By Nanditha Krishna

As I approach my 25th birthday this June, I find myself reflecting on my journey through my turbulent teenage years to the even more tumultuous twenties, with an evolving sense of self-awareness. Over the years, as I have started living my twenties, I have begun to walk down the rather ‘deep alleys’ of my formative years, revisiting and exploring the patterns I picked up as a child, in order to understand why I function today the way I do and how they shape my present self. It’s quite interesting, because the corpus of data one has of childhood memories is not really extensive, leaving one to make sense of whatever little memory exists.

One intriguing realisation that I have come to terms with is my complete lack of childhood friendships, with very few or no memories of companionship with kids my age, simply due to their absence. However, on the brighter side, I also vividly recall moments of joy that I experienced during all those times when my family would gift me toys and puzzles to play with. I would spend countless hours crafting stories, immersed in my own little world playing with these imaginary characters I had created in my head. While the world saw me engrossed with my toys—jigsaw puzzles, trains, doctor play sets, building blocks and LEGO sets (plus countless other play sets)—to me, I was deeply engaged in storytelling, worldbuilding, designing narratives, and weaving tales with my toys. I neither craved nor felt the need for friends; my solitary play was fulfilling enough for me to stay in my shell. Another distinct memory that strikes a chord with me is that of my parents once taking me to a kids’ park, hoping that this attempt of theirs would make me socialise with other children. Their efforts did prove very futile, and I would always swiftly retreat back to my own world upon returning home. Despite my parents’ attempts to encourage social interaction, my aversion to forced socialisation reinforced my preference for solitary play. In hindsight, I now recognize this tendency as introversion.

As I grew up into my early teens, my passion for video games only intensified—Counter-Strike, Mount & Blade, Hitman, GTA, Need for Speed, Road Rash, Rollcage, historical narratives in Age of Empires, Diablo, SWAT, and other gamified narratives; you name it, I played it all. My fascination with narratives deepened as I grew up and matured, intensifying my further immersion into interesting stories. I would eagerly collect video game CDs from my extended family whenever we visited our hometown during vacations. Unfortunately, it was also during this period that societal pressures convinced me that it was time to become ‘serious’, prioritising ‘seriousness’ over playfulness. In retrospect, I realised the world held me back, urging me to suppress my playful self in favour of a more serious demeanour and outlook on life. Looking back, I strongly believe that I lost a significant part of myself to this misguided notion of viewing games with negative connotations, rather than seeing them as interesting pastimes and a natural part of life. This misconception led me to forsake gaming and focus solely on the demands of life, causing me to lose a significant part of myself.

Cut to my 20s now. As I transitioned from my teenage years to my early 20s, what earlier seemed to me like loosely connected abstract events in the last five years now make so much more sense to me. I interned at the Empathic Computing Laboratory, an academic research laboratory at the University of South Australia in Adelaide, Australia and the University of Auckland in New Zealand, where I assisted PhD students with empathic interactional and conversational design in a context-aware empathic virtual reality (VR) photography environment. Additionally, I interned at The Verse, a startup focusing on games and well-being, where I contributed to worldbuilding, narrative design, and community development initiatives. I also freelanced with Playwell Bricks Design Studio providing creative editing support. Furthermore, I served as one of the editors of Media, Arts, and Design (MAD) Anthology-II: MAD Pandemic: Stories of Change and Continuity published in association with the Center for Applied Game Studies at the University for Continuing Education Krems, Austria. It has taken me a while to connect the dots and realise that the common thread linking these instances is, in fact, games. Today, I find it heartening and encouraging that despite conforming to societal norms that emphasise cultivating ‘seriousness’ for a period and losing some years to them, I have not entirely lost my passion for games.

As I now learn to let go of the ‘seriousness’ I previously embraced in life due to social pressures and re-embrace my lost playfulness, I am also consciously unlearning, relearning, and reframing the notion that being playful is not a trait inherent only in children but meant for everybody, regardless of age. I am learning that there is something deeply creative and fulfilling about immersing yourself in games, stepping into the shoes of characters, and, above all, being introverted with a deep passion for games.

Of course, I have carried a sense of solitariness with me from my childhood and teenage years into my early adulthood. However, I am also aware that correlation doesn’t imply causation. In my 25 years of existence, I have realised that while gaming was NEVER the reason for my limited social skills, it did help me a lot in coping with the growing pains of life and the intense loneliness I have experienced over time. In fact, playing games helped me feel a lot less alone. In short, books, stories, art, music, films, and games have been constant presences in my life and indeed helped me unleash my imagination. I have come to believe that introversion and gaming can truly be a highly creative combination.

Learning social skills still remains a challenge, but a great deal of happiness comes from relearning and knowing that it’s okay to be into games, and it doesn’t have to hinder my ability to form connections with people. Instead, it can be a topic of great conversations. Especially knowing myself all too well—that I usually bond through activities with people, and that games could be one of them too. As I also find my way through figuring out failed friendships, forming and sustaining meaningful connections and friendships in my early 20s, figuring out how to retain my highly sensitive, introverted self in this world, it helps to recall that I was okay as a kid and a teen, in my own little world, and that I will be okay as an adult too, no matter how hard adulting right now seems to be.

