Gwen Gordon Play Analysis

What is Play? In Search of a Universal Definition
By Gwen Gordon
Gwen Gordon began her career building Muppets for Sesame Street. She has been an artist-in-residence in settings ranging from the MIT Media Lab to San Quentin Prison. Gwen has taught transpersonal play to graduate students at the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology, Holy Names University, Saybrook Institute, and New College and teaches regularly at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. She co-designed and currently leads the mastery-level coaching course for the Coaches Training Institute. Gwen also leads the CTI leadership training. She is a creative consultant, educational designer, and freelance writer, and has had an individual coaching practice for ten years. Gwen received…show more content…
It is, however, often from redundancy that novelty (eventually) emerges. Our definition might become clearer still with a few examples of what is not play. The most immediately distinctive features of play are the freedom it expresses and the agreements and cooperation among playmates. Play stops when participants are not free to play or not, become objects of play, or are unaware that they are involved in play. War, violent crime, and practical jokes may be play for the perpetrators, but it certainly is not for the victims. In this case the consensual nature of play is lacking. What might be a playmate is instead an object of play. Here we start to see the need for a developmental model for adult play that can account for the capacity for intersubjectivity as a function of maturity and increasing play capacity. For now, we need only understand that if we are not free to play or not play, we are not playing. The freedom of play is absent in any activity that has become rigid, unconscious, habitual, or compulsive, even if it started out as play. We often see this with television watching, video game playing, gambling, or drug use. We also see it with the repetitive regressive “play” of trauma survivors which is either the routinized reenactments of the trauma or the play of the developmental stage arrested when the trauma occurred. The restless play of the forty year-old Puer Eterne is less an expression of the freedom associated with youth…show more content…
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