(rooster crowing)
(people chattering)
(engine rumbling)
(gentle music)
One of the things that makes ball games different
is the degree of uncertainty and chaos and spontaneity
that putting a bouncing ball with human limbs creates.
That's above all what balls bring,
spin, uncertainty, variation, bounce.
The ball game is a microcosm of our lives.
When we win we thank God.
When we lose we curse the universe.
It's the place where we can act out
the drama of human existence.
It happens across every culture, across thousands of years.
These sports have developed
with the ball at the center of them.
When we look back through time,
we see again and again the sphere,
fascinating, bewildering and enchanting our ancestors
and asking us what does it mean to play
and why do we love it so much?
(gentle music)
(birds and insects chirping)
Humans did not invent play.
We only develop it and add new elements.
(energetic music)
The play instinct is deeply rooted
in animals and humans as primates.
Play is the thing.
It's, the only point of playing is to play.
(monkeys squeaking)
Play is the central paradox of evolution.
It's a huge puzzle because evolution
is supposed to be efficient.
How did natural selection,
which is supposed to always be making
everything more functional and more efficient,
produce this purposeless behavior
that seems to be without function, seems to be pointless.
It involves a tremendous expenditure of energy.
(monkeys squeaking)
Rats do it.
Mice do it.
Monkeys do it.
Meerkats do it.
That it exists across these different species
means that it's been naturally selected for.
So, it's important.
As important as reproducing.
What is it doing?
In the 19th century scientists thought that if a cat
was playing at hunting that they were practicing
for an actual hunt.
But we've learned over time
that it's not that straight forward.
When we studied the development
of ball play in young animals, what we see is early on
they'll do certain things which are pretty simple
like just push the ball, maybe mouth the ball and so on.
And then they learn, well, maybe I can dribble the ball.
When they're first learning that, they're not good at it.
They're failing a lot.
They shouldn't persist at that behavior.
But, in fact, it's because they want to get good at it.
You're not worried about solving a problem.
So, you're more likely to generate these novel uses.
So, if you love the process, the process sucks you in.
Then you're much more willing to go off on these tangents.
Creativity.
Novelty.
It could be that flexibility is the key
to what makes it adaptable to future situations
and helping us to survive.
(film reel whirring) (dramatic music)
The classic example of this, Wolfgang Kurler,
a famous German gestalt psychologist, had these chimpanzees.
Kurler put bananas out of reach
and he gave one chimpanzee two sticks.
His name was Sultan.
Sultan took the sticks, jumped up with the sticks,
threw the sticks up, couldn't get the damn bananas down.
He gets frustrated.
Eventually he just sits.
Ah, the hell with it.
I'm just gonna play with the sticks.
Then oh, they do this, do that.
Then they go together and the ah-ha moment.
Just by mistake, by the drive of novelty,
by exploration, i.e. object play.
Sticks go together.
Bananas come down.
Quintessential form of social play is rough and tumble play.
Play fighting.
The golden rule you follow is I've got to give
the other guy a chance.
There has to be reciprocity.
And you see this in the rats all the time.
You see one animal on top and then he gets thrown off
and he goes on the bottom and they just keep doing this
through a reciprocal interaction
that you just don't see in a real fight.
There's a structure.
Rules that you follow.
There's got to be enough cooperation to make it possible
for both animals to win sometimes.
But in that structure you can have unexpected variation.
The animal has to continually evaluate his or her actions
and those of its partner.
And they're exactly the sorts of things that help train
the development of the prefrontal cortex.
The play is shaping the brain to be able to perform
in much more intricate ways than without it.
So, we have a causal link between play,
development of the prefrontal cortex
and, consequently, the development of these social skills.
(heavy panting)
There's increasing evidence that puts play at the center
of some of the biggest evolutionary breakthroughs.
Sociality and empathy through rough and tumble play.
Tool use through object play.
The moment you have creatures entering into a metaphorical
relationship with objects where a stone isn't just a stone,
it's a tool, then you also have the possibility
of other metaphorical relationships emerging.
Gestures, signs, signals.
The beginning of language.
Generally, I'm interested in the origins of human language
and to try understand how language evolved,
it's very interesting to look at our closest relatives.
Play is incredibly rich in terms of communication.
(animals screeching)
When bonobos are playing they very, very often laugh.
(monkey laughing)
Laughter becomes a signal to your partner
that you are still playing.
