The Play Ethic

Coupling Up & Powering Down: PK's Final Day @ Wonderlab

Last day of Wonderlab, but more than a few of us are feeling like it's mid-week at summercamp. Particularly since we are given the starting injunction that “now we're on a deadline, with an important audience coming in later on, and we have to produce an original game by 6pm”. Phrases like “invisible prototyping” and “games that embody their challenge in the rule set” are flying around, even before coffee and buns are properly ingested. 

I'm trying to locate that strange tension in my neck, and then it clicks: school sports day, third in the relay team, shitting it that the baton won't slip from my sweaty fingers at the last. Sometimes in this space, the distinction between play and games feels very clear indeed. 

Before we split up into two games-making teams, who will magically morph their ideas into one clear platform after lunch, we hear a presentation from Mark Earls (click on name for video of presentation), who wants to talk to us about the importance of copying in culture, beginning with the Oscar Wilde quip, “most lives are quotations from the lives of others”. Mark's work is lauded and admirable, and he's had many nice things to say about my stuff on play in the past. 

But I have to confess: I've always had a problem with a busy and active advertising man telling me, from a range of psychological and behavioural findings, that my sense of unique selfhood is an illusion, and that I am much likelier to shape my behaviour by copying others than by proceeding from my own cognition or reflection. Doesn't that mean marketing just shifts its focus from the individual's identity to the conversation they're involved in – a subtler field, but surely just as (maybe even more) determinable than older appeals to class, gender or region? 

Citing his work with a very ubiquitous family food brand (who shall remain nameless), Mark says that the brand's meaning now belongs to the consumers – the company's job is now to host and enable their conversations, rather than weld consumer desire to produced object. But this raises again the whole question of how much power resides in the hands of the “referees of social games”. The softer and less coercive capitalism gets, the more it tries to engage consumers through hosting games and discourse, the more it diffuses itself into every corner of our interior and exterior lives. Thus, again, Jesse Schell's nightmare vision. 

It felt like a purifying, light-hearted act of play to then sit down and learn some nerdy card games. This was training for our closing act of game-making, where our main prop was a pack of blank playing cards, ready to be inscribed as tokens in our rule-sets. With others, I got lost in a very abstract game called Set – very similar to the 'Snap'/Twist games I play with my daughter regularly. As I've been wanting to reduce my anxiety about performance-in-competition throughout these days, I found myself adhering to one single internal strategy – pick a winning set of cards that are as different from each other as possible – and judged myself internally as to how well I was doing, than bothering in any way about victory over others. 

Many of the other games were ingenious, and sometimes beautiful: Labyrinth, through a very simple arrangement of tokens, made the path of the game itself morph and change; Lost Cities wove a flickbook narrative across its gaming cards; Lightspeed turned cards randomly scattered onto a table into an almost 3D-action space. But my own abiding motivation for playing is to use the game as a pretext for finding out the depths (maybe also the shallows) of my fellow players. For me, the contestation enables the wider, broader sociability. 

So we split off into our two groups, and our group was guided by one participant's declaration that “we should remember we're making a game for London media wankers – like us!” Thus followed much discussion about Neil Strauss's seduction manual The Game. What rules and scenarios could we devise to subvert the stylish sovereignty of the thoroughly capable and self-possessed people coming through the door tonight? Battering together something along these lines, we met up with the other group and delightfully discovered that (no doubt under the guiding intent of that old Marxist Momus) they had come up with a partnering game, under the rule of love and attraction, in which nobody really wins. Our task in an hour was to try and fuse these two games together – one aiming to dent the arrogance of those media selves in a Regency room, the other aiming at the fusion of souls based on part luck, part flirting, part real empathy. 

Coupling and De-Coupling Up

Under Margaret Robinson's guiding hand, we managed it. We called the game "Couple Up". And it was, first of all, utterly specific to the space itself: two large rooms, an adjoining passageway which controlled access to each. It was also specific to the event: a group of people whose relationship varied from friendship to acquaintance to being strangers, coming to witness the result of a gaming process. The first move was to herd them into one bare empty room: the other room - roped off - was visibly full of wine, chairs and nibbles. The room of plenty - called, with crushing crudity, the "Upper Club" - was protected by a Maitre' D (Momus in a pink Post-it bowtie). Then two cards were given to each of the players – one card from a number set of 1-4, another a “fortune” card which described a personality trait or behaviour. 

Armed with these cards, the attendees had to “couple up”. First numerically (their cards must add up to five), and then in terms of character traits: you asked a potential “coupler” questions based on the personality trait on your card (eg, likes coffee/hates Arsenal/indifferent to Lady Gaga, etc). But the game constraint was that you could not use any of the words underlined on the card (eg, coffee, Arsenal, Lady Gaga, etc).

Once you had gone through that bit of social fun and forged yourselves as “couples” (all mixes of ages and genders permitted), you were able to march up to the Maitre'd and ask for permission to the “Upper Club”. And then the exclusions kicked in. For our Maitre'd had a secret rule for turning couples away from the Upper Club, denying them access to the revelry. This was decided by observing the guests gathering, and picking out some obvious regularities in their sartori (eg, either or both had to wear glasses, or have their sleeves rolled up). And as couple after couple presented themselves and were rebuffed, the challenge for them was to deduce what arrangement of themselves would allow them to make the cut. 

How did it play out in practice? Well, Momus could not have been a more gracious and polite Maitre'd (I was posted as his Coatbridge muscle, ready to repel any game-trashers). But I certainly saw him wilt under the burden of his authority, and let some couples through who decidedly did not fit the criteria. And while some couples enjoyed figuring out the door-entry policy, one or two at the end were getting visibly frustrated and annoyed at not being able to guess the hidden rule (we let them in before tempers began to escalate). 

Did we labour mightily in the fields of game-making theory, and bring forth a veritable mouse? Unfortunately, I think so. One of the shaping concepts of this final day was whether we could imagine a game where “the topic was embedded in the rule-set”. Undoubtedly, if this was a game being made by media wankers for media wankers, then it's perhaps no surprise that the joys of social association were made to thump straight into the severities of social exclusion: Toughen up, folks, this is a world for fluid networkers, not stiff-backed dullards! For all the (often brilliant) consideration of the abstract components of game-making in the previous days, and the grand ambitions about “behaviour change” erected upon such abstractions, we ended up expressing the tedious “culture” of our time and place all-too-predictably. 

And there it was, "Couple Up". Probably not coming to a conceptual arts venue near you anytime soon. 