Nanditha Krishna
Integrated Masters (M.A) English Language and Literature (2019-2024)
https://nandithakrishna.home.blog/
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham
Amritapuri, India

Lisa K. Forbes 

One day, I was reading the book The Boy, The Mole, The Fox, and The Horse. If you haven’t read it, please do. I found it to be super inspiring and thought-provoking. Anyway, as I was reading, one of the characters said “What if there was a school for unlearning?” That question followed me for the rest of the day. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. That phrase entered my brain and prompted reflections from my educational background that I’d like to unlearn. That night, I wrote and wrote and what came out was the poem presented below. You might read this poem and wonder what the heck this has to do with play so here are my thoughts on that:

Play is not just silly, childish fun. Play is also about rebellion. Daring to step “out of line” and dare to challenge power structures or old ways of being that now exist as truth. Because these norms and “truths” were created by certain people, for certain people. Not for all people. Yet, all people are expected to contort themselves to fall in line with these norms. Play, as a mindset or underlying philosophy, can help us stand up to that narrow set of standards and question if there are other, more inclusive ways to let humans exist. 

In that way, play is about bringing out people’s unique humanness. The systems in which we live often have a way of stripping our humanity – taking what makes us unique and valuable. Play is one way that we can resist cultural norms and messages each of us is given about who we are allowed to be so we can recover and rediscover our unique humanity. Because when we lose our humanity, I don’t think we can show up as our full and true selves. At that point, how useful are we able to be to our communities and to the world? 

The School of Unlearning

As kids, we go to school because we have to. 
There, our greatest strengths whittled away.
Because they just don’t fit in the same way.

Fall in line.
Learn the facts.
Think this.
Believe that.

We learn from what we’re told.
And what we observe. 
Which traits and behaviors are valued 
and which, absurd. 

We’re smarter than we look. 
Smarter than we seem.
But smarts aren’t the point to be deemed.

The point, never acknowledged, is alignment. 

Conform.
To what is valued. 
To what’s measured.

A sheepish confinement. 

Most forced to leave identities at the door.
Forget your uniqueness.
Your inner aspirations.
Forget the you that differs 
from those whom this education was made for.

Leave that shit at the door.
It’s not welcome here.

A day here, a day there.
Might not be so bad.
But a lifetime is hard to be had.

The lucky ones realize how lost they’ve become, 
no longer free. 
How they hardly remember who they were 
before everyone else told them who to be. 

How to think.
What to believe. 

The lucky ones might just find their way out. 

Back to themselves. 
To their humanness and unique potentials. 

What’s been taught can be undone: 
The school of unlearning, rebellious fun.

Question what is.
Question the facts.
It’s only real because they said it was. 
Expose all the cracks.

Unlearn what’s been caked on.
Layer after layer, year after year. 
The real lives underneath the conditioned fear. 

It’s real because it’s different.
Because it’s unique.
The you that existed before you were told 
what to think.

The school of unlearning is a lonely embrace.
It’s easy to lose your way,
slingshotting you back to the well-known place. 

It takes rebellion.
Reflection.
Re-learning.
And hope.

But when the layers are shed.
It’s easier to exist and to cope. 

You find inner freedom.
The world quiets down.
You can hear the inner you 
who’s been waiting to be found.

Soul.
Intuition.
Inner child.
It’s all the same. It’s you: human, unique, and wild. 

The school of unlearning seems pretty dope.
We need it now more than ever 
to rekindle some hope. 

What is play? It’s an easy question without an easy answer. 

To try and get to the bottom of that question, and to provide a rationale why it’s an important question to ask, Professors at Play co-founder Lisa Forbes empaneled a group of experts to try and find some answers.

Her initial publication based on her Delphi study with these experts was recently published in the Journal of Play in Adulthood. Not only is this study important in pushing forward our understanding of play and the need to grapple with definitions. It also leaps into new research territory by presenting its findings, playfully as a poem. Check it out! And if you get bored with the meticulous academic prose, skip to the poem. It’s, well, amazing.

enting its findings, playfully as a poem. Check it out! And if you get bored with the meticulous academic prose, skip tothe poem. It’s, well, amazing.

Professors at Play had a chance to spread the word about the power of play at a recent online
Learner Engagement Summit 2023 hosted by the fine folks at Yellowdig. You can view our presentation as well as many others covering important topics in education and student engagement by registering at this link: https://explore.yellowdig.co/2023-learner-engagement-summit-session-recordings

Oh hello. Been a while. What have we been up to at the Profs at Play Headquarters? Like you, dealing with post-Covid, getting back to normal, adjusting to the new normal, trying to pretend the past few years did happen. In short, recovering. Rebuilding. And also, finishing the Professors at Play PlayBook. We are beyond excited to share this resrouce with the community. And with that done, now we get back to work–the Playvolution never rests!

We spend a lot of time talking to faculty about their playful techniques as well as coming up with our own. But sometimes you just look outside the classroom and find all kinds of play you can borrow! I was talking to a colleuge the other day about something fun to do in a workshop for a few people. And I remember this funny game and app created by the fellows in the band OK Go. It’s nothing more than two people tryiung to come up with the same word at the same time. Funny. Fun. Playful. Check it out: https://okgo.net/2013/05/09/say-the-same-thing/