The way dogs do it, and other animals,
they do what's called the play bow,
where they bow on their forepaws.
They put their butts up in the air.
(dog howling)
The play bow is used to say I want to play with you.
And then it's used very strategically.
Before a dog bites another dog,
they'll say I'm gonna bite you hard but it's still play,
and so we've discovered that the play bow
is a very ubiquitous signal.
It shouldn't surprise us that a ball in the hands
of a highly intelligent and social animal
is gonna bring out a lot of familiar behaviors
that look just like what happens when we play.
(monkeys squeaking)
But I think that behavior provides a clue
as to why ball games are so important to us.
(engine rumbling)
The ball is a very universal experience.
It's a tool to explore security versus insecurity.
And I think with a ball, there's a sense of give and take
that's very soft and very yielding.
I wanted to see if the possibility of emotion
and deep emotion could generate a physical commitment
to how to work with an object.
Not to take a ball and control it,
but to let the ball be what the ball is.
Round.
(gentle music)
No one invented the ball.
It had to come out of the natural world.
Where do our predilection,
our fondness for roundness comes from?
Whether it's the sun and the moon
or a pregnant woman's belly,
these are things that we see from the youngest age.
(waves roaring)
The sphere is really a form that we're drawn to in nature
and are surrounded by.
One thing we know for sure is that we're primates.
Primates eat fruits.
So, much of our behavior really parallels
or has relationship with the ape world.
Food items, especially the highly caloric ones
tend to be round.
Fruits, nuts, eggs, seeds and stones.
It's no coincidence that the ball evolved from these things
that we depended upon for our existence.
Between one and two million years ago,
many of our hominid ancestors lived
around the Olduvai Gorge area.
Archaeologists have found numerous
stone artifacts and tools there.
Of the spheres that were found,
some of them were too large to hold in the hand
so don't seem to have been tools per se
but an object of interest.
And they gathered these balls.
Perhaps they'd made them.
Maybe they'd found some.
Maybe they'd made others.
Why?
If some of these objects were not of practical use
and were stemming more into the symbolic
and perhaps artistic,
it is in a way a stupid thing to do.
It's risky.
On the plains of Africa struggling to survive.
You've got drought.
You've got floods.
You've got lions around the corner.
The fact that they were gathered into one place
means that they must have had some kind of significance.
It's quite possible our ancestors
made no direct distinction between tools
and metaphorical function.
It can be at once a hammer and a breaker
and something beautiful and something playful.
Were these objects of play?
Were they, one of the earliest forms
of a ball that we know of?
Ancient ball games were concerned with the idea of survival.
Survival against nature.
Controlling the ball was their way of exerting control
over the natural world which was so unpredictable,
chaotic and dangerous.
The ball could represent much more
than the actual object itself.
It represented the movement of the planets, the seasons.
It represented whatever you wanted to map onto it.
The game evolved.
It is started as a highly ritual activity
and eventually was becoming a more recreational activity
because people connected with them
so much they gave meaning to their lives.
The first physical evidence we have of ball games
being played is from ancient Egypt.
They were highly symbolic affairs.
The Egyptian Pharaoh would throw the ball
and would kind of inaugurate the games with great spectacle.
In a way, it's not that different
than say the president showing up
and throwing the first pitch
which is a highly ritualized affair
that's not really play in the sense of fun.
It's something much more meaningful.
Games even are linked to the identity of people.
And this is something very clear in the case of ulama.
The game of ulama was played for over 3,000 years
in a region spanning from Arizona all the way
through to Central America and into the West Indies.
(waves crashing)
When the Spanish came to Mesoamerica,
one of the things that freaked them out was the way
the ball in the Mesoamerican ball game bounced.
They couldn't believe it.
All humans in every ages always face
the challenges of nature and they have responses
that are similar regardless where in the world you are.
The genius of Mesoamerican society was to work out,
A, not only how to make rubber,
but how to vulcanize it, right.
To give it that kind of incredible elasticity.
In this case of the ulama,
it's a rubber ball that comes from the trees.
Tree produces a sap that is sticky.
You feel that that sticky sap became part of your body
like a second skin.
(gentle music)
And you begin to manipulate that sap.
It begins to grow little by little.
It's developing like a human being.
Imagine you've spent millennia as humanity
kicking pebbles and skulls and something bounces.
Oh, my God.
(dramatic music)
So, people felt a connection to the sacredness
through these objects.
Are they gonna connecting to the essence of life.
