I’m not quite sure why it feels like unstructured play makes people better/stronger
(Written before reading the second part of the OP.)
I don’t really share that feeling[1]. But if I conditioned on that being true and then produced an answer:
Obviously because it trains research taste.
Or, well, the skills in that cluster. If you’re free to invent/modify the rules of the game at any point, then if you’re to have fun, you need to be good at figuring out what rules would improve the experience for you/everyone, and what ideas would detract from it. You’re simultaneously acting as a designer and as a player. And there’s also the element of training your common-sense/world-modeling skills: what games would turn out fun and safe in the real world, and which ones seem fun in your imagination, but would end up boring due to messy realities or result in bodily harm.
By contrast, structured play enforces a paradigm upon you and only asks you to problem-solve within it. It trains domain-specific skills, whereas unstructured play is “interdisciplinary”, in that you can integrate anything in your reach into it.
More broadly: when choosing between different unstructured plays, you’re navigating a very-high-dimensional space of possible games, and (1) that means there’s simply a richer diversity of possible games you can engage in, which means a richer diversity of skills you can learn, (2) getting good at navigating that space is a useful skill in itself. Structured plays, on the other hand, present for choice a discrete set of options pre-computed to you by others.
Unstructured play would also be more taxing on real-time fluid-intelligence problem-solving. Inferring the rules (if they’ve been introduced/changed by someone else), figuring out how to navigate them on the spot, etc.
Which factor is most important for growing better/stronger?
What’s the sense of “growing better/stronger” you’re using here? Fleshing that out might make the answer obvious.
(Written before reading the second part of the OP.)
I don’t really share that feeling[1]. But if I conditioned on that being true and then produced an answer:
Obviously because it trains research taste.
Or, well, the skills in that cluster. If you’re free to invent/modify the rules of the game at any point, then if you’re to have fun, you need to be good at figuring out what rules would improve the experience for you/everyone, and what ideas would detract from it. You’re simultaneously acting as a designer and as a player. And there’s also the element of training your common-sense/world-modeling skills: what games would turn out fun and safe in the real world, and which ones seem fun in your imagination, but would end up boring due to messy realities or result in bodily harm.
By contrast, structured play enforces a paradigm upon you and only asks you to problem-solve within it. It trains domain-specific skills, whereas unstructured play is “interdisciplinary”, in that you can integrate anything in your reach into it.
More broadly: when choosing between different unstructured plays, you’re navigating a very-high-dimensional space of possible games, and (1) that means there’s simply a richer diversity of possible games you can engage in, which means a richer diversity of skills you can learn, (2) getting good at navigating that space is a useful skill in itself. Structured plays, on the other hand, present for choice a discrete set of options pre-computed to you by others.
Unstructured play would also be more taxing on real-time fluid-intelligence problem-solving. Inferring the rules (if they’ve been introduced/changed by someone else), figuring out how to navigate them on the spot, etc.
What’s the sense of “growing better/stronger” you’re using here? Fleshing that out might make the answer obvious.
Not in the sense that I think this statement is wrong, but in that I don’t have the intuition that it’s true.