Is It Really Just Fun and Games?

If you watch American football, and really become a student of the game, you'll notice that the sport has a tremendous number of rules. You're allowed to tackle the person holding the ball, but you can't tackle them by grabbing their facemask, or grabbing the back of their jersey behind the neck. You aren't supposed to hit a defenseless player (e.g., someone who has jumped up for a high pass). You're also not allowed to lower your helmet and hit the ball carrier with your helmet.

If you're closing in on the quarterback, you can tackle him, but as soon as he throws the pass away, you have to try to back off and leave him be. If you are pursuing a receiver, you can tackle him, but as soon as he runs out of bounds, you also have to try to back off and leave him be.

You're not supposed to taunt other players, or yell at the referee, or—of course—hit or punch or kick someone from the other team. Imagine the amount of adrenaline you have to have coursing through your veins when you're trying hard to put another person on his back. Now, imagine how difficult it is to just turn that adrenaline off when the rules say you need to.

In a nutshell, the game of football requires strong skills in self-regulation. In fact, there are a lot of games that require this skill, and it is for this reason that I believe that games are important modeling and practicing grounds for teaching children (and adults!) how to act like adults, so that they can succeed in the adult world.

According to a recent study in the journal Child Development:

"Developing the capacity for self‐regulation, that is, the ability to automatically or deliberately modulate affect, behavior, and cognition (Karoly, 1993), is an important task in childhood and adolescence. Higher levels of self‐regulation are related to fewer mental health problems, and better academic performance (Bull, Espy, & Wiebe, 2008; Olson, Sameroff, Kerr, Lopez, & Wellman, 2005). One key component of self‐regulation is inhibitory control, that is, the ability to plan and suppress responses (Rothbart, Ahadi, Hershey, & Fisher, 2001)."

Take yourself back to your childhood. Remember the game "red light, green light"? A person turns her back to a group of pursuers. When she yells, "Green light!" everyone is allowed to run toward the caller. As soon as she yells, "Red light!" you have to freeze. Self-regulation in action. In fact, if you don't exhibit self-regulation and stop on a dime, you are penalized and lose the game.

How about Steal the Bacon? Two groups are created, and each individual in the two groups is assigned a number. A caller yells out a number—"7!" The two people on the two teams who were assigned the number 7 have to run toward some object in the middle of the playing area (the "bacon") and figure out how to grab the object and run it back to their team's line before their counterpart tags them. You can't just run toward the other side and grab it, because the other person is usually right there. Instead, you have to figure out how to gauge when it's the right time to grab it and go, avoiding the grasping hands of the other player.

I remember one child in my neighborhood playing Steal the Bacon with my group of friends. When his number was called, he ran headfirst into the other player and tackled him, then got up and grabbed the bacon to take it back to his team. All of us—even the players on his team—cried out that this wasn't fair. "Why not?" he said. "No one said you couldn't do that." And, we realized, it was true. That rule had never been explicitly stated. But still, we all intuitively knew that the purpose of the game was to be elusive, not violent. I don't remember anyone saying, "Hey! The purpose of this game is to teach us how to exhibit self-regulation skills, and that approach doesn't help us learn those skills!" Instead, we all negotiated a new rule—no tackling or hitting allowed.

Watch a group of children play games, and you'll hear all sorts of negotiating and strategizing, and you'll also hear an importance being placed on things like playing fair and being a good sport. Much as a child might want to cry when he loses a game, the pressure is enormous to hold it together. The requirement that children hold back their emotional outbursts if they want to be allowed to play is due to the Self-regulation that is built into how games are structured.

Imagine being an adult, and using violence to get your way. Your boss criticizes your work ethic? Punch him in the face! Your neighbor is making too much noise late at night? Throw a rock through his window! In most contexts, violence will get you fired or arrested. Imagine not getting the promotion you wanted, and crying literal tears about it, right there in the office. Most likely, this would be considered poor form. "Hold it together!" you might be told.

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Children and adults need games to help them learn about—and then practice following—the rules that our society has decided make for a successful and well-adjusted individual. There is, of course, a line between repressing all emotions, and learning how to adjust emotions so that they don't spill out all over everyone. We've decided that people who are too exaggerated in their emotional expression are fodder for ridicule, and not the types of people who will thrive on their way to success. And we learned all that out there in the street, on the ball field, and on the television.