Ulama is arguably the oldest sport in the world.
And today there's maybe 100 players
that can still play this sport.
(dramatic music)
The ball represented the sun
and the people trying to keep the ball in play
represented different celestial bodies or forces of the sky
because they understood that the sun
had to do with everything.
All the aspects that give life to people.
Europeans showed up in Mesoamerica
with their own version of the ball.
It was called pelota de viento
and it was basically an animal bladder filled with air.
Those balls had a very dull bounce.
Very limited bounce.
The Spanish thought the devil was in the ball.
They really did.
They thought some mad spirit, you know,
that needs to be restrained and controlled is there.
In 1588, the Spanish banned the game of ulama
across Mesoamerica because it represented
the pagan past of the culture.
They thought it was an integral part
of religious or philosophical ideas that could be harmful
to Christianity.
The Maya understood that the sap
from the rubber tree was the source
of the movement in the ball.
While blood is the source of human life.
Giving blood for blood is giving life
to the stars and the planets.
Restores order and restores balance in the universe.
(blade swishing)
(head thudding)
Decapitation was clearly a central ritual
associated with the ball game.
It's found across cultures and throughout time.
It's actually something that's still with us today.
We see it in films again and again.
Now, give me back my head.
Ow, how about I...
Ow!
Ooh!
Got your head dude.
This image of a head that's decapitated
and then is played with or kicked around.
We got our war faces on!
I'm Dave Beckham.
(screaming)
You guys!
This man was alive a few seconds ago.
We can't play soccer with his head.
In some of the games of folk football that there,
the myth of a severed head does play a role.
I think it's clear that the game represents a battle
between two teams and there's a sense
that having a sort of battle origin myth fits in with that.
(thunder rumbling) (waves crashing)
There's an old Orkadian tale
about a young warrior called Sigurt,
who went off to fight and kill an ancient
and malevolent king called Tusker.
Tusker was so described because he had protruding teeth.
(growling)
(branch snapping)
(blade swishing)
Now, the boy did the job and set back on his way home
with the head athwart his brawny thigh.
Because of the king's protruding teeth,
they scratched the boy's thigh and gave him an infection.
(bell tolling)
And as the boy was staggering in in his infected state,
(townsfolk cheering)
the townsfolk were outraged that the king's snaggled tooth
had caused the demise of such a brave
and valiant young warrior.
And in a state of collective rage,
they then proceeded to kick the old king's head
around the town square.
(crowd yelling)
(bell tolling)
And thus is the explanation for the Kirkwall game of Ba'.
(waves roaring)
(dramatic music)
Would you call it a sport?
Mm. -: Aha.
(crowd cheering)
(energetic music)
Hold the pressure lad.
(shouting)
(crowd cheering)
At the end of the Ba' once one team is victorious,
they still have to decide which of the men
that's played that day gets to take home
the ultimate trophy.
Debate ensues in the thick of this mob
just on the heels of this team's victory.
(crowd cheering)
(bell tolling)
Kirkwall Ba' doesn't really resemble any game
of football that you or I would recognize.
And yet we know that Kirkwall Ba' is a descendant
of the most ancient forms of football
and that everything we play and call football today
derives from it.
The games of Celtic Europe
are basically being played by peasants.
By shepherds.
By the lower orders of the cities
so, of course, they're gonna be much wilder.
The aristocracy looked down their nose at ball games.
They're all about killing people on the horseback.
That's their pleasure.
By the time we get to the early 19th century,
folk football, street football, all the different variations
are beginning to disappear.
This is an era of class paranoia.
You know, you've got a ruling elite
that is desperately riding the wave
of the world's first industrial revolution,
and the one thing it really fears is large numbers
of poor working class or rural people gathering together
in one place.
You've got a lot of folks saying this is akin to a riot.
It almost dies.
What saves it is the public schools.
Sport is brought in as part of the curriculum,
as a way of occupying teenagers
dealing with too much testosterone.
Countering the threats of homosexuality and masturbation
by exhausting everybody and providing systems of control
from the top down to the bottom of the school.
Then you layer onto that the notion
of creating muscular Christian gentlemen.
Christian soldiers who are going to run the empire.
To create a moral imperial project of moderation,
of fair play, of sexual moral discipline.
And games and football in particular is gonna deliver that.
And that's the culture out of which football emerges.
(dramatic music)
Once again the boys of Eton
turn out to celebrate St. Andrew's day by taking part
in the war game.
