The Importance of Play

I met Ryan, one of our co-founders, over board games. We were drawn to the same thing: the particular kind of thinking and connection that happens when you're playing together. Years later, when I was wrestling with how to help my students learn therapy, my experiences at the board game table with Ryan kept coming back to me. Because board games have taught me something about how humans actually learn.

Growing up, I internalized a hierarchy between work and play. Work was important, mature, serious. Play was frivolous, excessive, childish. The more I've studied and practiced psychotherapy, though, the more central play has become. Far from being merely silly, play is serious work. It opens a space of possibility that allows us to face failure, uncertainty, and our own limits without being destroyed by them. In other words, play is how we grow.

What Play Actually Is

When I say play, I don't just mean laughter. Play is a mental space we enter when we hold the concrete and imaginary in tension with one another. When material reality is too heavy, we lose sight of possibility. When we're too lost in imagination, we lose contact with what's actual. Play holds both in tension.

Think about a young child swinging a stick around, pretending to be a Jedi. The stick needs to look somewhat like a lightsaber—that concrete anchor matters. But equally important is that it's not a real weapon that could hurt them. It would be much harder to play as a Jedi without something concrete to swing. But it would also be too dangerous to play if they were actually swinging a blade that could really cut or harm them. Play sits in that middle space: real enough to engage us, safe enough to let us imagine freely.

Clinical training desperately needs this same middle space. You need something concrete to work with, such as an actual clinical scenario that feels real. But it has to be bounded enough that failure doesn't have devastating consequences. In that space, you can try new approaches you haven't tried before, imagine possibilities you haven't yet considered, and mess up without it ending your career or harming a real client. Learning is facilitated because the stakes are different.

Play doesn't focus on achievement. It creates a bounded space where failure isn't the end. You can try something new, fail, adjust, and try again.

The problem is that too few educational environments create this kind of space. So much of school and training is geared around pressure to perform and succeed. That pressure may motivate, but it kills the generative space for learning and trying. When the first time you practice therapy produces shame instead of play, failure leads to hiding and avoiding rather than growth.

Play as Its Own Reward

Play is also fun, so we keep coming back. Play is one of the few things humans do for its own sake, not as a means to something else. That return deepens our engagement. Instead of monotony that encourages disengagement, play pulls us toward a flow state where we're more alive, more connected, more willing to try.

Praxplay was born out of a desire to help my students find more ways to learn through play. We've tried to keep play at the heart of the platform not because it's fun, but because it's how humans actually learn. The safety to fail, the structure that enables freedom, the repetition that deepens joy. This is what makes it different.