Why do children play? Because it’s the best thing a child can do. But why do adults play as well? Here science faces a puzzle (although there are a few great theories).

Suddenly my young daughter was standing in my study, wide-eyed with excitement. But this time she didn’t ask for coloured modelling paper, a hole punch or scissors. In a firm voice, the five-year-old said: “Come on, dad! We’re going to play “Zocken”. She wants to play – what? Now she has learned “Zocken” from her big sister. During the European Cup football in the summer it was all the rage in her school playground.

You play “Zocken” like this: you spread out a handful of little Panini football stickers in front of you (my little daughter didn’t mind at all that the European Cup was ages ago) and then you have to try to turn them over by slapping your hand on them. And it actually works. You just have to make sure you lift your hand back up again as quickly as possible, and the draught whirls the little pictures of Ballack and Ronaldo up in the air. If you can get a picture to turn face down, you’ve won it from your opponent.

My youngest is really adept at “Zocken”. She knows exactly how to slap the stickers with her hand so that whole lines of them turn over. I am gripped by it too, and I try out all manner of hand positions and flapping techniques to hold my own in this game. Now I find it great fun.

But let’s look at this quite objectively: What is actually going on here? Two people, five and 43 years old, sit together on the floor, smack their hands down on little stickers, the little girl screeching with delight when a picture turns over while the adult knocks his knuckles until they are sore. Isn’t this just completely a waste of time?

Waste of time?
Certainly not, say the scientists. If we are to believe an increasing number of biologists, psychologists and anthropologists, play is in no way just a standard means of getting kids to let off steam or not to degenerate into couch potatoes.

“People simply can’t live without play,” says Rainer Buland, who is head of the Institute for Game Research at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg. “It is as much a part of being a human being as breathing.”

Only in play and its rituals can something new be created
The Berlin cultural anthropologist Christoph Wulf says that it is only through play and its rituals that something new is created. And the Munich psychologist Rolf Oerter goes as far as to see play as the origin of all art and culture. “Play is the bedrock of humanity’s cultural creativity.” So, together with work, it is the most important component of life.

These are ideas we are only too willing to embrace and we confront those people with them who regard education as single-mindedly stuffing your curriculum vitae with school, piano lessons, ballet and a third foreign language – ideally before year five, of course.

The advocates of unfettered play strike a chord with many parents and teachers who are worried by the way children’s lives are being institutionalized in the era of the PISA study and G8, the shortened grammar school education of 8 years.

Scientists too are discovering evidence of the importance of play. In particular they look to the animal kingdom, since humans can’t be brought up under laboratory conditions or have their brains dissected. And one thing is certain: animals do play as well. We all know that’s true of dogs and cats.

The American evolutionary psychologist Gordon Burghardt from the University of Tennessee likes to play a film clip showing how a komodo dragon mischievously sneaks a handkerchief out of his trouser pocket.

Burghardt also brought some pleasure to the life of an ageing turtle that was getting increasingly bored. Having been given balls, rings and sticks, the reptile suddenly spent a fifth of its time playing. How do turtles play? By, for example, nudging the ball along in front of them in the water.

Evolutionary advantage?
However, the following questions shock evolutionary biologists: Is it possible that all higher animals waste quite a lot of their time on totally useless activities? Does fun confer an evolutionary advantage? Shouldn’t the relentless mechanisms of mutation and selection have long since banished nonsense like this from the biosphere?

Even worse: Precisely in their early years, when animals like humans play most of all, their lives can be endangered. Eight out of ten young seals perish because they don’t notice their predators as they scramble about. It doesn’t sound as if these creatures have a good chance of survival in the evolutionary struggle.

Powerful reward system
But seals are still there, and still playing. They play like millions of other animals, and just as billions of humans do too. Naturally, there is a difference between a game of chess in a café and a turtle playing with a ball in the zoo. But the same principle applies in each case: play does not directly serve survival, the participants have to develop creative strategies – and there is a system of rewards that is very powerful.

Endorphines from the limbic system
Even the slightest success while playing causes the limbic system to produce endorphines. You become addicted to them so rapidly that Homo sapiens, who is supposed to be guided by reason, is driven towards the playground and the gaming table. It’s no wonder that people of all ages prefer learning or training that takes the form of play.

Play is the most efficient method of learning
This is why Rainer Buland in Salzburg, who researches play, calls for learning by playing in schools. And he is not alone. “When we see the effort young people make to swot things up for an exam that don’t interest them and which they promptly forget the day after, we have to ask ourselves how long we as a society can afford this luxury of inefficient learning,” he comments. “Play is the most efficient method of learning.”

Scientists researching the learning process confirm that people retain the things they do for themselves best, not those things they have heard or read about.

Scientists assumed for a long time that the higher animals play simply to learn necessary skills in the wild like hunting and running away.

We see examples of this when dogs and wolves have mock fights with each other or when children play hide and seek. The problem with all this is that in later life animals often do perfectly well even when they had little opportunity to play in their early years.

Laboratory cats, for example, that grow up with and without toys, are equally good at hunting later in life. Another factor is that the activity involved in play is often different from what is needed in later life. When dogs play, they display alternately dominating and submissive behaviour. For example, they stretch out their front legs, lower their heads and wag their tails as a signal to carry on, that it is only fun.

