Ready Player One - A History of Play

Going back to as early as I can remember and tracing my steps to the current day there have been three distinct times in my life where play has, for lack of a better word, played a significant role in my development and understanding of myself and my world. I consider these three moments in time to be pivotal points in my life where play was not just something that I did, but rather helped to define who I am and how I interact with my world. In order to get a better understanding of my first and subsequent defining moments of play, let me start back to when I was a very young, little girl.

I am the youngest of two children, and I am separated from my brother by a colossal space of nine years. Growing up with a sibling too old and cool to play pretend or teatime with Barbie, and me not being old enough to make a shot at the three-point line, my brother and I spent the majority of our first years in the same household doing separate activities and living the lives of only children. Living in the outskirts of rural Pennsylvania with only a handful of neighbors, few of which were children my age, I craved companionship. I had plenty of friends in school, but they were never able to come visit my home since I lived almost an hour outside of the city where they lived. Even though I spent a great deal of my early childhood alone, I was never usually bored. I had a wild imagination and filled my time in my room playing house, robbing banks in the Old West, keeping store as a busy entrepreneur, having tea with the queen, surviving the harsh winter as a an old-school pioneer, competing in a high stakes chess tournaments with my stuffed animals, among other amazing tales that my adolescent brain would craft. Back then play was about taking the things I'd heard, seen, and felt and role-played them out to get a feel for what the world might be like. I could go anywhere, be whomever I wanted to be, and experience whatever I wanted to see and do. I made my world, and that world taught me a great many things including how to be okay being alone, how to craft a story with complex plot and characters, and how to have fun with nothing but a few toys and some cardboard boxes.

Some years later the age gap between my brother and I felt less significant as I grew older and capable of more adult conversations and activities. This was around the same time that Nintendo had started to make it big, and my brother and I found common ground helping Mario and Luigi rescue Princess Peach from the evil clutches of Bowser. We played night and day helping one another through the levels and eventually conquering the treacherous, dinosaur villain. For the first time in many years, my brother and I were more than just siblings - we were friends. Our common interests in video games went on for many years and with it our friendship. Playing games with my brother taught me that connections can be made with another person through virtual reality. Things like cooperation, shared problem-solving, and communication in gaming can strengthen relationships. Most importantly, gaming taught me that no matter the differences between me and another person, we can find common ground through play.

Fast forward to just a few years ago - to a time bombarded with technology and social media. Information is available at the touch of a finger and everyone is connected to everyone, yet we found ourselves growing farther somehow. For me, digital connections were causing a divide in my connections with those around me. I had become a digital zombie, shambling from one site to the next and ignoring the people sitting in the same room as me. I didn't like what I had become, so I reached out for a change. At the same time as this digital craze, a board game renaissance was rising up. My friends were becoming interested in more grown-up card games and board games of every variety, and I began joining them to see what the craze was all about. It didn't take me long to become addicted. Heads bowed over the same table with a complex game in front of us, found that I loved going head to head with and against my friends. Using our brains to strategize against each other and the board, we would spend hours playing with one another. At this point in my life, playing board games brought back the connection that I had been missing for a long time. On top of it all, it was also a great way for me to exercise my critical thinking and problem-solving again. Older people try to tell you that when life slows down, thinking slows down, but you never really see how true it is until you witness it for yourself. Playing board games helped me to hone my thinking skills again and made me start looking at my world for problems to solve. For this reason, I started thinking about all of the things that I wanted to do better as an educator and how I wanted to improve the learning of my students through better forms of engagement in my classroom.And here I am - enrolled in Games in Learning to do just that.

Gaming and play were vital in my development as a human being. In writing my story, I see how they helped me to become the person I am today, but I know there is so much that I can't see that happened on a neural and physiological level because of gaming and playing. I am incredibly interested in how games and play affect the development and learning of students at every age. I want to learn more about effective uses of gaming in the classroom and put them into action in my own classroom. I have always been enamored by games of all sorts (digital and physical), and now I am ready to instill this kind of interest in my students for the betterment of themselves and their learning.

Game on! #ILT5320