapter on play by Cyndi Suarez in The Power Manual.