Please take time to share your play history here.
When you were growing up, how did you play? When you came home from school and weren’t doing homework, what did you enjoy doing? On Saturday when you had free time, what did you do? How did you play when you played alone? How did you play with others?
6 Comments
January 5, 2010 at 12:37 pm
I played alone alot – outside alot. rain, snow, or sun. We lived in an area so suburban it was nearly rural, and all the negihbors were boys I never played with. My girl friends lived far away and I saw them rarely. I imagined I was exploring or setting up living space in the “wilderness”. I played in the stream and examined tiny umbrella trees close up, imagining they were large and I was tiny under them. Maybe I should have become a biologist or a botanist. I would have enjoyed it.
I also played indoors – making things. I drew endless fashion designs, I made intricate beaded and beribboned jewelry and barrettes and doll clothes by hand. I decorated cookies with a tiny paintbrush and food coloring. I used the exacto knife to cut tiny intricate designs in colored paper. Maybe I should have become a surgeon. I would have been great at it.
I spent lots of time reading. I read Shakespeare and other grown-up books and magazines like the New Yorker regularly and voraciously before I turned 10.
Ultimately I became that weird cross breed, a very extroverted, social, party-hostess loner with a strong iconoclastic, independent streak. Careerwise, it seems I work best when I remain in charge of my own time and destiny. This has served me well as an entrepreneur and independent freelance consultant.
May 5, 2010 at 9:58 pm
I…am going to say the same thing Isabel did. Funny.
I played alone as well. Not always, but remembering back to my most intimate, blissful, and creative moments of play, it was always alone. I would get lost in the smallest details of the wall, or the movement of sand trembling off a sand pile on the beach, or the feel of silk when I used to hide from my mom as a little kid inside the circular clothing racks, feeling the textures of the fabrics on my fingertips.
I spent so much time silent and alone and in peace. Even in college and now. Rolling around, staring at trees, being weird in a world that is comfortable with oddness and changes to accommodate.
It’s funny to me that I don’t remember much of what I was actually doing in those times. It was always such simple things like touching the wall, or methodically folding paper, or pretending a laser was shooting out of my finger tracing the shapes of the cars as we drove past. Always very simple games at the surface, but with intricate rules and a feeling of being lost in a very rich and complex world.
June 17, 2010 at 12:42 am
I played with Lego a lot. Now I am convinced that playing with Lego has boosted my creativity. And I have this thesis that I now benefit in my journalistic activities (structuring information, writing, editing) due to playing with blocks (rearranging, building, structuring) as a child. Very interesting thought experiment!
July 13, 2010 at 4:14 pm
Linda
Hope I have this right. I remember you as a kid…that is if you had a brother named Mark.
If so, he and I were good friends for many years through the time of his marriage and early death in Arkansas…June 15, 1973.
If not, we lived nearby each other…I was on Whitener Street in the 1500 block.
Anyway…I read about your recall of Cape in the ’60s newsletter. Maybe you were in Cape for the reunion, as I was for the Friday nite event.
Let me know if I hit the right Stone family here.
Regards,
Dale
August 3, 2010 at 12:41 pm
From the age of either four or five on, I was obsessed with videogames. I remember watching my father play the original Metroid on the original Nintendo system. Whatever the genesis was (the first console I owned was a Sega Genesis, but not pun intended) they sunk their claws into me and since then it’s been an ongoing struggle of moderating the time I spend with them and accepting the role they’ve had in shaping me.
It’s hard sometimes, to feel like you’ve wasted your childhood, or that yours is inferior to another’s. Maybe there’s potential that was long since lost because I’ve grown up attached to something of an addictive medium. I try to tell myself that my childhood obsession fostered, in its own ways, imagination, problem solving, ect.
But still, in reading you describe all the rich, rewarding experiences, I feel like I’ve been deprived over the years. Of course, I was depriving myself. My parents would encourage the type of “healthy” play that you describe. But it always seemed so tedious to me, so confusing.
The world of games has defined rules. Whereas in other entertainment mediums, you might find yourself focusing on, say, assessing narratives or working your mind or imagination, the strict proscription and attitude of completion in video games hinders that. They tend to be, at least at the surface, about completion. Winning. Beating. Finishing. So I find, when there are less defined activities, I am uncomfortable, anxious, or bored. What is the goal of reading? Becoming more intelligent? Yes, but measuring that is close to impossible and so I get all bent out of shape.
August 8, 2010 at 6:32 am
At a very young age, around 3 and 4, I spent a lot of time making mud pies. My sitter would dispatch me to the backyard with several aluminum pie pans, a water hose, and my very own corner of the yard. I remember how much attention I paid to forming a perfect shaped pie. When the Oklahoma summer sun was at its most intense, my pies would dry quickly and I could get the quick thrill of removing them from the pan and displaying them around the yard. I liked doing this alone.
In grade school years, I lived in a suburban development where there were always new houses being built around us. My friends and I spent hours navigating through walls, unconstructed closets, fixture-less bathrooms, ceiling-less attics, and along concrete-poured foundations. We imagined re-connecting rooms, discarding walls and ceilings, and fantasizing about which room we each got to live in. There were no rules just an endless string of new houses to explore and imagine how we would re-architect the spaces.