 The important link between play and learning has been around a lot longer than video games. Play is not frivolous. In fact, central to our learning game design philosophy is the idea that we develop models of the world and prepare for and reinforce deeper understanding through experiences of play. Mountain goats play by jumping from ledge to ledge and cliff to cliff. They do that not just when they're looking for food or when they're escaping prey but really in their downtime, in their spare time. And they play at it in spite of the fact that occasionally they fall and occasionally they die doing it. Now, if you know anything about evolution, you'd say that a behavior that causes the death of an organism tends to die out. But this one persists, this behavior. So clearly there are advantages that far outweigh the costs. Most of us are familiar with kittens or puppies playing. And if you've ever observed them at all, you probably notice that they play at hunting. And it would be easy to conclude between the mountain goats and the kittens that what they're all they're doing is learning by rote, sort of the moves you have to do to hunt. But in reality, a cat who is deprived of the ability to play will still hunt fine. But what it won't know how to do is how to interact with other cats and how to make decisions in new situations. I like to characterize it in terms of four freedoms. First, the freedom to experiment. The blocks. I was clearly no one said, this is what you do with blocks. You build these structures. You see a lot of play nowadays where that happens, where you buy the Lego Star Wars tie fighter. And all you can build is a tie fighter as opposed to an open box Lego where you can build anything you want. Well, anyway, so I had the freedom to experiment. Related to that is the freedom to fail. When you build, when you play with stuff, things don't always work. That's got to be part of the game. Imagine a kid building a block tower with a parent standing behind him saying, OK, that's a nice tower. But whatever you do, don't let that tower fall down. Think about how uncomfortable that play would become if the child was worried about failing. Or we can build a sand castle at the beach, but don't build it close enough to the water because it might get washed away. I mean, that's part of the fun, right? Failure is part of the game, part of play. Freedom to try and identities. Think about your own play when you're a little, when you were young, and you played with dolls or stuffed animals. And you were acting out all the different people you knew and the kinds of roles you encountered, like parents, children, authority figures, bullies. You played out all those different roles when you were a kid. You're trying them all on. You're trying to see what it feels like to be all the different things you might be in life. That's a critical part of play. Finally, freedom of effort. It's really important when you're playing that no one tells you you've got to play hard right now. In fact, when you're playing, sometimes you play hard. Sometimes you play in a relaxed way. That's entirely up to the player. The minute someone says, OK, get going, get to work, it stops being played. So how do we channel playing activities while still keeping them open-ended? And that's where games come in. Because games are sort of organized play. If you think about a game of golf, it would be much easier if you just went to golf course and you took the ball and you walked to the other end of the golf course and you just dropped the ball in the hole, right? That's your job. Get the ball in the hole. So why not just drop it in? It doesn't sound like a whole lot of fun, though, does it? Who plays golf along with some people in this room? Presidents play golf, CEOs play golf, important people play golf. What do they do? They spend time hitting this little ball with a long stick in the most difficult way possible just to get it in the hole when the president could hire the secret service to go and drop the ball in the hole. But that's not the way it works. So why do people do that? It is part of our nature to play and it is part of our nature to rise to challenges when presented to us. If those challenges are interesting, they don't have to be meaningful in the way that religion or philosophy is meaningful. But they're challenging and they're interesting. And so we rise to those challenges. And that means that we as designers, if we put interesting challenges in front of people, I'd argue we can get them to think about things and do things that they might not otherwise have an opportunity to think about or do. How often are you allowed to fail in school? How often are you ever encouraged to make use of your failures in school? Or do you even learn from your failures? And certainly in experimenting in school, usually how many science labs actually ask you to really experiment? I mean, most science labs, you sit there and you do the list in the order that is. And if you don't get the result that you think the teacher wanted, maybe you fake it. Maybe. Because the idea that you could learn from the failed experiment and forget about identities, right? Even though you're not allowed to come in one day and say, I feel like being this person. And there's certainly no allowance for the fact that one day you feel like working hard and the next day you don't. I don't want you to think about how can I replicate school in a game. Not that there aren't lots of really good things in school, but I think school the way you experience it on a day-to-day basis is not what you want to replicate in a game.