Where Can We Play?
On Thursday I walked into the open-air entryway of CCA in San Francisco, and I saw hopscotch on the ground, formed with colored tape. I wasn’t really in a playful mood because I had a budding headache and was stressed out, but I thought, someone put this here for people to enjoy; really though, if I can’t find joy in this right now, how many other people would actually be bothered to use it, right here in public?
I posted Christopher Alexander’s A City Is Not a Tree in my reading post for the last week, but I wanted to share a particular quote from it that jumped out at me:
“Another favourite concept of the CIAM theorists and others is the separation of recreation from everything else. This has crystallized in our real cities in the form of playgrounds. The playground, asphalted and fenced in, is nothing but a pictorial acknowledgment of the fact that ‘play’ exists as an isolated concept in our minds. It has nothing to do with the life of play itself. Few self-respecting children will even play in a playground.”
I don’t know if I agree with last line, as I have played in many a playground, both as a child and as an adult. And yet… Play is often defined as unstructured activity for enjoyment rather than purpose. But we create a structured environment for it?
However, the part that hit me like a brick is “the fact that ‘play’ exists as an isolated concept in our minds.” For well over a decade I have been wondering why there aren’t playground for teens and adults. Do adults not like to play? Do they not deserve to play? Are the only spaces for us to play bars and expensive concerts and other events that revolve around drinking? Why must we disinhibit through alcohol in order to play? (Or, bear children so we have an excuse to play?) Also, what happens when you’re a teen who can’t drink and is bored and needs a space to play?
But even more disturbing than the desire of modern society to inform adults that we have too much else to do besides play, is the practice of separating play from the rest of our activities. Do…do we not want to have fun and be happy? Why do we even accept a society like this (let alone contribute to it)?
The relevance of this article to my class was the habit of city planners (and most people everywhere) to group things according to their category. Play things should all be in one location. Colleges should be in a campus, separate from the rest of a city. Art things should all be in one center: theater next to opera next to dance center. As if anyone has tickets to two different kinds of shows on the same night? As if art can’t be scattered all over a city so we actually see and interact with it?
Perhaps we shouldn’t be so invested in grouping things that we can categorize together. Perhaps we should let play spread through our environment, enabling it to be more accessible to everyone.
There I was looking at the hopscotch taped onto the ground, not really in the mood to play but fearing that this social experiment, this attempt to engage stressed-out art students heading to and from class, might get trampled by the fevered pace of education, creative ambition, and day-to-day business.
As someone who firmly believes floors are for lying on, tables for perching on, sturdy objects climbing on, and social rules for harmlessly breaking, I am definitely not the kind of adult who takes themselves too seriously to play in public.
So I hopped the scotch, and it definitely lightened my mood.
Later, one of my classmates told me she saw me hopscotching while she was nearby in the cafe, and it made her day.
Soooo, I’m just saying…we should probably all incorporate play into our normal activities more. Not only does it make us happier, it apparently makes the people around us happier (my single anecdote is definitely hard proof)! I mean seriously, tell me this image doesn’t bring you joy: two businessmen in suits, looking very boring and professional, walking down the street with briefcases…who suddenly dart into a playground together and jump onto the play structures, ties flapping over their shoulders as they chase each other around playing tag, jumping off of things and laughing out loud.
Maybe even better if this wasn’t confined to a playground.
People are always on their phones playing Candy Crush or whatever (is that really still the popular game after all these years?); what if they actually looked up and played games interactively, in physical space, and maybe with the other humans around? The potential to boost our moods is incredible! (I’m pretty sure.)
Although Alexander doesn’t like playgrounds, I still think there should be play structures meant for adults. However they needn’t be confined to little arenas that limit the boundaries of play. I happen to hold the firm belief that all public sculpture should be climbable, although I recognize that not all artists want to build using materials strong enough to withstand climbers and/or cities don’t want to bolt things to the ground. So the real question is, how can we incorporate play into more aspects of our lives and more of the spaces we inhabit?
(This train of thought makes me think of the stereotyped Boomer disdain for pingpong tables and the like that Millennials favor at work, but having games at work seems like a step in the right direction! Does this mean Boomers are to blame for our boring business-suit world?)
(Just kidding, we can’t blame Boomers for everything even though they exacerbated a lot of problems that are now destructively affecting society. They were just doing what they were told they could and should do, by previous models of thought.)
The most effective solution would probably be to consciously change our mindset. All self-respecting children know they can play a great game of tag around any random object like a park bench. Even confined in a car, you can play a horrible game of I’m-not-touching-you. Maybe that’s not the best example, but grab two toys and you can play make-believe by smashing them together! Adults feel they are meant to act with decorum most of the time, but this is nonsense. I mean, have you seen those young tech guys in tank tops playing that trampoline-ball-game at parks lately? They look so stupid! But they’re having so much fun as they spill their beers and smack a ball at each other with their bare hands.
So learn from the those park bros. Learn to be silly and have fun in public. Unlearn that adulthood is a defined space where we must act serious. You can, if you so choose, hopscotch on your way into buildings. And we can begin to undo the stigma around adults playing.
