Abstract: With the internet, society has been exposed to puzzling and exquisite animal behavior, while neuroscience has vastly concentrated on a few inbred animal models studied in trained unnatural settings. Changing this trend is imperative. By developing a novel behavioral paradigm in neuroscience, involving rats playing ‘Hide and Seek,’ we were able to study mammalian play and its neural basis. We played ‘Hide and Seek’ with rats in a 30-square-meter room and found that they quickly acquired the game and played by the rules. My work in large-scale wireless neural recordings during play laid the foundation for expanding neuroscience in two future directions: 1) the use of non-traditional rodent models (Deer mice) to understand the evolution of play and how it contributes to cognition, and 2) taking novel neurotechnologies out of the lab to study the brains and behavior of animals in the wild.