Okay, I've got a riddle for you. Name something that we all do as children, something that's

considered good and important, but when we do it as adults, it's often looked down on. Got it?

Okay, what's your answer? That's right. The answer is play.

Social scientists have generated a lot of evidence that playing is good for us.

According to one widely cited study, play contributes to the cognitive, physical, social, and emotional well-being of children. The playing of games is thought

to be especially valuable. And why is that? In 1978, the Canadian philosopher Bernard Soutes

published a sly and influential little book called The Grasshopper, Games, Life and Utopia,

in which he defined game playing as the

voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles, which, to me at least, could sound like a

definition of life itself. In both life and games, there are constraints, some of them artificial,

there is luck and uncertainty, there's constraints, some of them artificial. There is luck and uncertainty. There's

limited information. There are trade-offs between risk and reward. And also pressure, which tends

to scramble our decision-making. There's also the fact that over time we have invented so

many types of games for so many types of players, and they serve

so many different functions. Games can be a connection, a laboratory, an escape, almost anything,

really. And you can see it in the numbers. According to the American time use survey,

playing games is our number two leisure activity. Number one is watching TV,

and a lot of what we watch is live sports, which are, yes, games. So today on Freakonomics

Radio, the first of what we hope will be a recurring series on the joys, the perils, and the

absurdity of games.

Within minutes, there were strangers eight and ten deep on each other's laps.

In this episode, we will hear about game design, and we will ask if the New York Times is becoming a games company.

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