More social skills
These behaviour patterns are not those used when things get serious.  In cases like this, the animal researcher Gordon Burghardt in Tennessee refers to a “restricted indirect function”. He suspects that the benefit of play of this kind lies in the future, since many animals that play a lot when they are young have more social skills later.

It could also be that play has the positive effect of enabling us to view the world from different perspectives. Just as children adopt different roles, play at shops or dress up as princesses, perhaps it helps animals too to slip into different roles.

Taming your own existential fears
According to another very bold theory, play even helps us to tame our own existential fears. Individuals may survive the evolutionary struggle better if they have learned to think creatively about the future and to optimistically bear in mind a range of possibilities. This is a theory that is consistent with the mechanisms of evolution.

Myriad of possible ways of thinking
The great evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould called flexibility the “key to success in the struggle for survival of the species”. The Munich psychologist Rolf Oerter has a similar view: “Playing allows children to develop a myriad of possible ways of thinking,” he explains.” This in turn allows them as adults to develop creative options for actions.” The pathways may be different according to sex, not only in animals but in humans too.

Despite emancipation, it is clear that boys and girls play differently, even when you put the same toy in front of them. It doesn’t have to be as obvious as when a boy pushes a soft toy across the floor and makes a loud engine noise, or when a girl lovingly sticks coloured stars on the cardboard sword made for her by her father instead of going off to fight.

Oerter emphasizes that practising certain skills is only one aspect. He explains that what is more important for children is acquiring the ability to come to terms with life. “In many cases, children do not yet have the skill of getting to grips with problems themselves,” he says, “and adults often hinder them in this respect.” He finds that not infrequently issues that are traumatic and not understood have to be coped with.

Play helps children to master life
Play helps children to master life – adults too when playing cards, bowling, football or the lottery. It is said that four million Germans are currently afflicted by the poker fever that is rampant round the world. Psychologists see two reasons for this phenomenon: first, as you play you keep on being rewarded with little successes that in real life occur infrequently; and secondly, play provides adults with the opportunity to keep “regressing”, as psychologists call it, into childhood.

This regression is an important way of relaxing. Because it is socially unacceptable for adults to behave like children, they turn to ritualized games. Or perhaps to a hobby.

Where is the borderline between play and reality?
Is there in fact a firm line between play and reality? Put another way: what is not play in real life? When giving presentations at work, bluffing is certainly not uncommon. When looking for a partner, many people put all their eggs in one basket instead of pursuing an obvious option.

In the social network of a company or a family people often tackle issues obliquely. And aren’t we accustomed to calling the annual round of negotiations between trade unions and employers ‘wage poker’? Not to mention the recent gambling in the financial world, where investment bankers were obviously only concerned to satisfy the limbic system in their own heads with virtual flows of money.

Competition in play in the free market economy
The free market economy is driven by similar principles to competition in play, says the cultural anthropologist Christoph Wulf. And many sociologists regard competitions in sport as ritualized war. Wulf has observed that precisely in ritualized activities – the kind we often find in play – fun can quickly turn sour.
We see this development in the case  of football hooligans and card players if it turns out that one of the players has not called the suit. The psychologist Oerter gives flirting as another example: if one party regards it as a game and the other party takes it seriously, the situation can quickly turn nasty.

Even really serious issues like a court case reveal elements of play: fixed rules apply, some of the people involved dress up, and you have to proceed strategically in order to gain an advantage (or just to avoid the maximum sentence). Without a doubt, the consequences of this ritual are felt in the real world. And the cultural history of humanity is really full of examples of obvious play activities having existential consequences for all involved.
The Mayas had ball games and at the end the team that lost was slaughtered. The line between fun and seriousness is often blurred.

If you don’t play, you’re taking yourself too seriously!
At least, psychologists are certain that adults cope better with serious issues in life if they approach them in the spirit of play. To this extent, scientists and artists have the prospect of a fulfilled professional life. They can, indeed they must, employ child-like skills of inquisitiveness and creativity if they are to be successful.

Professional sportsmen, on the other hand, go through a contradictory process of having to combine play and job: footballers are the more successful the better they play, but playing is for them a job that they have to take seriously, like a book-keeper his accounts.

Scientists researching play find it difficult to come up with a clear definition. In the specialist literature of psychology you find definitions like: “When playing, all the participants must have equal rights and opportunities to win or take part.” But does this apply to children playing servants and queen? Or the definition: “playing is fun!”

What, dear reader, is fun? In any case, it’s interesting, says Rolf Oerter, that children often recognize the difference between play and seriousness better than adults.

Nonsense invented by behavioural biologists?
Is it possible that, when all is said and done, play is just a nonsense invented by behavioural biologists that higher forms of living creatures just happen to exhibit. Could those sceptics be right who refuse to see any meaning in play (far too many of whom are in charge of the curriculum in schools)? Hardly.

To come to this realization, you don’t have to dissect rats. You just have to look at the faces of children at play. At my own daughter’s, for example, as she skilfully flaps her hand to whirl the little Panini stickers into the air. The fact that in the end her trick is revealed (every so often she licks her hands) has no effect whatsoever on the happiness she feels. Tricks have been a part of all forms of play since evolution gave rise to this mysterious activity.