Two teams, the Collegers and the Opadams
are involved in the rough and tumble.
The battle of Waterloo may have been won
on the playing fields of Eton but it's nearly always a draw
in their own war game.
Like most sports at that time period,
it was really a collection of games played with a ball.
There's a lot of different varieties of football
being played in different public schools.
We see rugby which involves
being able to carry the ball
and we see something more like soccer that involves kicking
but not carrying the ball.
That's fine when it's just at the school level.
But by now the public school boys have left university.
They want to carry on playing football now as young adults.
But they find everybody has different rules
so what are we gonna do?
How are we gonna deal with this?
So, there's a real concern to systematize,
formalize and make it work.
And the 1863 rules drawn up by the football association
are the rules that we pretty much still play today.
Here's the idea about American football.
I have the ball.
I'm gonna advance it and you're going to violently take it
away from me.
That's it.
(energetic music)
Americans embraced industrialism
and modern capitalism and took it to a whole new level.
American sports reflect that.
If you take the violence out of it, we're playing soccer.
When Americans bring ball games
into the United States from Britain
in the second half of the 19th century,
they bring with it the British amateur tradition.
It doesn't matter whether you win or lose,
it's how you play the game.
It's a sense that we're all in this together.
I mean, that's the fundamental democratic idea.
American citizens at the time
thought it didn't have anything in common
to what they were experiencing in their own country.
People like Teddy Roosevelt are worrying
that urban civilization is corrupting the manly spirit
of the American upper classes.
That's when we invent our American game of football
which is a much rougher version.
It was about winning.
It wasn't really about how you play the game.
The first thing that they did in transforming soccer
to Americanized football was invent the first down.
The idea that you would gain territory,
capture that territory, advance, move on and defend it,
much like the concept of manifest destiny.
The whole idea that anybody who came here could have a chunk
of the United States of America as it moved west.
Well that's football.
(crowd cheering) (commentator shouting)
You're gonna capture territory and defend it.
It was a clearly delineated and defined story.
You don't have that in soccer
because the score rarely changes.
Most games end 1-1, 2-1.
Less than 10% of games have more than five goals in them.
They're very rare.
They're very precious.
Goal!
(mumbles)
Africa celebrates.
If what you're used to is 110 versus 108,
football's not gonna make a lot of sense to begin with.
Americans are easily bored. Let's face it.
Soccer is frustrating.
11 things could go right and you don't get rewarded for it.
That's just not satisfying to American culture.
The vast majority of Americans
believe that we are the authors of our own fate.
There is no other country in the world
that thinks that outcomes in life are as controlled
by the individual as the United States does.
Soccer seems to prove the idea that you could do
all these things right and it still doesn't matter.
This is why I think that America
is a little resistant to soccer.
The one thing we do know is if you play
to a zero-zero tie after 90 minutes, not much has happened.
That we know.
(laughing)
(whistle screeching) And they're off!
Nietzsche and Hegel there, Socrates.
There he is Socrates.
There's the ball, there's the ball!
We'll be bringing you back
to this exciting contest in a moment.
I do think the criticism of soccer that Americans make
that it's too low scoring totally misses the point.
If you know the sport,
the amount of scoring doesn't really matter.
Football, soccer is like a, European meal
that goes on forever.
You can sort of just let it wash over you
and take your time picking whatever plates
that you want whereas it seems to me that a game
like, you know, American football is like going
to a food court and eating standing up in a hurry.
Football remains.
Once the whistle blows for the first half,
that's it for 45 minutes.
There's nothing else but the football.
The essential sporting drama, the movement of the ball.
It flows.
Flow is ecstasy.
Into Pauleta!
What a goal!
Yes, there are ups and downs and variations in the rhythm.
It stops because people are feigning injury and all of that.
We have our little theatrical cameos.
If you've just been kicked in the leg
and it hurts you do not roll seven times over on the floor.
This is not a natural reaction.
You listen to Argentinian football commentary
and they praise players on cheating the referee.
(shouting)
Goal!
When Maradona scored his famous goal with the hand,
that was a work of art because the referee didn't see it.
Football is the most extraordinary personal
and public theater of the emotions in the human soul.
(crowd cheering)
What is killing I think all American sports
is too much stop start.
Today's first and 10 line brought to you
by your local Toyota dealers.
Because of the pathological demands of commercialization,
the game's been fragmented to the point
where watching it is absolutely excruciating.
