Episode: 1508
Title: HPR1508: In Defense of Play
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1508/hpr1508.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 04:27:40

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Hello everyone and welcome to the Hacker Public Radio.
This is Charles in New Jersey, and I'm here with a fun episode, I hope, that I'm going
to call in defense of play.
This is going to contain a little reference to some science, but mostly it's going
to be just some comments about how it's important for both kids and adults to get enough
play time.
It's the best way to learn, it's the best way to recharge your mind, and it's probably
the only way to really get and stick with a learning process where you have to acquire
skills, learn facts, and become a different kind of person, I guess.
It's hard to stick with the learning process if you have to do it on sheer willpower, but
once you find a way to make it fun, you get into a state that people call flow, and you
don't mind spending the time or researching something to support having a better time.
In fact, I'd call that playing.
I've always had trouble paying attention and sticking with things when I've been in
school or in a self-study or some other environment where I have to learn something.
As long as someone else wants me to do, I have a lot of trouble staying with it.
If I can turn it into a game or something that I get a payoff from, that I enjoy, I don't
have any trouble sticking with that at all.
It's like the kid that everyone knows who can't pay attention to anything for more than
a few seconds at a time, but you put him in front of Minecraft or some other video game,
and suddenly he can concentrate all day long.
Well, it's not that way with me with video games, but I have other things that I can do
that.
Once I start doing them, I become absorbed, and I can just sit back and enjoy them all day
long.
Believe it or not, it's not just my opinion that play is important for learning and for
development of your mind and for probably invigoration of your body as well.
There's actually a scientific journal called The Journal of Play, and I put a link to that
in the show notes.
One of the contributors to that journal, I discovered through just one of those links
on Twitter that you follow, just because it looks interesting, was Peter Gray, and he wrote
an article that claimed that children today are suffering from a severe deficit of play.
And of course, I had to look that up because who doesn't like playing, I think we could
do with a little less seriousness and a little more play in our lives.
So I read it and it made great sense that maybe we're doing kids a disservice by putting
them into regimented recreational activities and programs so that their lives are scheduled
to the hilt, and they can't ever get out for independent play with a group of kids who
are of mixed ages and so on, so that they can learn to get along with each other and
to develop rules of fair play, to develop the ability to make allowances for the smaller
kids so that they don't get hurt or they don't become frustrated because things become too
hard for them.
And maybe to have informal customs about making things a little bit harder for the older
and bigger kids because they have more capability and it's, you know, we feel we can challenge
them without harming them, but also to give them more of a reason to stick with the play
group.
And these are things that kids negotiate naturally if they're left to themselves in the absence
of bullies and so on, but when I was growing up, we had a neighborhood where the kids got
together and we dealt with bullies by either shunning them or having some of the bigger
kids intervene and driving them off.
That seems harder to arrange today, I don't know why, but well, I won't go into it because
I don't have any answers for that, but all I know is that our play groups, we had our
rough spots, but we managed all that stuff without help from any adults except when something
got out of hand and an adult needed to step in.
Probably that worked because we were in a context where if we got too far out of line,
some adult would see us identify us and call our parents.
So if we knew that that against that backdrop, we knew that we were going to get a neighbor
dropping a dime on us, we wouldn't get too far out of line anyway.
So that probably helped us manage that.
So it wasn't as ideal a situation where kids just managed themselves.
We knew that we were sort of on a tether because the adults were in cahoots against us if
we got out of line, but they were fine and they would let us keep doing what we were
doing if we stayed within the limits of civilized behavior for the most part.
But I'm not so much interested in playing as a child because I'm a bit far away from
that and I would be just giving you more idealized memories as I just did.
I think it's more important for me to talk about things that are closer to the present
and that would be playing as an adult.
Now I have a long commute on a train so I have a lot of downtime where I'm not actually
doing anything structured, I'm not necessarily working, I can't always be sleeping on the
train and sometimes I would get bored if I didn't have something to do so I've turned
that train time into me time where I might edit my audio for these HPR podcasts.
I do some writing, I take notes on articles, yes with a pen and a pad of paper because
that helps.
Things that are generally stuff that I want to do, it's play if you will and I find that
I do a lot of my informal learning projects while I'm on that commuter train.