Wondering at Wonderlab

Coming down from this experience over the last few days, I'm struggling to say whether a greater understanding of games-making techniques has made me more sympathetic towards, or more critical of, this cultural form as it currently stands. I'm happy not to drive to a conclusion at the moment – usually best to let these things work themselves out through more thinking, talking, or “iteration” (as the designers love to say). I'm enough of a play scholar to know that games are as eternal as the human cultural record, but also that there can be a contestive fundamentalism in thinking about games which is all too easy to fall into (we do live in a competition-oriented, market-dominant society after all).

As a corrective, apart from grumpy leftists like Momus and myself, I'd certainly suggest that the next Wonderlab builds an ornate Lego throne and royally installs the great Bernie De Koven (founder of the New Games Movement in the 70's, and currently blogging at Deep Fun). Bernie has devoted a lifetime to thinking about games (and toys) that evade the obvious and coarsening effects of zero-sum competition. A quote from one of his recent posts will suffice (with a nod to Tassos):

...No matter how new the game, a game can be no more than an invitation to play. It’s not the game itself, it’s play that renews us. Play without goals, rules, reasons. Play per se.

And the quality of the game, the well-playedness of it all, frequently has little to do with the game itself, little to do with the goodness of the players themselves, and everything to do with the unqualified goodness of being in play.

Play is a taste of health. A momentary engagement in the natural exuberance, exhilaration, ebullience of life at its liveliest. An affirmation of our boundless wisdom, limitless capacities.

And when play is especially good, transcendentally, transformationally good, it’s because of the people with whom we are at play, in play. The community of players. The people with whom we play community. The people with whom, when we are at one with ourselves, we are at one.

But after the event, I came across two stories which express my genuine ambiguity and ambivalence about games. This weekend, the FT magazine reported on the pre-eminence of board games over computer games in German culture. Tim Harford gave an account of the difference between a major “Euro-game”, called Settlers of Catan, and You Know What:

The Settlers of Catan superficially resembles Monopoly. The board is assembled from hexagonal tiles, but the components include wood houses that look much like Monopoly buildings. The idea is similar, too: players use resources (money in Monopoly; timber, wool and other commodities in Settlers) to build property; the property then collects further resources, and the process of expansion continues.

Yet after Monopoly, Settlers was a revelation. Monopoly ends in the slow strangulation of the weaker players and usually feels stale long before the official end, assuming it isn’t abandoned along the way. Settlers didn’t take long – perhaps an hour – and even as it was coming to an end, every player was still involved. In Monopoly, many choices can be made on autopilot; in Settlers, there is scope for skill throughout a game: the decisions always matter and are always interesting. Settlers has its own elegant economy, in which the supply and demand for five different commodities are determined by tactics, luck and the stage of the game. Players constantly haggle, wheedle and plead. It’s convivial experience, a game of incessant banter. In the course of an evening, I was hooked.

The game as generator of “banter and conviviality”, as a means of “tasting the health of play... as we play community”, is precisely the kind of game that I, and I bet many others, would like to see emerging from the computer games sector. I've no doubt Hide and Seek, and others who are thinking at this intense level about the aesthetics and ethics of their sector, are on the case with this.

My other cultural moment – which falls on the negative side of my ambivalence about games – came from watching Christopher Nolan's new movie Inception. There's no doubt this is a movie for the gamer generation. The thieves who enter other people's dreams conceive their territory, the dream space of a person, as comprising of different levels or worlds, in which the rules can be self-consistent, but utterly arbitrary – gravity failing at certain points, injuries not really being injuries, etc. So far, so game-like.

Even the group which comes together to do the dream-exploring – charlatan, teen maths whiz, bureaucrat, mad scientist, intense hero - feels like the cast-list of a particularly nerd-esque team adventure movie. But David Denby's review of Inception in the New Yorker nailed precisely why all this dazzling elaboration left me intellectually charged, but emotionally unmoved. There are two breathlessly mentioned realpolitik referents in the movie: i) the fact that “the military” developed this dream-surfing science. And: ii) their mission is to manipulate the dreams of the heir of a massive energy empire, so that he can decide to break it up, preventing its total dominance of world energy. But as Denby says: 

Why would we root for one energy company over another? There’s no spiritual meaning or social resonance to any of this, no critique of power in the dream-world struggle between C.E.O.s. It can’t be a coincidence that Tony Gilroy’s “Duplicity” (2009), which was also about industrial espionage, played time games, too. The over-elaboration of narrative devices in both movies suggests that the directors sensed that there was nothing at the heart of their stories to stir the audience. In any case, I would like to plant in Christopher Nolan’s head the thought that he might consider working more simply next time. His way of dodging powerful emotion is beginning to look like a grand-scale version of a puzzle-maker’s obsession with mazes and tropes.

Might a “puzzle-makers obsession with mazes and tropes” be a way of “dodging powerful emotion”, rather than taking it on? I am always struck by how rare it is when gamers can say that a game experience made them cry – and the wonderment in the voice when they do so. I sense that there is much thought and practice to do in exploring the emotional dimension of game experience, beyond the exultation of a “win-state”. (Brian Sutton-Smith's newest turn of play theory addresses precisely this issue - download this article). But I hope that will be a topic for future Wonderlabs to come. For now, I'm extremely grateful for the experience. Hope you get the next golden ticket...

Lifestyle Nazis, Beckett Meets Tetris & Rules Are Crystals In Your Pocket: PK @ Wonderlab, Day 2, PM

A muggy afternoon on Day 2 of Wonderlab, the huge windows at the end of the Nash room in the ICA opened as high as they can be, so we can gulp in a little air. And I, along with my fellow Lab technicians, am going to design my first ever game. 

Which is immediately untrue. I'm sure that when I was a child, with Lego and soldiers strewn across my toyroom floor, I was inventing games and scenarios incessantly. As a father, when I got a chance to hear my children at play with their pals -  particularly up until about middle of primary school - I was always thrilled to overhear how they would roughly compose the rules of a game among themselves. The materials to hand might be pop songs, or a found object, or something they were wearing, or the staples of rope or ball. I simply know that children are natural game-makers, as well as players. The promise of these few days, for me, was about learning a way to recover that innate capacity. 

Was it my first technologically-inspired game? Even then that's not strictly true – every game is determined by the materials it faces and the setting it's in. If it's a half-broken branch on a tree that affords a little springyness before it snaps entirely... well, there's your technology. I'll have to settle for “first game created according to explicit game-making methodology”. 

As it was laid out by H&S's Margaret Robertson, the methodology was fertile and productive. What's the verb that describes what happens in a game? (I had a little dispute about whether crown bowls – my father's favourite pastime – had “target” or “shoot” as its core verb. In no way was John Kane a sharp-shooter at the Blairhill Bowling Club). We considered the three layers of game design: mechanics (the basic rules that specify action), dynamics (what things possibly happen in the game when you play it), aesthetics (what it feels like to play it, what its culture is, what's the "fun"?). If we knew the objective for a game, what would make it “interestingly hard” to meet that objective? And finally, how do you know you've won – what does “victory” look like?  We were sent off in groups of three to create our game. As well as the verbs, we were asked to each name our greatest fear: from both of these elements, our game would spring. 