Make sure you join us at halftime
as we announce this week's winner
of the Honda generator's tailgate giveaway.
The OT presented by Lowes.
KFC plus football equals couch gating.
Served up by DQ, the home of fan food.
The crowd is constantly being manipulated,
engaged and bombarded in all of those things.
No space to think.
(engines roaring)
During the three-hour broadcast of an NFL football game,
the ball is in play for maybe 11 minutes.
The rest of the program is advertising,
replays and video segments.
Shots of the players standing around in a huddle
or gathering at the line of scrimmage.
Therefore, you have to have more and more special effects.
But that's what happens when the game
turns into a machine-made product.
(dramatic music)
I think football mirrors how we experience pleasure.
I mean, football kind of gives us everything
that we're after.
Celebrity.
Athleticism.
Violence.
And it has forensic videography.
It's not just a receiver stretching out his hands
and catching the ball by his fingertips.
It's also that bit of knowledge that he could be creamed
by a defensive back at any moment
so the danger plus the balletic expression
is what makes football so exciting.
It's impossible even to compare the thinking
that goes on with football with any other sport.
It's the most primal but also the most cerebral
and the most exalted.
But you know, in this world of sports,
people use larger institutions to explain the things
that they can't explain.
There is justice, there isn't justice.
For 100 years as a Red Sox fan you were pretty much
like a Scottish Presbyterian, right.
You knew that life was suffering.
Well, maybe you're a bit of Buddhist also.
Right?
If you're a Yankees fan,
maybe that's like being an evangelical Christian
where there's a reward now
and there's also a reward in the afterlife.
Here at the University of Tennessee,
the football games are a prime example of,
ritualized behaviour and, in fact, it's often said
here in Tennessee that football is the main religion.
Well, certainly there are some people who claim
they're not religious and yet over 100,000 people
come out to the games.
They all wear the required regalia orange.
Religion seeks to explain the inexplicable
and so does sports, you know.
(festive music)
Professional footballers.
The whole hierarchy is meaningless
and nothing without the crowd.
(crowd booing)
We're the chorus, we're the commentators.
We provide the essential background and energy
that gives it social meaning.
Because until people invest cultural capital
and their personal energies in the meaning of this thing,
it's just a silly game with a ball and 22 people.
It's tribalism at its most basic.
You put on face paint.
You dress like other members of the tribe.
You identify yourself mostly by the geographic community.
But, of course, if you're someone from Cleveland
who's now living in L.A., your love of the Browns ties you
to the city as much as anything else about Cleveland.
(crowd chanting)
We think of watching sports,
particularly maybe watching sports on TV
as being a passive act and yet science shows us
that that's absolutely not true.
Watching sports, it's almost like being part of the game.
This mechanism in the brain makes us so into the game.
Somebody who watches a player on TV
kicking a ball, for example.
The very same neurons that would fire in their brain
if they were kicking the ball,
fire watching a player kick that ball.
We call these cells mirror neurons
because it kind of suggests that I'm almost watching
my own action reflected by a mirror.
We literally project ourselves in the game.
Mirror neurons allow us to feel on some level
what we're seeing athletes do on the field.
The blood pressure goes up a little.
There's a little increase in sweating.
People tend to mimic what they watch.
Not only are we invested in the players
but we actually have a cognitive connection
to the ball itself.
They kind of orient their body
toward where they want the ball to go.
And in the way show our desire to influence
how the object moves.
We are kind of one with the ball
in this neurological sense.
It's automatic.
And it creates a connection between people.
(crowd gasping) (crowd cheering)
(balls thudding)
I think the thing that sport in its modern form
offers is brilliant storytelling.
The throw to second is high and wide,
pulls Colman off the bag.
Nevertheless, he goes on through with the pivot throw
to first base.
But both runners are safe.
Just as American ball games embraced the idea of data
as an abstraction of the game itself and the story itself.
Once the box score system is invented,
you're got a really simple and effective form
of visual representation.
These are games that are defined
by quantifiable events.
We see the emergence of statistics
that captured elements of the game for spectators
and others who might not be there.
Before television comes along,
people are watching boards in Times Squares
where light bulbs light up to represent a ball or a strike.
And it's like how can that be interesting?
But the thing is, it is interesting
because it's the story unfolding.
When all you've got is just basically numbers
in front of you, it still works.
That's what modern sport offers.
You don't have to see it.
