Welcome to the 'Play Knows No Age' blog!
With a multitude of definitions and theories on play, one fact cannot be denied; play must have a purpose it cannot just be. As humans we are genetically hardwired to engage in play, using it as a tool to adapt to ‘new social interactions’ and a method of maintaining physical, emotional and mental well being. Play helps assist our connection and understanding of identity, of ourselves, of others and of the world around us. Therefore it can be assumed that play is essential and should not be naively subjected to the stigma that it belongs purely to the realm of childhood.
We have looked at Erikson's eight stages of human development as a way of exploring the role of play. The findings of this research have been displayed in a poster attached to this blog. Now we aim to further explore the role of play within adulthood, specifically people aged between 45 and 60 years, and we'd love your input! We will be adding questions soon, so please help us out with your particularly ideas on play. Here is a teaser...
What is your definition of play? Is play relevant to your life?
About Me
- Play Knows No Age
- Bachelor of Design (Communication Design) with Honours. Group includes Melissa Beel, Melissa Chubb, Chloe Dam, Justine Fotia.
Hi Melissa!
ReplyDeleteJust off the top of my head: play for me is about creating space away from the many constraints of everyday life - about introducing characters and events that hop-skip-jump beyond the boundaries of what we know to be physically or socially possible - about making the things we'd like to see happen, happen - about bringing absurdly incongruous objects and persons together for comic effect and orchestrating their antics like a capricious god. When you're young, play can serve as a laboratory for testing out the way things work and adding a pinch or two of the mystery you believe the universe is coyly hiding. The older you get, the more rigid you see life's limits becoming, and maybe the more you need play as a space to recreate the rules.
Maybe playing, after all is said and done, is learning: a canvas upon which we reveal what we know about possibility and impossibility, and our deepest hopes and fears.
To conclude: an anecdote. I once spent an entire evening teaching my friend's kids the basics of direct democracy by playing with about twenty plastic dinosaurs and a tin foil pond. They were 5 and 3 years old. And they got the idea pretty quickly, but were keen to break the rules when their favourite dinosaur didn't get what he wanted. To cut a long story short, the day was saved by a fireman made out of felt.
I slept like a baby that night.