I think the most charitable description of our team's game was that it was an instructive failure. Our three fear words were 'ignorance', 'confidence' and (my own) 'fascism' – and immediately, the whole question of how a game could articulate or explore something as horrifying, but substantial, as fascism gripped our over-intellectualised minds. We all shied away from trying to create a “serious” game – one where the gameplay was at the service of a message (say, transforming the attitudes of BNP half-sympathisers) – and tended towards making a set of rules that implicitly or abstractly tested the exclusiveness, the antipathy, the power-relations of fascism. How could you be made to feel or act like a fascist, even if you didn't want to, using an aesthetic symbolism which was far away from the obvious signs of that creed? How could you obliquely explore the dangers of that psychology and behaviour? 

And so, building up from what seems to be the initial move in game-design – ie, reduce the psychology of your player to a basic series of binary decisions about yes/no, stronger/weaker, happy/sad, mine/thine  – we began the intense, strange journey to “Lifestyle Nazi”. The crucial, indeed hilariously weird moment, was when our team was sitting in the ICA cafe. I was spluttering out some game scenario which involved Seinfield's Soup Nazi gag; plus the inevitable arrogance about sensibility and taste that came with membership of the creative class; plus a kind of weekly social network game, where your job was to try and guess what your friends' excellent consumption and service choices were, so you could join them as a...Lifestyle Nazi! At that point, one of our team did the oddest thing. “I'm sorry, I can't get involved in this conversation any more”. Why not? “I'm in a situation where... it's a patent thing... you really have to carry on without me”. And with that our colleague sat silently, literally cast speechless by some far-off Non Disclosure Agreement. Copyright Nazi had just entered the room. 

I looked up at the wall, more than a little frustrated - and there, as a giant photo in the ICA cafe, was the simplest game about fascism imaginable. A white working class woman in a St.George's-flag-bedecked neighbourhood was peering at a tent on a lawn, which had Arabic script across one side of the sheet. “What's In The Tent, Sharon?” I muttered to myself, my mind running on the rails of a game-logic that was beginning to take me over.

The games from the other two teams – a card game where people auction themselves to establish greater personal worth, another one using Plato's cave as a device to explore chaos and imposition – were also thoroughly determined by the fears used as the starting-point for creation. Though it was an enjoyably demanding process, I'll admit my heart sank a little at the pinched, petty image of human subjectivity that sat at the heart of each of these games (ours included). If our initial question had been, “what do we love most?”, would our gaming have been different? 

At some point in our Lifestyle Nazi making, it struck me that the way many people use Twitter is as a love-game, or at least an attraction-game - a positive, indeed helpful display of their sensibility, a showing-off but also a sharing of their internal and external resources. Could the reason we embrace these networks be much less about farming or Mafia games, and much more about the way they enable easy self-expression and rich discourse, the way they amplify the sharing dimensions of culture? A conversation depends on the abundant resources of language, which is fuelled by intersubjectivity, and in principle never needs to end; a game (at least one which aims at a “clear win-state”) deliberately limits its resource base, which equally delimited subjects scrabble over, to get to something "that feels like victory". 

(I kept bringing up James Carse's Finite and Infinite Games in the course of these days – though he's a scary reference. Carse says that a finite game can be in the service of an infinite game – we're winning these victories so we can learn better how to sophisticate the rules of the game, include more people in the game, learn about ourselves and our culture through the game. But one of his definitions of evil is that of an infinite game in the service of a finite game: that is, a never-ending, war-of-all-against-all commitment to victory. Funny enough, he calls that Fascism/Nazism...). 

All this brings a different take on Jesse Schell's bemusement – quoted in my previous post - at why these “crappy, flash-based, turn-based games” on Facebook and other social network platforms have been so successful. The answer is, they're just finite (indeed, crappy) little pretexts – alongside other pretexts like gift-giving, sharing/curating, commenting/expressing – to help us engage in the potentially infinite social communication that something like Facebook (or more generally the internet) affords. 

I've never come across a more synoptic framing of play than Brian Sutton-Smith's seven rhetorics – and he places “play-as-power-and-contest” as only one mode of play among many others, one instrument in the evolutionary repertoire (and in no way the most dominant) by which play helps us complex mammals to adapt and flourish. So much of Wonderlab seems like a self-conscious deep-dive into the rhetoric of 'play-as-power', with all the other rhetorics hovering around as the lovely assistants to the main magician. A very useful exercise, but a very particular experience.

Such was the quality of curation at this event, though, there were always grace notes against the main theme. Aleks Krotoski's charming presentation spoke about three instances of delicious anticipation – her participation in a volleyball competition, a roller coaster ride, a promenade theatre experience – when she had “put herself into something, knowing that something was coming along to surprise or shock me, but also feeling completely safe”. Knowingly I'm sure, Aleks described there the primal moment of developmental play, what I was trying to show with my laughing/biting baby clips in my opening presentation (turn the sound right up) – play as a place for ultimately safe and healthy experimentation. 

But as with the biting baby, who simply wasn't able to calibrate his strength over someone else's flesh, play in the shape of contestive games can always threaten to go too far. There's an intoxication when power gets amplified by a sense of ultimate possibility, the “spiel macht frei” etched invisibly over the door of DeSade's boudoir, or the Abu Ghraib torture room presided over by the fun-loving Lindie England. (My friend Momus nodded imperceptibly at that one). 

Of course this must be part of art's armoury, what it has to do to map the perimeter of our human condition. One of our Wonderlabbers Melanie talked about her theatre experiment In A Small Town Anywhere, which cast the audience into two groups in a town – the Wrens (New Labour) and the Larks (Conservative) – who the dramatists then consciously “gamed” or catalysed (by urging them to get a Mayor elected, by strewing a poison-pen letter writer in their midst, by inducing them to scapegoat and then murder someone). “At some points I have to say it was sheer anarchy, pretty dangerous” said Melanie, citing the Kent State experiments by Philip Zimbardo. (Though see this correction by a co-producer of this experience, Tassos Stevens, in comments below). 

