NIMBioS Working Group members are featured in this new documentary on the importance of play.
Interviews on the subject of play behavior by several members of the NIMBioS’ Working Group on Play, Evolution & Sociality are featured in soon-to-be released documentary movie about the importance of play in our everyday lives. A trailer and a kickstarter campaign for the movie was released today.
The filmmaker for the project is Gwen Gordon, a former designer and builder of Muppets for the children’s program Sesame Street, who came to NIMBioS in November 2011 to conduct interviews of Working Group members. Entitled “Seriously!,” the movie is “a creative documentary about the power of play to generate and restore health and sanity to our world,” according to the movie’s website.
The movie features interviews with many Working Group members, including co-organizer Gordon Burghardt, a UT professor in the psychology and ecology & evolutionary biology departments; behavioral neuroscientist Sergio Pellis; biological anthropologist Kerrie Lewis Graham; biopsychologist Barbara Smuts; sociobiologist Elisebetta Palagi; and animal biologists Marc Beckoff and Marek Spinka.
The NIMBioS Working Group on Play, Evolution and Society aims to develop models for the interactions that occur during social play and to determine the factors that predict the dynamics, occurrence and trajectory of play in diverse taxa as well as the ecological, physiological and life history factors that facilitate and maintain it. The next meeting of the Working Group is scheduled for Oct. 29-31, 2012.