Worldplay Relevance to Mature Creativity

First, worldplay nurtures the capacity for continued pretend play, especially thrthrough middle and late childhood, well after the intense exploration of make-believe/e in early childhood typically fades. Second, worldplay exercises a range of cognitive capacities involved in projecting alternate realities, including imaginative thinking skills such as imaging, empathihizing, recognizing and forming patterns, dimensional thinking, and modeling. As wtwelbll, it may develop and sustain attitu...

 Adult Participation in Children's Worldplay

In The Brightening Glance: Imagination and Childhood (2006), the art theorist Ellen Handler Spitz argues that "[t]he topic of adult participation in children's play is delicate, complex, and controversial," largely due to the overwhelming influence a parent or a teacher or even adult-generated entertainment media can have. Adults must work hard not to impose their owti interests, methods, or judgments upon play activity. The act of modeling and encouraging can, indeed, be fi-aught with miss...

 Computer Models as Play

There is, indeed, an "art" to worldplay in the social sciences that fuses narrative with analytical technique. There is also a kinship with the arts in the relationship between imagined world and reality, a point brought home by political scientist and ellow Robert Axelrod. In the early 1960s the teenage Axelrod won the Westinghouse kience Talent Search for a very simple computer simulation of hypothetical lifeforms behaving in an artificial environment. Ever since, he has worked on the appli...

 How Utopian Stories Can Encourage Work in Reality

"I do a lot of public speaking, often debating public figures on television or other high profile settings, or giving speeches to large audiences," one Fellow, an immigration rights lobbyist, wrote in her query response. "I am constantly, almost involuntarily, honing my skills by debating adversaries or giving speeches when I'm alone (in the car or walking to the metro). They're not exactly imaginary worlds, but rather imagined versions of real-life settings in which I find myself" Equally ...

 Why Kids Abandon Creative Play

The observation that play gets short shrift as children come of age in the Western world is surely as old and as perennial as that civilization itself. The Bible puts it thus: "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child: now that 1 am become a man, I have put away childish things." Turning their attention to the phenomenon, psychologists have asked what might be the causal factors. In the early 1900s, for instance, G. Stanley Hall argued that as children...

 Imaginative Play Creates Ownership

Ultimately, the child as creator exercises a whole range of capacities that set the Stage for original thinking. We find the imprint of creative practice in the blending of experiences and ideas, the classifications of real and imagined things, the organization of systemic patterns and narrative sequences, the modeling of worlds, the generation of artifacts, and the synthesizing of all that is known and felt into one grand design. The creating self "owns" the processes and products of make-...

 Characteristics of Worldplay

Worldplay appeared to be a solitary, or perhaps intimately shared, pastime. Over the years nearly everyone in my extended family heard or saw something of Kar, yet immersion in that make-believe remained a solo pursuit for Meredith. Thomas Malkin, Hartley Coleridge, Barbara FoUett, and Stanislaw Lem also played alone. Friedrich Nietzsche played in the imaginary world of King Squirrel with his sister; C. S. Lewis played in Boxen with his brother. Worldplay looked to be constructive, that is ...

 Pattern-Seeking Through Play

Meredith's worldplay was shot through with yet another well-recognized ingigredienlent of creative thinking, the comparison and synthesis of two or more unlike things. As the mathematician and poet Jacob Bronowski famously expressed it, the discoveries of science and of art "are explorations—^more, are explosions, of a hidden likeness The same holds true for the insights generated in worldplay. Documents of play in Lewis, like many a child, combined the animal and the human in Lord Big. Una...