Deep Play

Everyone plays!

Animals play.

Play is an important part of our growth, our advancement, our culture.

The more we can tap into the positive benefits of deep play in our conferences and profession work,

the more we can engage in creative, contextual innovations, ideas and problem solving.

Deep. adj. 1. The most intense or extreme part. 2. Profoundly absorbed or immersed. 3. A distance estimated in fathoms.

PLAY. It is an activity which proceeds within certain limits of time and space, in a visible order, according to rules freely accepted, and absolutely binding,

having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy and the consciousness that is different from ordinary life.

Written by Johan Huizinga, A Dutch historian on the eve of World War II, in 1938.

What is play?

We may think of play as optional, a casual activity, something to do when we are not working, a leisure activity, something done online.

We even think of play as self-indulgent and irresponsible.

However, play is fundamental to growth and progress.

4 Elements Fundamental To Play

• Movement
• Freedom
• Rules
• Boundaries

Play is one of the ways our brain engages in learning.

A word of caution here, games don’t necessarily engage deep play. They are tools for play. They serve as a form for deep play.

The phrase I THINK is derived from "cogito" which implies to "shake up together" or "blend together."

Intelligo is the root word of "intelligence" which means to "select among."

Combining thinking and intelligence demonstrates a clear early human intuition about the usefulness

of permitting ideas and thoughts to randomly combine with each other and the value of selecting those from the many ideas you have to the few you retain.

Albert Einstein referred to his thinking process as "combinatory play."

Einstein did not invent the concepts of energy, mass, or speed of light.

Rather, he combined these concepts in a novel way which restructured the way he looked at the universe creating E=MC2.

Many of us did this naturally as a child.

Combinatory Play Exercise

Steve Jobs said, “Creativity is about connecting the dots. I’m just lucky cause I have a lot of dots to connect.”

Kirby Ferguson reminds us that Jobs didn’t technically invent any of the things that made him into a cultural icon, he merely perfected them to a point of genius.

WHEN
should we engage in combinatory play?

When you have smart minds together at meetings.

How did you feel during that activity?

Deep play causes us to lose sight of time, what’s happening around us and society’s unspoken rules.

When we are engaged in deep play, our mind takes chances that it normally wouldn’t. We get involved in total rapture and ecstasy.

Why have we as adults walked away from this type of Deep Play in our work, lives, events and conferences?

How did this activity of combinatory play differ from some gamification of events or novelty games at conferences?

While this activity did have elements that engaged your novelty seeking centers of the brain which caused a dopamine drip, it also engaged the pre-frontal cortex and executive function.

This activity connected deep play with deep learning and now deep connections and deep reflection.

We’ve each amassed a collection of cross-disciplinary building blocks — knowledge, memories, bits of information, sparks of inspiration, and other existing ideas.

We can then combine and recombine, those elements into something new…even unconsciously.

Connecting the seemingly unconnected is the secret of genius says Stephen Jay Gould.

What are you going to do with this element of 4D Experiences: Deep Play at your conferences, meetings and events?