Matthews slams a double
down the right field line.
It bounces.
Baseball and American football really gave rise
to the whole idea of the broadcast of sports
and they're perfect for that medium of radio and television.
Mass media transformed the act of watching play
into, perhaps, the greatest collective experience
in human history.
(horns bellowing) (crowd cheering)
Television was used to broadcast soccer
around the entire globe so it's a little ironic
that this medium that came out
of these intensely American and quantified sports
became the device for turning soccer
into the most popular sport on the planet.
More people watched the last soccer world cup
than have ever belonged to any religion.
Technology is this amplifier that allows us
to satisfy our urge to play.
You're watching the most exciting game
you will ever see on your TV set.
Telstar by Calico with three different games.
Telstar handball, tennis, hockey.
All three at an exciting low price.
The ball has pride of place in video games.
The world's first commercially successful video game, Pong,
was an almost platonic reduction of table tennis
into two white bats and a square blob of ball
bouncing potentially endlessly between them.
And all the instructions it offered its users
was one iconic phrase, avoid missing ball for high score.
Playing was the cutting edge of computer experience.
(energetic music)
(beeping)
(crowd cheering)
Goal!
Fantastic header!
Play had this magic ingredient.
It turned the computer from being something difficult
and obtuse like a maths puzzle into something like a ball.
Something that you picked up and played with.
And this deep fundamental fascination
continues throughout the history of technology.
And in this sense, our newest and most dazzling tools
are just like rocks picked up by our distant ancestors
thousands and thousands of years ago.
In modern ball games, what makes them so compelling
to watch and play is precisely the fact
that they are highly organized.
They're organized around rules that are understood
and highly repeatable.
And undoubtedly, you know,
if you play highly competitive games,
if you play video games you get better.
The consistency of rules, play and regulation
repeated again and again allows players
to perform greater and greater feats of excellence
within those constrained variables of the rules.
The football being played today is immeasurably superior
to anything that was played in the 20th century, frankly.
It has allowed us to create an extraordinary stage
for the amazing aesthetic performances.
It's fantastic.
When you have that level,
the questions of money and power arise
because someone has to pay for the circus
and someone's got to run it.
You have to have that if you want to have professional sport
but how do you stop them taking over.
How do you stop it becoming a pathology.
If you start trying to buy victory
rather than achieving a win,
I mean you're not playing anymore.
We're out of the realm of play
and we're into the realm of politics and power.
In the perfect world, there's a symbiotic relationship
between these highly structured, commercialized games,
and these unstructured ball games as kids play them.
They both exist for a reason.
(children shouting)
It's a spectrum.
What's the right mix.
You know, what's a good balance, what's healthy, what works.
What happens, unfortunately, is when one
displaces the other,
when those sandlot sports no longer exist.
It's so impossible for a modern
commercialized spectaculars to replicate the innocence,
the presence of play in its most basic forms.
We have to ask ourselves what's being lost in the process?
(whistle screeching)
We know that kids now are couch potatoes.
Childhood obesity is high.
It's like the first thing you want to do is encourage them
to go out and get some physical activity.
Look at all this cool stuff you get to wear.
I'll help you.
But because simultaneously we also are living in a world
where parents are freaked out that, you know,
there's monsters hiding around every corner.
Walking down a street
you never walked down before.
You never know what's around the next corner.
Some of the things might be terrible,
so be careful turning corners.
One solution has been to overcome that
is well, let's get kids involved in various kinds of sports.
So, you're on a sports team.
You're playing football, you're playing cricket,
you're playing baseball,
depending on what country you're from.
Children are more likely to play in AYSO sponsored games
of soccer than they are to grab a bunch of kids
and set up their own game.
Think of the difference between a pick up game
and an adult-directed game of little league.
In structured sports,
somebody else has made the rules for you.
Little league is good for learning skills.
It's good for learning how to swing a bat,
maybe how to throw a curve ball.
Ready, set, release.
But how important for most people,
ultimately, are those skills?
Keep your eye on the ball.
Remember, eye on the ball.
They will still exercise their bodies
and engage with others
but it's not the same as the free play that allowed Sultan,
the chimpanzee, to put the two sticks together.
Being able to get into somebody else's mind
to solve your own problems.
To take initiative, to create rules collaboratively
with other people.
These pick up ball games or sandlot sports
are based upon sports that we know
but the rules are innovative and tailored
in the moment of play to reflect the specific needs
of this community or that community
or this group of kids or that group of kids.