So contestive game-spaces crackle with energies which demand a lot of monitoring - which again for me raises the question of the governance, even the "parenting" of a healthy play experience (and to be fair, exploring that topic was something that Alex from Hide And Seek's wanted from this event at the start). But after two days of nerve-jangling rule-making, it was a total joy to hear a presentation from games maker Tassos Stevens which completely re-asserted the necessity and primacy of play, and the way that games are only ever secondarily dependent on play's wide, messy field of free conjunction and connection. I'd be happy to quote you the entire text,  so thoroughly do I endorse it, but here's a favourite passage:

Game arises from play. A rule-set crystallises a set of actions distilled from an experience of play. That crystal can be popped in your pocket to be played with again and again, any time, any place, with anyone entranced by its sparkle. It gets chipped and scratched, then rubbed and polished. It becomes a lens that focuses action in time and space and for one brief encounter let’s us act as if we lived in a simpler world, the kind of world that can be described in a rule-set. But the very best thing about it is that if we want to, we can smash it up and grind it into paste to make believe anew. Even if let alone, its inherent ephemerality will let it pass; like a playful version of the second law of thermodynamics, people stop playing attention and soon the game dissolves into flux. It’s the playful spirit of the game that’s more important than the letter of the rules.

Well, exactly. 

Maurice Suckling's second presentation on how storytelling and narrative work in games was worthy of an entire post to itself - which I will attempt over the next few days. But in essence he was laying out a complex map of how games should (and shouldn't) use the power of story; and that perhaps theatre was a better cultural analogue for games makers than blockbuster movie – a sense that games similarly set the scene, allow the attention to rove around the stage, and develop dramatic potential within that. 

Our day closed – I presume with intentional mischief – with exactly one of those blockbuster-aspiring games makers: Richard Lamartin from Naughty Dog, makers of the Uncharted series, on a Skype line from California. Apart from his confession that at some point he'd like to stop making “popcorn munchers”, and start thinking about a cross between Tetris and Beckett (“I'd call it Waiting for a Straight Piece”), the relevant question was again put by Momus: was his games-making imagination being subsumed by Hollywood, or was he actually on the way to being the dominant new paradigm? 

Richard mostly demurred at that one. But one thing that perked my interest was their embrace of machinima – players getting their hands on games-making tools as part of the game experience – at the heart of Uncharted. The news that all it had been used for was by fans making rave vids about the game itself was a bit bathetic (I prefer what Xtranormal is making possible for all the new generation of comic-strip detourning situationists). 

And so day 2 of Wonderlab ended. My one thought as I left the ICA, head bubbling and reeling: You know what, Kane? Ten years after you named them, the soulitariat has actually turned up. Now, be responsible about what you wished for. 

Infinite games and not-so-finite brains: PK @ Wonderlab: Day 1

Herewith my first day attending Wonderlab, a summer-school for the ludocracy run by Hide And Seek, the ambitious game design studio in London. About ten of us, and not entirely male (thank god), are occupying one of the elegant Regency rooms upstairs at the ICA (which I've besmirched in various forms, as both speaker and heckler, for about 20 years now). 

I'm reunited with my bohemian doppleganger Momus/Nick Currie – who sports a most excellent pair of cloven-hooved sneakers – and I'm meeting a range of fluent players and gamesters from the worlds of computer games, design, theatre, dance, academia and performance/improv. Hide And Seek have just been swarming over the South Bank with their Weekender festival, providing a “chaotic but supported” experience; we're here to use that as a springboard to think critically about how playspaces like this can be sustained, scaled up and propagated. 

First time I've ever heard the phrase “interactive work” as a general term for all this stuff - and not sure about it either. But glad to hear H&S's Alex Fleetwood asking us to think about how to design institutions/institutes that can make the “niche” of gameplay become a mass, even a “revolutionary” phenomenon. 

There'll be videos of our presentations up soon. But I'm fascinated straightaway that four of the opening presentations (including my own) head straight for that nexus between evolution, consciousness and play I've been ever more obsessed with in recent years. It's a busy and contested crossroads, though...

We hear a story from Margaret Robertson about toxoplasma gondii, a virus that survives by changing the chemistry of mice so they're friendlier towards cats (and thus more easily consumable), then takes up residence in the lower feline intestine, and eventually comes out into the world of our speaker's back garden as cat shit. It turns out that gondii has the same effect on humans – and so the question is, does she love the cat because of empathy, or because she's been infected? 

We're asked to compare this with games-making – where one little technique, like one little virus, can change a game experience quite radically. “So how do we make things/games that change the way people behave?” concluded Margaret. Hmm. “Behaviour change” is not a happy phrase in my mental mansion at the moment – too reminiscent of the “nudge” philosophy of the behavioural economists and marketeers, and so beloved of Cameron's New Tories, which literally assumes that the fatally impatient “Homer Simpson” is the default model of human nature. (Though I'm glad to see there's some debate beginning about the political usage of these sources). 

Could we make games that, for example, brighten our understanding of the complex systems that make up our world - rather than ones that presume we're a collection of psychological mouse-traps waiting to be sprung by magisterial game designers (or Coalition ministers)? I'm guessing Margaret knows about neuropsychology beyond the "choice architects" of nudge-thinking - for example, neural plasticity - when she argues for "responsiblity" in games-making: "the many hours being put in by gamers will change their brains". At least this presumes some kind of dynamism about our neurological response to gaming, rather than just the accessing of our inner schlub.

I was much more in tune with voice artist Melanie Wilson's account of an installation which uses nesting birds to trigger faltering, Morricone-like soundtracks, or Momus's paen to the ambivalence and ambiguity of play, its equal potential for liberation or the subtlest of oppressions. I'm a wee bit anxious (maybe over-anxious) to communicate to the contingent of gamers here that play ≠ game. That is, games are a subset of play – and play is a wide and broad spectrum of realities-taken-lightly (everything from rock'n'roll to social carnival to superstitious gambling to religious creation myths to jokes-and-gibberish), that aim to mimic or mock the stresses and strains of survival. Contestive, rule-bound games are only ONE of the ways that play's “adaptive potentiation” (Brian Sutton-Smith) can express itself. 

I guess I've been through too much discussion recently – particularly the Internet as Playground and Factor conference in New York – where alarm-bells have been rung about the “interpassivity” of much computer game-play. And particularly about the semi-addictive “playbour” that can be so easily extracted from those playing social network games like Farmville on Facebook, or the endless participative toil demanding by online worlds like World of Warcraft. 

Jesse Schell's now infamous speech at the DICE convention earlier this year lamented that game-makers who wanted to make money should stop idealistically trying to “find the fun in clever game ideas”, and start “brainstorming about new psychological locks and keys” like those found in social network games like Webkinz, Club Penguin and Mafia Wars, making millions through the adroit offering of “external rewards”. Schell's closing dystopian view of a thoroughly game-pervaded, endlessly-point-scoring world is almost Orwellian in its satirical and cautionary power. And we haven't even gotten to the military-ludological complex yet... 

