It feels like unstructured play makes people better/stronger in a way that structured play doesn’t.
What do I mean? Unstructured play is the sort of stuff I used to do with my best friend in high school:
unscrewing all the cabinet doors in my parents’ house, turning them upside down and/or backwards, then screwing them back on
jumping in and/or out of a (relatively slowly) moving car
making a survey and running it on people at the mall
covering pool noodles with glow-in-the-dark paint, then having pool noodle sword fights with them at night while the paint is still wet, so we can tell who’s winning by who’s glowing more
In contrast, structured play is more like board games or escape rooms or sports. It has fixed rules. (Something like making and running a survey can be structured play or unstructured play or not play at all, depending on the attitude with which one approaches it. Do we treat it as a fun thing whose bounds can be changed at any time?)
I’m not quite sure why it feels like unstructured play makes people better/stronger, and I’d be curious to hear other peoples’ thoughts on the question. I’m going to write some of mine below, but maybe don’t look at them yet if you want to answer the question yourself?
Just streaming thoughts a bit...
Unstructured play encourages people to question the frame, change the environment/rules, treat social constraints as malleable. It helps one to notice degrees of freedom which are usually taken to be fixed.
Because there’s so much more freedom, unstructured play pushes people to notice their small desires moment-to-moment and act on them, rather than suppress them (as is normal most of the time).
Unstructured play offers an environment in which to try stuff one wouldn’t normally try, in a way which feels lower-risk.
… and probably others. But I’m not sure which such factor(s) most account for my gut feeling that unstructured play makes people better/stronger. (Or, to account for the other possibility, maybe the causal arrow goes the other way, i.e. better/stronger people engage more in unstructured play, and my gut feeling is picking up on that.) Which factor is most important for growing better/stronger?
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.
It feels like unstructured play makes people better/stronger in a way that structured play doesn’t.
What do I mean? Unstructured play is the sort of stuff I used to do with my best friend in high school:
unscrewing all the cabinet doors in my parents’ house, turning them upside down and/or backwards, then screwing them back on
jumping in and/or out of a (relatively slowly) moving car
making a survey and running it on people at the mall
covering pool noodles with glow-in-the-dark paint, then having pool noodle sword fights with them at night while the paint is still wet, so we can tell who’s winning by who’s glowing more
In contrast, structured play is more like board games or escape rooms or sports. It has fixed rules. (Something like making and running a survey can be structured play or unstructured play or not play at all, depending on the attitude with which one approaches it. Do we treat it as a fun thing whose bounds can be changed at any time?)
I’m not quite sure why it feels like unstructured play makes people better/stronger, and I’d be curious to hear other peoples’ thoughts on the question. I’m going to write some of mine below, but maybe don’t look at them yet if you want to answer the question yourself?
Just streaming thoughts a bit...
Unstructured play encourages people to question the frame, change the environment/rules, treat social constraints as malleable. It helps one to notice degrees of freedom which are usually taken to be fixed.
Because there’s so much more freedom, unstructured play pushes people to notice their small desires moment-to-moment and act on them, rather than suppress them (as is normal most of the time).
Unstructured play offers an environment in which to try stuff one wouldn’t normally try, in a way which feels lower-risk.
… and probably others. But I’m not sure which such factor(s) most account for my gut feeling that unstructured play makes people better/stronger. (Or, to account for the other possibility, maybe the causal arrow goes the other way, i.e. better/stronger people engage more in unstructured play, and my gut feeling is picking up on that.) Which factor is most important for growing 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.
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.
My guess would be unstructured play develops more material skills and structured play develops more social skills.