Tony Tulathimutte

SymSys 205 – Final Paper

Play and Games as Educational Simulators

            Whether it is procedural learning via military or athletic drills, academic learning via reading and memorization, or even simple task learning by way of concentrated observation and trial-and-error, learning is often characterized as a “serious” process, the result of a focused and deliberate attempt to learn. However, there is no reason why this is necessarily the case; in many situations it is common to see improvement in or acquisition of abilities as the natural result of unconscious honing and cognitive association. One example is operant conditioning, in which repeated exposure to a pair of stimuli results in an association between the two, regardless of whether one intended to or not. Another is casual observation, in which people are able to recall things they have seen or heard, even if they were not looking for them consciously.

This paper will summarize and evaluate Sue Parker’s notion of play as a form of instruction, in which skills are obtained as a by-product of game-playing. In “On the Origins of Play”, Gordon Burghardt lists certain salient traits of play that evoke the notion of simulation: “a breakdown in role relationships”, “mixing of behavior patterns from several contexts”, “relative absence of threat or submission”, and “relative absence of final consummatory acts (e.g. biting, intentional injury or killing, eating, copulation)” (p. 6). Hopefully, examining the feasibility and plausibility of play as an instructional tool will shed light on the extent and nature of the effectiveness of simulation games for purposes of education.

Classification of Games in Sue Parker’s “Playing for Keeps”

            In “Playing for Keeps”, Sue Parker argues an evolutionary basis for play as a means of instruction, speculating that all human play has its roots in socially or physically adaptive training behaviors. First, she refutes the stance that play is a vestigial behavior, that animals who played were selected for because if they had extra energy to expend playing, then they must have had more than enough energy to perform survival and subsistence tasks. Parker argues that this argument is “bizarre”, because natural selection places a “premium on efficient allocation of a limited supply of energy” (pp. 273). Rather than serving as a functionless outlet for surplus energy, Parker asserts, play and games are “practice for adult activities that cannot be practiced directly” (ibid.). This, essentially, is a conception of play as a form of simulation, and indeed the two share many common attributes.

            The examples Parker provides in support of her hypothesis follow a trajectory of child development; she classifies games into four categories, which are intended to emphasize the type of activities taught by the games. The first category is “contingency games”, in which infants learn how their actions cause things to happen. The game of “peek-a-boo”, for example, supposedly teaches the children the basics of turn-taking and causality by making repeated associations between their “vocal, facial, and hand signals” and the adults’ exaggerated responses. Parker claims that the turn-taking underlying these activities operate on the same principles as many human interactions, such as conversation; similarly, the trial-and-error experimentation with objects such as rattles are “adaptations for practicing tool use”. The second category is “make-believe games”, in which the enactment of imaginary scenes can be construed as “practice for domestic and extra-domestic tasks”, preparing children for roles and object they may encounter later in life. The third category consists of what Parker calls “agonistic exercise games”, games characterized by physical activity and motivated by “play attack and play fear”; examples include racing, play wrestling, and throwing aimed projectiles. Parker argues that these games teach the player practical hunting and maneuvering skills, while also applying the contingency rules found in the previous two game categories.

The fourth category, “games with rules”, is the largest, and for good reason: according to Parker, these games underlie the complex group interactions that define adult societies. These comprise a huge range of activities, from field sports such as polo and basketball, to board games such as chess, to word games such as “twenty questions”, and even the formation of clubs or gangs with specific rules of conduct, eligibility, et cetera. As Parker argues, the ability to follow rules, to understand their relation to winning and losing, and to adapt one’s general strategy to the rules of a game are traits indicative of Piagetian “operational intelligence”; in learning the games, one acquires an understanding of several abstract social skills, such as understanding one’s subordinate (or commanding) role in a “team”, delivering effective rhetoric, managing money and resources, predicting the behavior of others, and estimating probabilities.

Parker uses the “motivational structures” of games to link games with their practical manifestations in the real world, arguing that all rules-based games are motivated by play attack, play fear, and contingency-control. This assertion is involved in arguing several points; first, that the predominance of rules-based games are a product of sexual selection for male-dominated hierarchies, because males are more likely to engage in rules-based games. To account for this, Parker cites the “prenatal organizing effects of male sex hormones on the brain” and the relative scarcity of collective girls’ games with as many and as consistent rules. She further argues that games are used to rank male dominance hierarchies by allowing players to gauge their “physical, mental, and temperamental” abilities in relation to other players. Finally, she contends that types and prevalence of games correspond to the nature of the societies that produced them: she cites Brian Sutton-Smith, who points out that the games of the aborigines emphasize “exploration and testing”, whereas “in a symbolic and achievement culture like [American culture], most play involves make-believe and contesting”. Another comparison study of warlike and peaceful societies by R.G. Sipes found that “combative sports were typical of the warlike societies and atypical of the peaceful societies”. Parker claims that this manifestation of cultural temperament may even shift to reflect different periods in a culture’s history: Sipes found that during World War II and the Korean War, “football and hunting and betting on horses became more popular… whereas baseball became less so.”