So right now, apart from a few honourable and predictable exceptions, I need some audacious hope about computer-games-as-culture – some encouragement that the art-form will be heading out of its early-printing-press stage of penny-dreadfulness sometime soon. Luckily the rest of Wonderlab's first day was an impressive and mind-opening training seminar in the elementals of games-making. 

After some excellent word and chair parlour games, we were set up by Alex to play two rounds of Peter Guber's game Nomic, a game where changing the rules is the point of the game. Half way through this rather beautiful experience – where I ended up under the gaming table with a New York academic lady playing the part of Robert De Niro, asking me for good ideas about how to embarrass the other players – I realised that out of this piling-up of rule upon rule (some petty and some profound, some logical and some shameful) we were actually composing our own mini-civilisation. (Guber is a philosopher of government and legislation, and created Nomic (from the Greek for “law”) to explore some of the procedures of law-making). 

I've no doubt we were exhibiting, and in some cases even trying to apply, some of those  “psychological locks and keys” that make up a potentially profit-making game in the early 10's. But I've never experienced a mainstream digital game world that has remotely the same openness and flexibility as Nomic (though I see from Wikipedia that it is a staple of an earlier era of text-based online gaming). And to be desperately analog and fleshy about it – a dimension of play which Hide And Seek completely understands – there was an embodied, performative and (certainly in this heat) perspirational “reality” to this game. I'd be intrigued to think about – and who knows, maybe build - the digital correlate to this uproarious experience in a room. 

More presentations from some extremely sharp people tomorrow. And I'm hoping that the opening plea for some “critical thinking” about the future for gaming can fuse with some of the richly playful souls in this process – and maybe some new games, rather than just critiques, might be the result. Let's see. 

Branding radical innovation - more Summit Series reverberations

Post Summit-Series (posts here and here), I'm having these fascinating long-distance conversations with young American entrepreneurs and activists, who are trying to wrestle with the ethics of what they're calling "radical innovation" - the step-change invention (from cuneform writing to Craig Venter hiding a URL and quotes from James Joyce in the DNA of a synthetic cell; from the wheel to the superefficient solar panel) that changes civilization inescapably. (All this in the context of futurist Ray Kurzweil who spoke at the conference in Washington, anticipating what he called a 'Singularity' of technological advance that redefines basic questions of life, society and sentience). 

What I bring to the party, from my own play theorising, is captured in this lightly edited (and anonymised) part of our exchanges below. The discussants are seeking to establish some kind of brand/marketing idea for radical innovation - how, in an eco-anxious and fearful age, there can be a better story about technological transformation that steers between the extremes of Luddism and boosterism. (And if anyone's wondering what this has to do with recent fevered discussions about 'poverty porn', it's this: instead of documentaries that sneer at people who have lost the psychic battle with consumer culture, it might be interesting to concentrate on that generation of 'makers' who want to build their social future as easily as they can make a website or hack a mobile phone). 

Here's my 50 cents:

Pat Kane / Playing the Future

If the question was "what is the language that can make people comfortable with radical innovation as a permanent feature of our long-term future?", I would have said that you have to first engage in a bit of a battle about human nature. If it is "natural" for humans to innovate, to transform their conditions, to use their abstracting powers to shape nature - ie, if it is natural for us to be unnatural - then we need a language in which the "nature of being unnatural" makes sense, seems descriptive of who we are. Rather than (as some environmentalists would have it) that we're some kind of maladaptation, far too unstable and destructive a presence in our biota, which 'The Earth' as an overall evolved system will decide - is deciding - to get rid of. 

For me, that language for the last ten years has been the language of play. And at the moment, I think it's become one of the few keywords of real resonance and authority in recent years. Play is where we 'take reality lightly', where we take joy in crossing boundaries and limits - but it's also where we complex mammals develop and learn, neotenically through our entire lives. By being 'unnatural' in play, we express and develop our true nature. 

There are a number of deep ideas trends that have been supporting this new centrality of play - for one, the advance of complex adaptive systems thinking through all areas of business, governance and even pop culture (Wired etc), which knows that healthy systems have 'play' in them, and are populated by dynamic 'players', rather than cogs in machines. This blends over into the advanced sciences of human nature - eg positive psychology and neuroscience - both of which have encouraged us to look at early child development, and the plasticity of the brain through that, as crucially shaped by our play experiences. When we see education systems throughout the world making major policy changes to extend kindergarten experiences to 6 and 7, delaying the moment of formal education, they're doing so under the pressure of mind-science that's telling them how important the play moment is to the development of their future productive citizens. 

So it's not the only theme you could deploy, but I certainly think that putting "the right to play" front and centre of any movement about radical innovation - not just for kids' development, but for adults too - would be one way to "naturalise" our "unnatural" response to the challenges we collectively face. 

Play is often misunderstood as either triviality or extremism (though of course its phenomena can be both). Play is properly understood as risky behaviour where the consequences are not fatal - because we (or our authorities, whether governments or lionnesses on a savannah) have secured enough safety, distance from scarcity and tolerance for messiness for our explorations to be educative, developmental. So seeing radical innovation for the long term as a play zone, also implies a level of safety-guaranteeing governance. (It's worth noting that the amount of bioethics that Venter went through to get to his synthentic life molecule showed that he wasn't interested in 'playing God', but in 'playing civilisation' - taking the risk of creating an a-life, but having it buffered and filtered through stable public institutions). 

In valuing radical innovation, people need to be assured that this isn't going to be some kind of terrifying, extropic SF scenario - this is what's good about Kurzweil's calmly rising exponentials as images of change; they at least look swooping, elegant, rather than the jagged, unsettling lines of stock-market activity.  We need a way to think about how we build the institutions, and their consensuses of value and ethics, that can help us direct radical innovation as a contribution to our growth, health and development, than a dangerous unravelling of all of those. I'd suggest that what you'd be trying to do here is to build a robust and sustainable 'ground of play'. 

There are many old hippie coots still active at the moment - Stuart Brand, Kevin Kelly, Brian Eno, Danny Hillis, the whole Edge crew - for whom the establishment of a 'ground of play' would be intuitive. (In fact, one way to look at uber-old-hippie Steve Jobs's almost paternalistic total-designing of his information appliances is that he's establishing exactly that 'ground of play' for the info-sphere - creative interactivity and expressivity, but in an environment free from predation and disaster. And there, we might get into a discussion about different parenting styles...) But in any case, I think we have the news in from the mind and systems sciences to justify the importance of that ground in a powerful way. 

Summit Series Preview (1): me, Bill C, Ray K, Jason & Max...

Now here's an adventure... I've been invited to speak on a panel, and hang about for three days, at an invitation-only event called the Summit Series in Washington DC. May 13-16th 2010 - here's my session, titled “Media for Change”. 