I also try to schedule some time outside of that where I have some me time where I can
just go to my lab and play with stuff like when I start experimenting with other Linux
distributions or with different math software that I have to figure out how to compile
and build and make it work and then find the things that are wrong with it and tinker
with them until I can get them, coax them sometimes into getting the right answers or at
least trying to prove that the answers that they have are wrong so I can call for help.
But that may sound like work to you but to me that's a kind of fun and it's really a
form of play, I wouldn't keep doing it if it didn't give me some kind of a fun payoff.
When I was a kid I used to pretend that I was hunting.
I say pretend because I'd go out in the woods with my shotgun but I had such, I had mixed
eyesight, I had one eye that's extremely near sighted and one that's normal so I had
really crappy depth perception so my career in majorly baseball was probably in danger
from the start and my career as a marksman was probably not going to succeed either because
I can't get a good sight picture if I don't have decent depth perception.
I was okay at shooting ski because it was approximate and I would also try to wangle
my way into a shotgun with a medium choke barrel so they had more of a pattern to hit those
things but I mainly took it as an opportunity to get other people's permission to go and
walk in the woods and I would see animals or try to track them and develop skills in stalking
and in orientering which is a fancy word for finding my way around without getting lost
or too lost and that was really a form of play.
I put it into the context of hunting because that's what people in my area did at that time
up in the wilds of northern Vermont so I use that as a form of play.
You might be in this in that kind of a position now if you're in a rural area where you have
access to places to go hunting.
You might actually fire your weapon.
I don't do that sort of thing and haven't for quite a while although I for the record
I am an NRA safe hunter got that certification and so I know to watch for what's downrange
and all of that but I haven't touched a firearm in years but there are some people who really
enjoy that and they'll do endless research on how to get cosmoline off the metal and
other parts of a rifle that they've collected or something like that and that's fun for them.
I think I would probably for one get a lot of complaints from my wife if I were to start
doing that but also I'm just not oriented in that direction anymore but for those who
are you learn a lot by playing with things that present you with problems and you do experiments
to try to get the results you want and you don't mind spending time because it's fun.
I think I did that with programming from the start you know when I was first starting
out with basic I would get those David all books and type in the source code to different
games and then play with them for a while and then experiment with changing the rules of
the game by changing the changing the code in the program and then I got involved with
experimenting with sort programs including quick sort which I've coded in a bunch of different
languages some of which have more or less support for recursion which is another whole episode
in itself I can hear Ken Fallon go caching you owe me a show on that so I would I would write
that program over and over again in different languages just to see how that language worked
and it would reveal things I would need to know about using that language and work whether
it was Pascal or one of the various basics or quick basic or visual basic or Python I don't
think I haven't done it in Pearl which is not something that I would necessarily want to do in
Pearl anyway but there are a few other languages that I've done that program in and in some
occasions I was experimenting and these are in the days when I was single I'd be programming until
four in the morning before I got up to work and not really realized that it had gotten that late
or early as it were that I'd work basically all night on something that no one had assigned me to
do I wasn't going to get paid for it was just purely for fun I think another thing that I
learned in doing things that other people would call work in a context of having fun is how to stick
with something how to keep my attention focused for a long for me an extremely long period of time
without stopping without fretting about how hard it is just keep on plugging at it and coming at
it from coming at the task from different directions it helps if the task is challenging and has
and there are obstacles in the way and computers are really good at putting obstacles in the way
because they do exactly what you tell them to do instead of what you necessarily want them to do
or intend them to do so computers are a good way to learn how to be to deal with frustration but
there are other the real world has plenty of frustrations as well so don't worry they'll they'll be
opportunities for play in other contexts as well with real things things that you have to wire
together a weld or solder or screw together or nail together or build with real materials I tend to
do it with computers more because that's pretty portable and I don't have a lot of time to in space to
have a big workshop for making stuff but I do like playing um I think it goes back to when I was a
kid and I used to do my older brother's math homework because he would do just enough of it to
understand what was going on and then he would stop because he didn't need any more drilling on it
then then he did and then I would just pick up and do some of the problems and it would be
interesting to me and sometimes I didn't have the background to figure it out so I would just read
his book and go ahead and do the problems and I did it in the context of playing was purely
voluntary he didn't make me do it he probably thought it was pretty stupid that I would even try it