Evaluating Parker’s Claims

            Parker’s argument hinges mainly on the notion that games are capable of training and preparing players for real-life situations; however, it seems quite clear that in most cases, the games bear only a vague similarity to the activities they purport to simulate. Not only is the violence in a “combative sport” such as boxing intentionally scaled down, but the rules tend to prohibit the sort of fighting that would most likely be employed in lethal combat. What, then, is being taught? Parker is never quite explicit about this; she refers several times to games as “adaptations for practicing”, but if this is true, then the form of practice should match the activity being practiced as much as possible in all pertinent ways. Soccer forbids the use of the hands, but clearly using the hands would be more effective or practical for transporting the ball in many circumstances; Parker does not account for why the constraint has been placed there. It may be that constraints are placed in a game for the purposes of teaching a single activity in a focused manner, but then one would have to question what the adaptive utility of kicking and maneuvering a ball with one’s feet exactly is, and why it has such broad appeal. One possibility is that the games are used for other purposes, such as conflict resolution between individuals or groups of people, but this undermines Parker’s argument that the act of playing has an intrinsic adaptive value.

Parker also seems to implicitly state that playing a game that merely resembles its target activity in a symbolic manner is sufficient for teaching that activity. For example, the value of soccer would be purely metaphorical, in that the players make a goal out of invading the opponent’s territory, but it would be ineffective for teaching actual techniques for real-world invasion. This instruction-by-analogy presupposes a human capacity for unconsciously detecting the metaphor and applying it to the proper real-world circumstances. Though we have discussed instances of unintentional learning (via associative pairing and observation), this sort of learning has been mostly rooted in sensory memory; Parker never makes it clear exactly how people were able to apply their play learning to the corresponding real-world situations, especially when the two do not have many practical procedures in common. If soccer is a metaphor for territorial invasion, then it lacks so much of the original warlike connotation that it may not be obvious to the players that it is intended as training for war; the connection might be learned unconsciously, but this would be quite a significant assertion, and Parker never indicates that this is necessarily (or even potentially) so. However, since people clearly have the capacity for explicit analogical reasoning and learning, acquiring a symbolic connection implicitly it is by no means an absurd proposition.

            Another issue is how Parker correlates the temperament of a society and the nature of their games. Parker seems to suggest that the demands of a society influence the type of activity enacted in a game, as with the aborigines and exploration games, but if this were so, then there should be complex adaptive games for every evolutionarily useful activity. However, there seem to be activities that have no adaptive “game”—for example, preparing food or identifying edible plants. If, as Parker argues, games emerge as a means to teach complex skills, she does not account for why all useful practice activities are not as intrinsically engaging as play activities. Some forms of adaptive practice, such as studying for a test or training for a marathon, can be unpleasant or tedious, and rewarding only in their results. Parker does not address why these rewarding tasks are considered boring, while other repetitive and seemingly “pointless” tasks such as solitaire or chess can appeal to one’s sense of play. It would seem that the ability to affect tangibly change or control one’s circumstances has something to do with the appeal of the game; whereas studying and physical conditioning are slow and monotonous with no immediate rewards, one can affect one’s situation relatively quickly and visibly in a game.

            In any case, Parker falls short of defining exactly what types of skills different categories of games are capable of teaching or simulating. For instance, because she claims that all rules-based games are motivated by play attack, play fear, and contingency control, a wide range of activities are excluded from being taught in the context of a rules-based game—particularly, activities that are solitary and unsuited to win/loss conditions and rigid rule structures. Parker acknowledges this incompleteness briefly when she notes that girls’ games tend to lack functionally specialized role assignments, organized or codified rules, and are often played in parallel in smaller groups: this suggests that adaptive “female behaviors” cannot be conveyed in a rules-based framework. Parker does not surmise whether there are any activities that cannot be taught in any type of game, but the absence of games for activities such as food preparation seem to suggest that such games were ineffective (or else they would have survived).

            Finally, there is the question of the efficacy of play in teaching the tasks that Parker claims it is capable of teaching. Parker makes it clear that much play is largely motivated by “play attack” and “play fear”, which differs from their real-life counterparts in that they do not stem from genuine desires to injure or suspicions of threat, but rather the more inconsequential desire to win the game; as a result, they are moderate and pleasurable. However, it seems reasonable to argue that the reality, sincerity, and consequentiality of one’s actions impact one’s decisions; combined with the abstractions and constraints inherent in many games, this difference might be substantial enough to make games less effective at teaching evolutionarily important skills such as combat and invasion than straightforward drills. Parker does not argue one way or the other, but it is a question that pertains directly to the plausibility of games—and moreover, simulation—as effective methods of instruction.