The kids have to create the rules because they're playing
on whatever ground they're playing on.
It's not a real baseball diamond.
You have to set a rule that you can't hit it
where it's gonna possibly break a window.
You can't go running out into the street.
There's all this negotiation, understanding,
figuring things out.
What's the game we're gonna play?
What rules are we gonna follow?
What are the consequences if you don't follow them?
How many times is somebody allowed to break a rule
before they're excluded from the game, right.
The kids have to decide that.
All of which are extremely important skills
for all of life.
There's no substitute for that kind of process
where the kids are not only given the physical exercise
but they're actually getting the brain training
to actually design a social world
that they can now negotiate.
(bells jingling)
(children chattering)
(rooster crowing)
(cow mooing)
One of the great classics on children's games is,
Piaget's book on marbles.
(gentle music)
It's about how children's moral development occurs
while playing marbles.
Showing how they develop a sense of fairness,
a sense of competitiveness within rules.
With adults around, they see the rules
as sort of something that comes down to them
on the basis of authority.
It's as if the rules are God given.
They get a little older and they start thinking,
well, wait a second.
We can make the rules different if we want to.
They are realizing that if it's not fun and fair,
you can change the rule.
In these interactions with each other,
they'll develop their own sense of morality.
Once again, we see that the ball is at the center
of this social dynamic.
Balls produce unpredictability because you literally
don't know where the ball is gonna bounce.
The actual variability of play is the key to its value.
It confers flexibility.
Having to adapt the rules and to be sensitive
to other people in the context of play is a natural part
of these unstructured freer ball games as children play them
and is exactly what connects them
to rough and tumble play in animals.
(dramatic music)
(heavy panting)
I look at a ball as being equivalent
to like a social catalyst.
It gets animals to play with one another,
interact with one another.
Play is about a relationship between risk and security.
The name of the game and what we inherit
from other animals is that play is risky.
But they don't get hurt that much
because you've got the rules that don't allow them
to bite another animal or kick another animal
or slam into another animal too hard.
You watch a kid begin to have to share
or a kid that punches another kid too hard
and the other kid cries or a kid pushes another kid down
and that kid is all bent out of shape.
And then you yourself get pushed down or punched hard.
You begin to have a sense of what it's like to be the other.
It's my ball!
We have to rehearse the dark stuff and the violent stuff
as much as we rehearse the sociable stuff.
And when you don't get to play
like that from within yourself,
when you don't make some mistakes,
you're really devoid of a kind of an internalized sense
of what it is to have empathy.
Think fast! -: Oh!
Children that hadn't had lots of play,
they are the ones that are more likely
to be violent criminals.
They simply do not understand
what's happening other people's minds.
Maybe they don't care as much.
By denying kids that free play,
that social free play in particular, what we're denying them
is the opportunity to really push their frontal cortices
to the maximum of their ability.
And it's just gonna have devastating effects
on interpersonal interactions and communication.
And I think we're actually doing the exact opposite
of what we should be doing.
You begin to see this is really pretty important
to being fully human.
(wind whistling)
(children shouting)
(dramatic music)
I do have a sense that preparation for the unexpected,
and the search for novelty and openness to new forms
are really necessary to survive in an ever changing world.
Humanity is engaged in a gigantic experimental crisis
and we simply do not know what is coming our way.
We've had glaciers.
We've had volcanic eruption.
We've got global warming, over population.
I mean these are things that require flexibility
and innovativeness to solve.
We are going to have to be incredibly spontaneous
and incredibly inventive and we are going to have to think
collectively if we are to have half a chance,
not of stopping these problems,
but of dealing of the consequences and the uncertainty
that we have unleashed upon ourselves.
I think that's why play is there.
To give problem solving capabilities and novel ways
of looking at the world that we wouldn't get otherwise.
Play is the imagination of new worlds.
It's extending the reach of mind and possibility.
(whistle screeching)
(children shouting)
We will come up with some idea to rescue us.
That's where it will come out of.
It will come out of the realm of play.
To open yourself to spontaneity,
uncertainty and caprice of the ball,
it's an extraordinary thing.
What we don't know is whether we have the heart
and the wit and the guile to bring it under control.
Let's hope so.
(whistle screeching)
(children chanting)
There are worse ways of exploring it
than watching people play a game of football.
(children singing)
(energetic music)
(gentle music)