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Did you know? Twitch Plays Pokemon was a social experiment and channel on the video game live streaming website Twitch, of a crowd sourced attempt to play Pokemon video games by parsing commands sent by users through the channel’s chat room. The game became unexpectedly popular with more than 1.16 million players with a total of 55 million views during the experiment.
Isn’t it incredible that somehow 1.16 million people collaborated to accomplish a task. Think back to your last company offsite course, remember what a struggle it was to get ten people to achieve a goal?
Recently I came across an article that intrigued me about the concept of play, specifically play having the connotation that it must be a separate part of our lives, what if we explored the opposite?
Some sections of our society are skeptical about the connections between play and learning. As we grow, we tend to associate play with laughter, fun, and having a good time. And that’s because play often involves all these things, but it’s not limited to that.
Since our earliest days as a human being, play is how we relate to the world, and to each other. When provided with plenty of opportunities to learn playfully, Children do what they do best: pursue their natural curiosity and thrive. And, they build skills and aptitudes we keep for life.
Let’s explore this concept via two distinct examples.
Gaming and the connection to learning and performance
There are 1.23 billion people worldwide who spend an hour a day, on average, playing video games. The Oxford physicist David Deutsch, referred to as the father of quantum computing, and esteemed video game designer Jane McGonigal think this is a great thing.
In an interview on the impact of video games, Deutsch says the counter view against gaming boils down to no more than the fact that children like video games. He states, “There seems to be a very common tendency among parents to regard children liking something as prima facie evidence that it is bad for them.”
Deutsch provided an example of comparing video games with other “educational things in the world.” He mentioned books and TV having great complexity and providing access to different aspects of knowledge – but that they are not interactive. Playing a piano is interactive and complex but requires enormous amounts of practise and training with the associated risk of misplacing that investment.
“Apart from conversation, all the complex interactive things require a huge initial investment, except video games, and I think video games are a breakthrough in human culture for that reason.” says Deutsch.
Similarly, when Jane addressed the audience at TED in 2010, her presentation would be easy to instinctively resist. “If we want to change the world,” she said, “we need to get more people playing video games.”
At the time, she referenced the cumulative tally of hours spent playing video games was 3 billion hours a week and challenged that number needed to grow to around 21 billion hours. Why? Jane argued that many of us feel like we’re not as good at reality as we are in games – not just achievements, but also our motivation to collaborate. Instant gratification, clear scores to beat and next level adventures could boost real world feedback formats and performance.
To show another example of this point – in this interview, Tobi Lutke refers to how video games helped build Shopfiy (the e-commerce juggernaut with a market capitalisation of US$100B). Games like Starcraft taught him how to develop strategies, manage resources, and invest for the long term. These lessons directly transferred to his role as a CEO.
Imagine, if we were to harness all this energy into solving real world problems. The instant gratification in gaming almost programs players to win. When you accomplish a task in the game, what happens? You go to the next level! You get a healthy bonus or a new tool for the next challenge. Is this what is happening in the workplace unconsciously, we sit ready waiting to ‘level up’ when we accomplish something. Only the workplace isn’t set up like that.
Be a kid again
In her captivating book, The Leading Edge, Holly Ransom recounts the story of taking her friend to an escape room game for his forty-third birthday. She writes how they ‘flamed out’ after selecting the highest level of difficulty and battled valiantly in the series of puzzles, codes and logic games. As they were making their way out, walking past a birthday party of six year olds, Holly was surprised when the host shared that the kids hold the escape room record on all of the most difficult rooms.
This was because: kids ask questions freely, ask for help more readily, experiment without fear and generally don’t overcomplicate things.
Holly writes about another example to show the escape room isn’t an anomaly. In the MIT Marshmallow Challenge, groups are given twenty sticks of spaghetti, a metre of tape, a metre of string and one marshmallow. Fifteen minutes to build the largest free standing tower with the one requirement that the marshmallow has to be at the top of this tower.
With all their training, MBA’s perform the worst on average in building marshmallow towers. Engineers perform decently, but guess which group performs the best? Kindergarteners!
Why? While MBAs wanted to plan their way to ‘optimal outcome’ and then execute, kinder kids took a completely different approach: instead of wasting time to make a plan or establish who is in charge, they kept experimenting over and over until they found a model that worked.
I’ll leave you with this thought provoking excerpt from Holly’s book, The Leading Edge: questions, play and curiosity are the heart, lungs and brain of the creative organism. And, as renowned education and creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson puts it, we have ‘killed creativity’ by systematically stifling all three essential organs.
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