It has a pretty high-powered cast-list. From the heights of the US power structures (Bill Clinton, Ted Turner, the MD of Carlyle Group David Rubenstein, a clutch of White House “innovation officers”), through scientists and gurus (from the edges - long-life techno-advocates Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey De Gray – to the founders of Craigslist and Second Life, as well as quite a few health and yoga masters), to a decent sprinkling of Tinseltown glamour (R'n'B titans John Legend and Russell Simmons, Peter Petrelli from Heroes, the MD of Variety, an Estee Lauder 'spokesmodel').

But the driving force of the event is the twenty-something organisers' belief that they are the “Millenial leaders” - a generation born in the 80's, but getting ready to take power (see this NYT article which captures their culture well , and their press page). Their agenda seems (from this event) to be a heady mix of social and tech- entrepreneurship, dreams of human life extension and techno-utopianism, and a lot of 'playing hard' - they have a 'Revelry' strand which involves hip DJs and jam bands, 'altruistic' dating casinos and paintballing.

My entry point is through the inimitable duo of Jason Silva and Max Lugavere, hot young anchors of Al Gore's Current TV network (and known in the US press as “Al's boys”) - both of whom are big fans of my ideas, and particularly Jason, who's something of an ardent transhumanist and futurist. Here's his Huff Post columns, and below is a teaser for his forthcoming documentary (in which I am planned to appear) called 'Turning Into Gods' (from the old Stuart Brand saw, "we are as gods and we might as well get good at it").

TURNING INTO GODS - 'Concept Teaser' from jason silva on Vimeo.

I'm going to write about this event in some form or other over the next few months, and will gather much material while I'm there (interviews, podcasts, etc), as well as blog from the event. 

But I seems I am being caught up - from my Glasgow/London perch, sending out memes about the Play Ethic - in a new wave of Gen Y/Millenials-era public entrepreneurship in America. They are naturally globalist in outlook, completely native to the internet society, optimistic about growth (but in a green- and socially-centred way), and seek a new justification for their enterprise which gets beyond the Puritan work ethic (which is, I guess, why I've been invited). And (of course) they're inspired by Obama's victory, which has given them a new political horizon of successful activism. 

On the eve of a UK election which has possibly registered a million extra younger voters, will we begin to see the same urge here for a generation to identify themselves as "millenials" quite so self-consciously? 

All fascinating. More to come. 

Review of 'You Are Not a Gadget' and 'Googled'

Here's a recent review for Scotland on Sunday of Jaron Lanier's You Are Not A Gadget and Ken Auletta's Googled - ridiculously small word-count, so apologies for the compression, but I will be elaborating on both in a bigger post (and doubtless later presentations & consultations) later on. The Lanier book is brilliantly and provocatively wrong - I want to engage with it in terms of the Digital Economy Bill in the UK, and what an technologically-friendly artist's perspective should be on the debate. Later! [This article was first published in Scotland On Sunday on April 04, 2010 - below is the unedited version]

YOU ARE NOT A GADGET Jaron Lanier (Allen Lane, £20)

GOOGLED Ken Auletta, Virgin Books, £11.99

Reviewed by PAT KANE

In case you hadn’t noticed, the war for the future of the internet has reached the peak of battle. On the shimmering plains of cyberspace, Rupert Murdoch and the music multinationals are sandbagging themselves against the oncoming waves of news-surfers and file-sharers. Paywalls are being erected, the regulatory arm of Peter Mandelson is being seductively bent - anything to get a regular buck off those rapacious, intellectual-property-despoiling hordes.

To the philosophical rescue of hacks and A&R men, in a tangle of dreadlocks and perched on a silver surfboard, comes Jaron Lanier. Lanier was a pioneer of virtual reality in the early 90s (remember those goggles?) and is now the author of a carnaptious yet brilliant denunciation of The Way We Network Now.

You Are Not A Gadget is hardly a Luddite tract from some defender of old technologies and even older monopolies. There’s not many non-fiction “talkers” that plausibly invent an entirely new form of human discourse (“postsymbolic communication”, if you must know, seemingly a fusion between software and the behaviour of octopi) in the last few throwaway paragraphs.

So when Lanier says that our beloved Twittering, YouTubing and Facebooking is about reducing our personhood to fit the limitations of software, about “becoming a source of fragments exploited by others”, we should at least put the devices to sleep and pay attention.

Happily for Rupe and the satin-jacket brigade, Lanier says that one of the ways that technology can express a “digital humanism” is to allow musicians and journalists to make a middle-class living again. How? By turning every current (and neutral) click on the internet into a tiny monetary transaction between seller and buyer, enabled by a very deep change in the internet’s operating code. For Lanier, this would clean out the witterings of what he calls “the hive mind”, and allow those who live by their craft and skills in symbols to flourish in the Net, rather than see their royalty cheques reduce to zero.

Lanier notes the paradox that an exponential rise in broadband and computing power hasn’t resulted in the cyber-equivalent of a Mozart, an Orwell or a Thelonious Monk, but much more culture-as-nostalgia – the “YouTube” evening watching classic tv clips, or Spotify as a rummage through three generations of record collections.

As someone who plays between both of the industries that Lanier focusses on in this book, music and journalism, I can appreciate his Romantic angst about the dimunition of originality. Yet I think he’s wrong to suggest that a more closed, narrowed-down and marketised internet will foment genius or even just excellence.

Creativity is as much about reading and listening, as it is about writing and composing – and my own creative experience with the new digital plenitude, in all its cost-free ubiquity, is that of swimming in a sea of permanent inspiration. The end of the old business models means that both music and journalism will have to boil down to what is enduring and scarce in their professions: the live performance and the heartfelt, self-produced song; the necessary investigation and the unfettered comment. Rather than the hype, flash and churnalism that clogged up too much of both professions in the good old days.

The point is to use the wild and free internet to connect these moments of cultural integrity to communities who only have time for the best: and then, eclectically figure out how to monetise their intense interest and commitment. It can be done.

Something that Lanier refuses to do – but which exercises the Digger greatly – is to condemn Google as the cuckoo in the nest of content. Ken Aulietta’s meticulous account of this huge company’s fundamental geekery should encourage Lanier that the basic infrastructure of this new era is being driven by insanely creative individuals.

And Googlers know fine well that they’re in the position of the old railroads and private utilities of the 19th century - in the queue to be nationalised when they become too big and infrastructural to fail us. Our future might not be the "digital Maoism" that Jaron deplores – but something more akin to a digital social-democracy. Let’s have a debate about that vista, rather than worry too much about Kevin the teenager in his downloading frenzy. A war against enthusiasm could hardly be more pointless, or less winnable. 