because I could be outside doing something but it was just fun to
realize that I could figure things out for myself I didn't need teachers or anyone else to
order me to figure it out to lay out all the steps for me I could just pick up the book and
as long as I was having fun I could keep at it I really enjoy myself
and that's sort of what I like to do when I'm picking up any new skill today
if someone tells me I have to do something I feel myself resisting from inside but if I want to do
something I will look up links on the internet I will read articles I'll read things that are
only tangentially related to it I'll get as much information as I can and then I'll start playing
and sometimes I feel like I'm not ready I haven't learned enough but as I start playing with
something I realize what I don't know and then I am motivated to learn more which gives me more
ideas about things I can do and I return to doing and I might come back to the same point
in the project but when I come back around the second time it's more like being in a park
and garage than going around a circle I'm back at the same point on as relative to the ground
but I'm on a different level of understanding because I've gone back and researched it and figured
out why I was doing what I was doing and why the things I had tried before didn't work
and I have a better sense of where I am and exactly what's going on so that I can move ahead
and then as I try things again I realized that when I thought I knew exactly what was going on
I didn't really understand it so I needed to learn some more things and it just keeps piling up
and I would do none of this if I wasn't telling myself that hey this is fun and I'm really enjoying
this and it's this is play time I'm not saying that I should go ahead and and contrive ways to make
my work into a game that's fun and play but if that happens that's a nice coincidence
it would be a nice thing if I could arrange so that my the things I have to do for my job were
also fun to do and to some degree the things I do at work are fun because I like that kind of thing
kind of the mathematical challenges the people challenges the trying to get computers and people and
things in the real world to do what I'd like them to do and sometimes you win that and sometimes you
don't but it's all it seems like one big one big I don't want to say game it's like a big hack
it's like okay if I do this and that what effect is that going to have is it going to be fun
is it going to get me where I want to go is it going to get the best result that I can possibly get
and then afterwards I don't mind taking the time to figure out what went wrong what could I have
done better and actually find ways to improve myself and my performance for next time
I suppose that makes me that could make me a better worker if I applied that that discipline the
discipline of making of playification of work if I took it that seriously it would feel like I
was professionalizing my play and then it wouldn't feel like it was play anymore and I say oh I'm
just tricking myself so I wouldn't it wouldn't work it would lose its magic but really informal play
is where I learned a lot of the things that I learned in fact I think I learned Python programming
language because my wife asked me to help her out on debugging a Python based prototype of some
system she was working on for a large company and I didn't know the language so I picked up the
Python tutorial a few days in advance read up on it started playing with it on my computer
and then went in and just played with code and see it you know tried to see what it was doing and
we did get it to work eventually after an entire weekend of poking at it and she got her job done
and I started really liking Python I like other programming languages too but that's where I first
got introduced to it back in 2002 so sometimes what someone else considers work if you're open
minded you can make it play and get some results that help both of you you can help someone else
get their job done and help them get through an obstacle while gaining some new knowledge and
skills for yourself so I've always found that being somewhat generous in helping people
has given me opportunities to learn things and to grow as a person and to make myself I don't know
feel better about myself become more effective and have another thing I can put on my resume but
better yet to put into my task list at work so that more things that if there are more things on
the things I have to do at work that are also fun then you know it makes the day go by much faster
and makes my job much more enjoyable you know if I can make 9 out of 10 things I have to do at work
feel like play then I must say that if I can arrange that I've got the best job ever right
and that's really coming to the end of what I wanted to say about play sometimes you need to
shut off the adult supervision of yourself and just do something fun and if you don't know what's
fun just do something and if it's fun keep doing it if it's not fun stop doing it and grab something
else or just keep doing it until it becomes fun there are some some skills that you want to learn
like I don't know inline skating that you have to stick with long enough to get your you know
get your balance and first get that feeling of having the skate stay under you while you're moving
so that you're really starting to enjoy it but other things you can start having fun right away
but I really am a big advocate of having fun doing things that you love or that you can love
and I think that taking the time to play will ultimately make us all better people and that's it
I hope that some part of this is helpful to someone somewhere and that you'll have a good week
and when the weekend comes that you will take some time to play see you next time on Hacker Public
Radio this is Charles New Jersey saying goodbye
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