Ultra Processed Play

When we were kids, play was organic, unsupervised and often carried a degree of risk. The adventure playground down the road from where I grew up, was straight out of the Marjorie Allen Playbook. And by that, I mean largely dangerous, always involving heavy building materials, high slides and deep stagnant water.

When I moved to Devon at age ten, I lived near the River Erme and a typical summer day involved playing in and around the water with no supervision or life jackets. We had no first aid kits either, in case one of us grazed or broke something and the only limitation was being home for tea.

Scrumping (stealing apples from other people's trees) was an end of summer experience, which had landowners chasing us down the back lanes, when parents today would probably now kill for their children to voluntarily eat fruit. It's all too easy and probably lazy to look back on these as idyllic times and believe the world around us is a much more dangerous place.

But all of this has slowly and inexorably changed. Children are rarely exposed to risk in any form, let alone actual danger. The world is a much more closely watched place, but this absolutely isn't the same thing.

And this has done kids no good at all. Most children in the UK and US seem to mainly interact with their friends online, as they have no freedom to discover, other than online and through electronic games consoles. There's no place for them to talk about their feelings, their dreams or their fears. A day of play in the woods and clambering along the side of a fast flowing river allows all of this or none of it to come out, depending on how you feel and who you're with.

It's no coincidence that according to the NHS in the UK, injuries caused by falling from trees fell 34% from 2008 to 2018. RSI injuries from games controllers are up 62% and the saddest statistic of all is that injuries from intentional self-harm with a sharp object are up 270% over the same ten year period. Read the value of play here

So having just read the incredible book 'Ultra Processed People' by Chris van Tulleken I saw the perfect parallel in how play had changed in the same way as food.

Food was pretty much all organic when we were kids, but as globalized food brands grew, so did the reach of ultra processed or factory made food with additives that leech all the goodness from what we eat. Very we little we eat now has ever been eaten by humans before, which is why so many of us are becoming ill from it.

And the same has happened with much of the play available for families.

Play areas with giant plastic ball pits are the nemesis of organic play. They allow children to expend energy without using their imagination in what they do. It's empty play like the calorie dense fug of ultra processed food. The imagination has been stripped away leaving little of value behind.

When you look at IP based play, this has come on so far, that it can never go back to how it was. The best example of this, is for me, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. As a child, it's one of the most visually powerful books you could ever read. Your imagination created a magical place with a deep and luxurious chocolate river churning the chocolate, exactly as described by Roald Dahl.

But, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, the 1971 film with Gene Wilder, had a river that was so thin and unpleasant looking that it ruined the whole film. Later versions with Johnny Depp in 2005 and Wonka in 2023 without the river, but with a deadly pool of chocolate and the most incredible effects, did all of the imagining for you. They were picture perfect, but left little for your mind to process

Brilliant for a film. Poor for play.

And that for us is why most IP based play is passive. You sit there waiting to be entertained or walk through an area where the imagination is on show and often incredible. But for the guest, it's a had the imagination delivered to the max, rather than enabling or encouraging imaginative play.

What CAP.CO do differently

We spend an awful lot of time in the imagination phase of any project, as part of our design and build process. We look for the stories that are hidden within the history, flora and fauna of the place, to deeply root it to that specific site, with a sense of place that ensures it's a total one off.

Play like ours is thankfully proving very popular. We've built our whole business on this type of imaginative play where we enable multi-generational play together, for people of any ability. It's an unforgettable experience as you see the kids discover again that their parents or even grandparents can still be fun.

We don't build ‘kit-of-part’ catalog play spaces, but rather organic, natural and sustainable structures, packed with imaginative play that we co-create with those local stories and characters.

This is the CAP.CO way and hopefully when you've played in one of our places you'll not only notice the difference but love it too.