By Nancy Richards Farese, San Francisco Chronicle, February 29, 20202
Three years ago, I photographed the Rohingya crisis in a Bangladeshi refugee camp where most of the refugees were children, some orphaned just days before. Surprisingly, the most unexpected sound in the camp was not the mournful silence of traumatized people; it was the laughter of children, playing on the edge of every frame. Sliding down mud hills and organizing games around bottle caps, these children were instinctively using play to adapt and heal: keenly aware of, yet defying, all that was wrong in their world.
In contrast, Americans recently witnessed another kind of play — the Super Bowl, in which grown men who are paid millions of dollars played football. Certainly, this is the most serious of games — but is it also “play”? In an ever-expanded and reinterpreted definition of play, pro sports is hardly recognizable as play in its truest sense — spontaneous, voluntary and joyful. Are we even talking about the same thing? This context confusion undermines play’s essential value in our lives. As a society, we should make the same investment and commitment that we devote to commercialized sports to the art of play. Why? Because today play is endangered.
We are all experts in play.
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