Pat Kane is author of The Play Ethic (www.theplayethic.com) and one half of Hue And Cry  

My review of 'Fun Inc.' and 'A Casual Revolution'

My review for the Independent of two excellent books on game culture. All comments welcomed.

Fun Inc., By Tom Chatfield (Virgin)

A Casual Revolution, By Jesper Juul (MIT) 

Reviewed by Pat Kane

Friday 15th January, 2010

Those of us who have been dented in a tender financial place by the latest tera-byte crunching games platform may be up for a little intellectual justification of our Xmas spending. So here are two crackers: Tom Chatfield's Fun Inc. is the most elegant and comprehensive defence of the status of computer games in our culture I have read, as well as a helpful compendium of research. And Jesper Juul's A Casual Revolution provides even more conceptual filigree to justify the refinement of your cyber-tennis forehand on the Wii.

But are computer games "the 21st century's most serious business"? The numbers surrounding the sector are certainly thudding. By the end of 2008, annual sales of video games - not including consoles or devices - was $40 billion, comfortably outstripping the movie business. In the same year, Nintendo's employees were more profitable per head than Google's.

The sheer pervasiveness of game experience - 99 per cent of teenage boys and 94 per cent of teenage girls having played a video game - means that instant naffness falls upon those who express a musty disdain for the medium. Chatfield wickedly punctures Boris Johnson's vestigial urban chic by quoting his description of video-gamers as "blinking lizards... without ratiocination, discovery or feat of memory".

In fact, as Fun Inc. elegantly explains, computer game-playing has a very strong claim to be one of the most vital test-beds for intellectual enquiry. Rather than shock-haired politicians bemoaning "vanished dreams of an unmediated society", they should be looking to massive multi-player online games (MMOs) as a laboratory for the better angels of our civic nature.

As anyone who has even tentatively stepped into the virtual world of games like Eve Online or World of Warcraft would corroborate, Chatfield finds there "elections, formal debates and fundamental discussions, self-organising task forces, mass communications and mass motivations", and every shade of human grouping. That you may be a citizen with bejewelled tusks, or a trader of interstellar cargo, does not for Chatfield signify a weird retreat from political engagement. In the spirit of the best play scholarship, he sees games as a tool for learning how to handle offline complexities - as social rehearsals that make us wiser and more sophisticated in our responses.

Corporations are now scouring CVs for evidence of "level 70 guild leader status" in online games, signifying responsibility and leadership skills. There is a clear-eyed chapter on the mutually-supportive relationship between the US military and computer-game players - one just as strong with medical trainers and environmental modellers. Economists are using virtual worlds to conduct controlled experiments on our spontaneous behaviour as traders. And there's an unequivocal thumbs-up to the Scottish education sector, which seems to be the global leader in adapting games for use in schools.

Where Chatfield inspires most trust is the way he handles the unavoidable fact that "a player is actually 'doing' rather than merely watching" acts of violence and cruelty - neither or which is "peculiar to, or even common in, games". He notes that of the top 20 bestselling console games of all time, only one - the infamous Grand Theft Auto - involves explicit violence. The top three are Wii Play, Nintendogs and Pokemon.

Even a figure as mainstream as TV supernanny Tanya Byron, in her report on children and cyberculture last year, came to the conclusion that we need to move from a model of games "causing harm" to "the adult business of education, contextualisation, responsible classification and regulation". All the violence-and-games research, exhaustively cited in Fun Inc., makes clear that the onus should be on identifying those who need social support, rather than hyping up the negative effect of one newer media over any other.

Chatfield concedes one medical scare-quote on the impact of games, on their addictive powers. Indeed, given the way games are designed to tap into our compulsive, species-deep desire to learn, it's perhaps no surprise that they tap into the same neurological joy-loops as alcohol or sucrose.

This is where the "incorporated" part of the title starts to seem a little less witty, and a little more creepy. Many cyber-critics are beginning to identify "playbour" in net culture - play as exploited information-labour. The fun of games online is, on this view, a commercial fly-trap. As their ludic gizmos entice our social and imaginative natures to keep pressing the fun-button, all manner of civic and consumer data is being harvested by corporations. And maybe worse - witness the mega-surveillant Chinese state's heavy investment in online game worlds, not mentioned in Chatfield's book.

These "casual" games, purchased cheaply or downloaded freely, and played across the screens that occupy not just our living rooms but our pockets and laps, are the subject of Jesper Juul's The Casual Revolution. In its way, this delightful, straightforward book is an exercise in what they used to call in my English course "practical criticism" - a theory-light disassembling of the essential components of an art form. We are introduced to robust concepts like "juiciness": the visual and aural rewards that these simpler games give their mildly distracted users.

Juul reveals a hightly entertaining schism in the gamer community - an elitist disgust from "hardcore" gamers at the rise of this cheap'n'cheerful sector. It seems as much a response to the maturing of existing gamers (as one interviewee says, "I'm a dad now, I've no time to disappear into the loft for days with a virtual platoon"), the raw economics of the bigger games (now costing scores of millions to develop), and the desire to broaden gender appeal, as a retreat from the kind of sublimity that Chatfield promotes.

The wildly successful Wii Golf or Tennis, or music games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero, are often about adding a virtual element to the existing physicality of a familiar play-form. Yet one should always be alert towards the return of the ancient in the world of play. At the end of Fun Inc., Chatfield invokes the Dutch play-theorist par excellence, Johan Huizinga.

He makes a comparison between Huizinga's idealisation of chivalric and carnivalesque play in the medieval era and the patriarchal guilds, wilfully embraced hierarchies and mass triviality of digital play today. Is our current ethos of play to be defined as "happy inspiration" in a world of neo-feudal and neo-militarist values and structures? This play-theorist would robustly beg to differ. But at the very least, these books make a strong case that we're all ludologists now. As the Tense Tens approach, we might as well get good at it.

Play Ethic @ TEDxOrenda: Play, the Net, Education and the ambiguities of a 'Creative Economy'

As a welcome to all those who'll be attending Drew Buddie's TEDxOrenda conference next week (Twitter, tickets), here's a draft version of an afterword I've provided for a US volume called Educating in the Creative Economy, edited by Daniel Araya, out next year. It's a mash-up of the paper I presented in New York recently at the Digital Labor conference at the New School, but it gets to the heart (via quite a lot of theory, apologies) of my thoughts around play, tech and education. 

Comments welcomed below, and looking forward to seeing you all there! -- PK

PLAY, THE NET AND THE PERILS OF EDUCATING FOR A 'CREATIVE ECONOMY'

Pat Kane

As complex mammals forged through play, from the beginning to the end of our lifespan, humans are fated to be lifelong learners. Yet the crucial question for the effectiveness of education in a creative economy is: to what degree is the playful generativity at the heart of our species-being a route leading towards autonomy, or heteronomy?

