alt dek: In Both game and life, how well you prepare in the early stages can determine how well you do in later stages.
Sixteen-year-old Owen Liebenberg and his friends are spending the day looking for supplies of healthy food and tools. They are in a race against time to build a wooden ship that takes them off the nightmare island they find on it, a task that is far from easy. At each turn, ferocious beasts try to stop them, each exponentially harder to defeat than the last. It’s a game called dirtyAnd it’s another in a long line of contemporary survival video games.
The game is procedurally generated, so every play is different. “Sometimes you get lucky right away, sometimes you don’t,” says Liebenberg, noting the importance of doing well in the early rounds to outlast the increasingly challenging beasts to attack, says Liebenberg. on a day-night cycle. It’s quirky, lively fun and can give players a lot more than they first encounter. It’s a delicate blend of entertainment and strategy, but on a deeper level, game play can contribute to our overall evolutionary survival. Gaming can even enhance our cognitive, social and physical skills, giving us more advantages in life.
The idea has been studied in animals much time, with physical strength and dexterity at the top of the list of benefits. We often see dolphins and otters playing in the waves, or dogs happily wrestling with each other at the park. Physical activity keeps animals in good health and helps them release stress and bond better together.
Humans benefit in the same way. Active sports help us stay in shape while also increasing hand-eye coordination, speed and strength. The game can also be considered a stress reliever, whether as a short-term, fast-paced first-person shooter with Apex Legends or a longer, peaceful round of solo solitaire with a deck of cards. And we know that Games can contribute to good health.
However, the bigger idea is this play is also considered practice. Take, for example, a cat chasing a laser dot on the floor. Nathan Lents, a biology professor at John Jay University, says that when a kitten plays, it can be seen as “a warm-up to doing real things as an adult”. Attacking a toy mouse for fun will turn into hunting for food in later years. Similarly, it is possible that the joy that children derive from dressing up and playing the roles they see around them is baggage for later in life. “One of the greatest tricks of evolution is to associate behaviors and stimuli that benefit us with our reward centers, as a way to motivate us to engage in that experience and thereby reap the benefits they provide,” says Lents.
With good reasons to play, why not adapt schools to exploit this concept? Ana Lorena Fabrega, a former teacher, helped design a school that focuses on the impactful benefits of play. She is currently the main missionary in synthetic, a school that believes that children are capable of learning through play and offers as many learning principles as possible. Lessons are problem-focused, not tool-focused, and encourage students to “master their choices and develop a sense of self-efficacy.” There is no losing, only winning and learning.
