The live version of this report was jam-packed with play: from easter eggs and doodling and an in-report personality quiz that gave you your very own playful archetype, to a print-and-play activity book and a miro-turned-multiplayer-playground.

We've done our best to include as much of the fun in this archive as we were able.

An impromptu game of hide-and-seek in the park. A random, silly little dance after a small, personal victory. The calm surface of a lake inviting an irresistible urge to pick up a stone and skip it. Moments like these happen every day, everywhere, all around the world. These displays of universal human behavior are unprompted, natural, and remind us that there’s something powerful — in the deepest, molecular level of our cells, across our bodies and minds — that motivates us to play.

But what is play, really?

Answering a question this big and nebulous requires that we first answer a handful of even more nebulous questions…

Like, why do we play? To answer that, we need to remember that humans are not the only ones who do it; what we conceive as play is behavior that manifests far beyond our species. 

Across almost every sort of animal, from fish and frogs to rats and kangaroos, play acts as the great rehearsal for life. It's an opportunity for the young to practice essential survival tasks required of them as adults — and for those adults to hone, sharpen, and practice too. Predators engage in sparring or chasing games to simultaneously train and explore. In hunter-gatherer societies, children make their own toys, engaging with objects that emulate or are part of adult material culture in order to mimic work through play. Play is necessary for adaptation, flexibility, and social learning. As Dr. Stuart Brown from the National Institute For Play observes, across the animal kingdom, “non-players do not do as well as the players.” This makes play a matter of survival, reducing the risk of a host of diseases and influencing mating & sexual selection. 

But it’s not just about staying alive, it’s also about feeling alive.

Nothing lights up the brain quite like play. It fires up the cerebellum, shooting impulses at lightning speed into the frontal lobe. Play transforms mundane, forgettable moments into memories, because when we play, we remember — helping contextual memory to be developed.

So when we zoom out and look at the role play, well, plays for us, it’s almost unbelievable that it’s so often disregarded as frivolous, when it forms much of the mental map and emotional backbone required for us to navigate the world.

Our journey through time makes clear that the more power that play demonstrates — the more resistance, contempt, and hostility it meets — the more potent it grows. It’s this cycle that gives us an inkling into what play truly is.

Such playful questioning may start at the margins, but the disenfranchised margins are growing. 

The old paradigms and structures of power established in the last decades and centuries have proven to be unsustainable and unscalable, leaving most people disillusioned and — in many ways — disempowered. As we explored in A Future In Sync, it’s time for new structures, new stories, and new behaviors to emerge in their place … and the charge is being led, snarkily and with many a meme, by young people all over the world.

In the sections that follow, you’ll meet our five character types: The Enchantress, The Healer, The Mediator, The Teacher, and The Artist — each of whom brings something uniquely playful to the table, and helps us unlock a piece of play within ourselves and in the world. To truly manifest A More Play-Full Future, we’ll need all five cards in our hand, since their diversity of experience is critical to rounding out our relationship with play in every dimension.

And, of course, we’ll need our Trickster friend along for the ride. His ability to challenge norms, take risks, and bring a sense of fun and playfulness to even the most serious of situations acts like a power-up for each of our characters — and he’s known to bridge the gaps in between too, bringing our characters together in unexpected ways to multiply their individual impact.

If we can build toward a world where our collective hand includes each of these cards — where their roles are elevated in importance, and where we’re empowered as people, communities, and societies to embrace their gifts — that’s where we think we’ll find our better future. 

So how do we do it? 

How do we create the conditions for play as a force for good to flourish and thrive?

As we laid out at the beginning of your journey, there are two paths ahead: One, a toolkit and wayfinder for incorporating play into your own life. The other, our journey into Incubate; an invitation to accept our upcoming briefs built to inspire makers, creators, and visionaries to help us manifest A More Play-Full Future, together.

If you share our vision for a playful world — and, by this point, if you’re still with us, we hope you do — then we invite you to explore both paths.

As we quoted in our Multiplayer Futures thesis, “​Rather than providing pre-packaged images of possible futures, it is important to encourage do-it-yourself and do-it-together attitudes towards the creation and exploration of futures.” It’s a perspective from FoAM with which we heartily agree.

And so we hope you’ll play with these ideas, remix them, and make them your own. And if you’re so inspired, maybe you’ll join us in Incubate as we embark on A More Play-Full Future in multiplayer mode. We promise, it’s more fun that way. 

If play is what we say it is, it's not enough for it to exist on these pages. Below, you’ll find two opportunities to turn this research into reality — in your life and in the world.

We believe that the future is community-owned.

We believe that better futures aren’t built in bubbles. 

We believe the future isn’t something that happens to you, it's something you — and me, and all of us, individuals, communities, and brands alike — can actively participate and invest in. That’s why we wanted to feature an organization like KABOOM!; one that shares our values and our vision of this particular better future.  

In 1995, four-year-old Lesha and her younger brother Clendon were looking for a place to play in their Washington D.C. neighborhood. Without a playground to be found, and with the only community center too far for their little feet to walk, they decided to make up a game to play inside of an abandoned car they found nearby. They got trapped inside and suffocated to death, a desperately sad story that resulted in much hand-wringing and finger-pointing within the community and around the country, but also in the action of KABOOM!’s founder, Darrel Hammond. 

Hammond didn't set out to start a non-profit organization; he set out to do what he could to support a particular community — and its kids — that had experienced a tragedy. And so, over the course of four days, he built a playground with the community. And that was just the beginning.

Play is the very essence of childhood, and yet not every child has equal access or opportunity to play.

Over the last 25 years, KABOOM! has set out to break down the barriers to play inequity and bring play infrastructure into the largely black, brown, and indigenous communities across the U.S. that have been disinvested in and, in many ways, ignored, thanks to years and years of systemic racism, and its legal and extralegal effects. 

Their work is centered in communities who aren’t accustomed to change. Maybe a politician or an organization will blow through with big talk, but real change? That doesn’t happen here. 

And so, KABOOM! embodies tangible and transformative change in all that it does. And it always starts with the community.

From the playgrounds it builds, to its playable cities effort, ‘Play Everywhere,’ every initiative starts with community input. Because when a community feels ownership over a space, it gets used more; it gets treated as the safe space it deserves to be; it becomes a real, collective priority.

And, much like the way we do things at RADAR, collective ownership starts with collective imagination.

Each playground initiative starts with kids in the community designing their dream playgrounds. And the beauty of it, for KABOOM! Senior Fellow James Siegal, is that “kids have no barriers in terms of what’s possible; they don’t think in those terms.”

And so, while most times they see kids drawing their own version of the slides and monkey bars we’re accustomed to, they occasionally get things like, say, a volcano.

True story.

While working on a project with the New York Housing Authority, a kid dreams up a volcano. Not fazed by this, KABOOM! takes the drawing back to its playground manufacturing partner to create a playground that was evocative of a volcano, so it had a central point higher than everything else with all sorts of ropes and slides coming down from that central area.

The kid shows up as it’s being finished, and beams with pride: “That’s my playground.”

(cut to your author crying)

This is but one story of many that demonstrates the power of envisioning a better future, and then seeing it brought to life. That shows you that change is possible, no matter your background. That shows you that you deserve to be a meaningful stakeholder in the future ahead of you. That you deserve to be heard, and have your dreams valued.