We Should Learn to Have More Fun (or Vice-Versa)

By KIM BELLARD

For several years now, my North Star for thinking about innovation has been Steven Johnson’s great quote (in his delightful Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World): “You will find the future where people are having the most fun.” No, no, no, naysayers argue, inventing the future is serious business, and certainly fun is not the point of business.  Maybe they’re right, but I’m happier hoping for a future guided by a sense of fun than by one guided by P&Ls.

Well, I think I may have found an equally insightful point of view about fun, espoused by game designer Raph Koster in his 2004 book A Theory of Fun for Game Design: “Fun is just another word for learning.”

Wow.

That’s not how most of us think about learning. Learning is hard, learning is going to school, learning is taking tests, learning is something you have to do when you’re not having fun. So “fun is just another word for learning” is quite a different perspective – and one I’m very much attracted to.

I regret that it took me twenty years to discover Mr. Koster’s insight. I read it in a more current book: Kelly Clancy’s Playing With Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World. Dr. Clancy is not a game designer; she is a neuroscientist and physicist, but she is all about play. Her book looks at games and game theory, especially how the latter has been misunderstood/misused.

We usually think of play as a waste of time, as something inherently unserious and unimportant, when, in fact, it is how our brains have evolved to learn. The problem is, we’ve turned learning into education, education into a requirement, teaching into a profession, and fun into something entirely separate. We’ve gotten it backwards.

“Play is a tool the brain uses to generate data on which to train itself, a way of building better models of the world to make better predictions,” she writes. “Games are more than an invention; they are an instinct.”  Indeed, she asserts: “Play is to intelligence as mutation is to evolution.”

Mr. Koster’s fuller quote about fun and learning is on target with this:

That’s what games are, in the end. Teachers. Fun is just another word for learning. Games teach you how aspects of reality work, how to understand yourself, how to understand the actions of others, and how to imagine.

We don’t look at our teachers as a source of fun (and many students barely look at them as a source of learning). We don’t look at schools as a place for games, except on the playground, and then only for the youngest students. We drive students to boredom, and, as Mr. Koster says, “boredom is the opposite of learning” (although, ironically, boredom may be important to creativity).  

Learning is actually fun, especially from a physiological standpoint.

“Interestingly, learning itself is rewarding to the brain,” Dr. Clancy points out. “Researchers have found that the “Aha1” moment of insight in solving a puzzle triggers dopamine release in the same way sugar or money can.” We love learning; our brains are hardwired to reward us when we figure something new out. Play is a crucial way we get to that; as Dr. Clancy writes: “Play is all about the unknown and learning how to navigate it.”

Dr. Clancy is not the first to articulate this point of view. Almost 90 years ago Dutch historian Johan Huizinga wrote Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Dr. Clancy summaries his point: “Play, historian Johan Huizinga argues in his classic book Homo Ludens, is how humans innovate, from new tools to new social contracts….Huizinga sees games as foundational cultural technology: Civilization arises and unfolds in and as play.”

I am wowed by the assertion that play is how humans innovate. If that seems extreme to you, contrast the crazy, reckless, boisterous atmosphere of many start-ups with the atmosphere of most corporate innovation departments. Not much playing – not much fun! – going on in the latter, I suspect.

Dr. Clancy goes one very interesting step further: “Play has served as a crucible of culture and innovation; it’s at the heart of design itself…Design is what happens when we uncover rules latent in the world and use these to define the logic of a new, separate system.”

That’s not how most of us typically think about design, but how I hope more of us will.   

And if you want to bring up the trend towards the gamification of everything, don’t get Dr. Clancy started: “Gamification, in other words, replaces what people actually want with what corporations want,” and “Many jobs that can easily be gamified will more profitably be automated.” You need more than gamifying to make play.

All this focus on the importance of play and having fun reminds me of the classic essay A Mathematician’s Lament, by Paul Lockhart. In it, he argues that when people say they are just bad at math, what they really are saying is that they’ve been taught math badly. “Math is not about following directions,” he wrote. “It’s about making new directions.” I.e., playing. 

Imagine, he suggests, if music was taught by simply teaching students how to transcribe notes, or art by having students identify colors. The students never get to hear music or to see art, much less to create either on their own. They’d hate both and claim to be bad at them. That, he charges, is what has happened with teaching math.  We’ve drained all the fun out of it, taken all the discovery from it.

“What a sad endless cycle of innocent teachers inflicting damage upon innocent students,” Professor Lockhart laments in closing. “We could all be having so much more fun.”

We should.

We’re living in very serious times. If it’s not climate change, it’s microplastics. If it’s not the threat of nuclear war, it’s of biochemical attacks. If it’s not the danger of cyberattacks, it’s of AI. If it’s not the impact of social media, it’s the breakdown of civility. Pick your poison; honestly, it’s hard to keep up with the things we should be worrying about. Fun seems pretty far down our priority list.

Fun is just another word for learning?  Play is at the heart of design? Play is how humans innovate? These are radical concepts in our troubled times, but ones that we should take more seriously — or, perhaps, more mischievously.

Kim is a former emarketing exec at a major Blues plan, editor of the late & lamented Tincture.io, and now regular THCB contributor