One might think that rising affluence, improving health indicators and the cognitive surplus represented by the internet would provide the optimum conditions for a post-work/players' identity in the developed world – a spreading 'ground-of-play', where our potentiating faculties find ever greater zones in which imagination can enchant and infuse our lives.[i] But the story may not be so blithely heading in the direction of playful liberation.

 The distinct neoteny of our species – that is, the extension of youthful characteristics far into our maturity, by comparison even with other simians – keeps us always, as the Italian autonomist thinker Paulo Virno says, in a state of "permanent formation".[ii] We have kept this endemic and anxiety-inducing openness  to the world under control, says Virno, by means of what he calls "cultural and social devices" – religions, castes, class identities, civic values, regional and national traditions, foremost among the last of these (as Ernest Gellner might say[iii]) being the nation's education system.

But Virno's warning is that the regime of flexible production and informationalised management that typifies contemporary Western capitalism is now uniquely exploiting our neoteny. Post-Fordism (should we bite the bullet and call it Googlism?) deliberately accelerates this indeterminacy – the faculties that open us up to endemic flexiblity and openess – to make it the very fuel of the social and economic order: "The death of specialized instincts and the lack of a definite environment, which have been the same from the Cro-Magnons onwards, today appear as noteworthy economic resources". Virno moves through our natural faculties of potentiality, and lashes them methodically to the flexible personality required by informational capitalism.

Our biological non-specialization? The grounding for the "universal flexibility" of labour services: "The only professional talent that really counts in post-Fordist production is the habit not to acquire lasting habits, that is the capacity to react promptly to the unusual". Our neotenic forever-youngness, always ready to learn and adapt? We are now subject to "permanent formation… what matters is not what is progressively learning (roles, techniques, etc) but the display of the pure power to learn". That fact that we are not determined by our environment, but make and construct our worlds? This is mirrored by the "permanent precarity of jobs", where we wander nomadically from one cloud in the nebulous world of labour markets to another.

Play School: my Times Educational Supplement feature on NY's Quest to Learn school

 Belatedly posting up my Times Educational Supplement article on Katie Salen's Quest to Learn school in New York, which aims at using 'gaming literacy' to develop a new kind of education that teaches kids to think systemically and creatively. I also have a podcast composed of the interviews I did for the article, which I'll post up some time after Xmas. (And there are some pics of the day in this post). All comments welcomed.

Play school

Published in TES Magazine on 18 December, 2009

By Pat Kane

I am in New York, with an appointment to visit a school of the future. But when you jump out of the yellow cab in the city’s Chelsea district - where panhandlers strike up fights in local coffee shops and you are surrounded by Manhattan tenements - it’s difficult to see where it might reside.

When you discover the actual location - a large, bolted door on a crumbly old building, where security guards check you into care-worn hallways right out of the 1950s movie Blackboard Jungle - you might wonder how the reality will match up to the school’s impressive website.

The photocopied A4 signs eventually lead to a bright, busy - though decidedly ad hoc - inner-city school on the third floor. There I am greeted by Robert Torres, co-founder and research head of Quest To Learn (Q2L), the world’s first secondary school dedicated to educating 11 to 18- year-olds in “gaming literacies”.

He is immediately at pains to say that “this isn’t a place where kids just play games with consoles all day; we are educating here in ways that people will be able to recognise”.

As instant proof, Mr Torres stops to have a quiet word with a pupil who has just been put outside the classroom by his sure-footed teacher for “talkin’ over everybody”.

Julio has just been sent out of a class called Codeworlds, which teaches a combination of language and maths under an approach that sees both as “systems that convey meaning”. He is also missing out on an explorers’ visit to the land of Blubonia, where they are using gaming technology and role-play to pick up the local lingo (which happens to be first year Spanish). Clearly, something new is going on here, even if the built environment is echoing hallways and squeaky linoleum floors.

Cyberspace ≠ big bad wood: children and the Net

Update: found a great symposium on Protecting Virtual Playgrounds: Children, Law and Play Online - video presentations. Supporting blog from Terra Nova. 

* * *

Here's an essay I wrote for my old employer, The Sunday Herald in Scotland, on children and the internet (the uncut version is below, here's the edited version). I was commissioned under the headline, "Who's afraid of the big bad Net?", so it begins a little more luridly than I'd like. However, I think it grapples with a lot of the phobias about the topic pretty well, and suggests some creative (rather than just regulatory) proposals towards how cyberspace might exercise a "duty of care" to children. 

Who's Afraid of The Big Bad Net?

Pat Kane, Sunday Herald, 22 Nov 2009

You're hovering at the door, and your beloved has turned back to her machine, a moon face in the monitor's glow. You've been what they call in the instant-messaging world a "POS" (Parent Over Shoulder) – asking about this online game and that customisation, smiling at the Twilight obsession and the LOLcat video sitting side by side on her social networking site. 

So far, so early-adolescent, so familiar. Yet you know that, at this age, there's a genuine need for privacy with her friends: a space to work out who she is, who she wants to be. So you close the door and leave her, for her allotted 45 minutes, as she taps out incomprehensible mixes of mnemonics and icons into a message box.

The question in the mind is: have you sent her off to a virtual version of the local playpark – with good facilities, chatting to friends in the sunlight, in a well-run, somewhat monitored space? Or have you left her to wander into the gloomy, unpredictable woods of cyberspace, where duplicitous wolves, terrible visions and worse lie in wait? 

There's no doubt that the latter metaphor describes most of the tabloid headlines about our children's relationship to cyberspace. If the internet service provider TalkTalk is to be believed, more than half of UK parents believe the internet is a more dangerous place for children than the real world. In other words, it has replaced the deep, dark forest – where Goldilocks, Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel confronted their demons – as the locus of our most visceral fears. And even as an evangelist for the networked world, I'd be the last to minimise the issues.

The recently revealed operation by Central Scotland Police, sweeping social network sites like Bebo, Facebook and MSN, identified some alarming numbers – like 1700 men involved in 4000 sexually explicit chat logs with children over the summer, a small proportion of which led to arrests in the UK and abroad. Bebo itself has just announced what they call a "Panic Button" for their websites. This links directly to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (Ceop) Centre, allowing any user, child or adult, to report their worries about online activity to child protection workers.

And it's the predatory monsters called other people's children that cause almost as much popular anxiety. A report on 'cyber-bullying' in England and Wales last week identified that 22% of schoolkids had reported being harrassed or intimidated via internet or mobile phone. 

Yet some aspects of these stories deserve an instant reality (and history) check – mostly around the degree to which an age of networks merely amplifies existing social disorders.