The Play Ethic

What is a "Constitute"? Prez to HubWestminster, London, 15/11/11

This is a very tentative presentation I made to Vinay Gupta's Truth and Beauty seminar at HubWestminster in London, on a concept I've been toying around with in my mind for a few months now... What is a "constitute" - as opposed to an institute? Or a constitution?

Personally, it's an answer to my anxiety about being drowned in rich and meaningful connections in the social-media age, and not being able to turn even a small percentage of them into resources for action or enterprise (of whatever kind - civic, intellectual, commercial). Do we need to forge a "craft of info-citizenship" or "netizenship", some guild-like or practice-like behaviours or conventions, that can capture the value of the relentless connecting, conversing and curating we do with our networked devices? Similar to the hacker ethic, or agile programming, or the Transition Towns protocols - but at the level of a great conversation in a cafe that we don't just want to let sink into the background of our busy lives? "Ok, this has gone well...let's make this a constitute...." So what behaviours/duties/commitments would that imply?

The word "constitute" points to a need to name a new, network-society subtlety in the relationship between idea and action (of course, there are older and other words like rubric, model, method, praxis, meme... I just happened to notice that constitute wasn't a noun!). And theoretically, it's another one of my journeys into the Italian Marxist tradition, looking at culture and communication as real forces for systemic change in society (but particularly coming from the work of Negri/Hardt, Virno, Marazzi, Bifo). And behind that - always behind that - my 30 year sea-journey with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in which I occasionally, nowadays, glimpse the shore... 

All comments welcome (indeed if you do comment/repost, it becomes a constitute!) 

What is a "Constitute"? Pat Kane prez to HubWestminster

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Pat Kane review of "Free Ride" by Robert Levine

This is my review (for the Independent) of the Robert Levine book Free Ride: How The Internet Destroyed The Culture Business, And How the Culture Business Can Fight Back. The book is fascinating, detailed and dogged in its defence of intellectual copyright in the digital age - but I think it lacks a wider societal context, to explain the take up of the "open web" and its distinctive attitude to the sharing (rather than the purchasing) of cultural artefacts. 

I didn't really explore this angle in the review, but I am brewing up a proper Socratic exchange with the Scottish writer Ewan Morrison, whose clarion-call to prevent "The End of Books" at this years Edinburgh International Books Festival caused quite a fuss. Ewan is embracing and endorsing Levine's argument completely - and we've begun our detailed exchange on this Facebook post. But watch this space, because I think we'll be announcing a more engaged, and public, discussion about this soon. Meantime, all comments welcomed below. 

How To Sink The Pirates of The Web 

Unedited Review of Robert Levine's Free Ride in The Independent, 2 September, 2011 (edited version)

By Pat Kane

 

My eldest geek daughter and I were helpless with laughter the other night, rapt at our screens before another webcast discovery. 

We had found a brilliant “mash-up”: footage of the Sesame Street character Cookie Monster, lip-synching precisely to the Tom Waits song “God’s Away On Business”. (Really, get thee to a search engine now: your day will be beatified). Such a diverting, obsessional labour of love is what we celebrate about the internet - amateur energies coursing through democratic tools, coming to mass attention from nowhere. 

But what might the respective intellectual-property lawyers from Henson Enterprises, or Waits’s record label Anti, have to say about such a wisp of joy? According to Robert Levine, they should be fully empowered to discourage such irreverent bricolage, with all manner of punitions and legal threats. 

In this comprehensive but relentless book, Levine (an ex-editor of US music business bible Billboard) wants to make us realise that the internet’s facilitation of “free culture” - or a world of piracy to some - has to come to an end. His case is that technology companies have built their businesses - whether web-based and advertiser-driven, or integrated device companies like Apple - on the basis of unpriced (or underpriced) content, made possible by the open (or more precisely, under-controlled) web. Levine has made an very authoritative attempt to substantiate the content creators’ fightback. 

But his angst for the good old days of the music business (roughly the early to mid 90’s, before those subversive, system-wielding geeks came to spoil the party) also reveals some rather grisly commercial assumptions. For example, one of his problems with iTunes, even though it’s a monetised service, is that it “unbundles” the album. The consumer is now able to spend less money picking off favourite tracks - rather than, as before, having to spend more money on a complete magnum opus (including those interminable urban soundscape tracks on the second CD). 

Yet Levine has no appreciation for how this unbundling allows listeners to create their own stimulating playlists, refining and amplifying their musical enthusiasms. Would this ultimately result in more spend per consumer? Levine cites studies that say no, against others that say yes - but he also admits there is a general failure of objective market research in this area. Yet it’s indicative of the overly corporate, pro-bottom-line tone of this book that even Apple’s brilliant, integrated and mostly successful effort to commercialise the infinitely copyable is worth his sustained grouch.  

What would a “functioning market” for digital culture look like for Levine? A balance of stick and carrot, entrepreneurship and regulation, which he calls “blanket” or “collective licensing”. The carrots are well-designed content “services” (the current exemplar is the music-streaming service Spotify). We receive a bountiful - but licensed - downpour of music (Levine thinks it could be extended to other media, like tv and journalism) to our various screens and headphones. 

It would “feel like free”, because the user experience is the same click-frenzy as present: it wouldn’t be free, however, because our actual payment would be subsumed into the rental fees we pay for our information devices. (Levine predicts that we would have to accept some price rises in these rents). 

The “stick” part is that licenses, obviously, have to be enforced. Performing Rights Society inspectors already go round radio stations, restaurants and cafes, making sure these establishments are paying their dues for playing music. So a software equivalent would regularly monitor the usages of these services across the networks - ensuring that some agreed proportion of revenues is returned to the rights-holders (be they corporations or individual musicians).

Levine hopes we can redefine copyright, “the right to copy” - an unenforceable absurdity after ten years of the vast copy-machine known as the Web - as copyrisk. Like traditional actuaries gathering together pools of money to insure against the inevitable risk of shipwreck (or car accident), the content business needs to find a way to collectively compensate authors and creators for the healthy turbulence of internet usage. 

You almost feel sorry for Levine, in all his mercantile passion, when he discovers where these “collective licensing” agreements are already proving most successful: in Northern Europe, from Ireland to Germany, Denmark to Finland. That is, in national cultures where “they socialize any number of expenses that others would view as private. And as anyone involved in health care can tell you”, he continues sorrowfully, “what works smoothly in Scandinavia can start fights in the US”. 

His call for a “statutory approach” in his own country, as the American polity gyres and gambles on its various fundamentalist axes, seems rather forlorn. 

Ian Hargreaves’ constructive recent Digital Economy report in the UK would seem to chime with this European approach. He suggested a one-stop Digital Rights Exchange, which would help make intellectual property somewhat more trackable - and thus licensable - across the expanding wilds of bandwidth. 

 And away from the heavy-metal clangour of “thieves” and “property-owners” (oh enough of that, for the moment) it’s the filigree of patient, intelligent policy - forged through a boring old stakeholder-driven commitment to a well-regulated mixed economy - that will bring stability to these debates. Which labours, to his credit, Levine fully endorses.

Incidentally, Hargreaves’ report makes an astute and charming proposal: we should recognise the rights of parodists and satirists to recombine digital material, without Matrix-like IP lawyers swooping down to exterminate them. It looks like, at least in this jurisdiction, that Cookie Monster Tom will continue to flap his gums freely. Our house will be pleased.  

Journalism/Networks/Ontology: my presentation to Media140 Barcelona #media140

Update2.0: Rachel McAthy's reports on my speech on Journalism.co.uk, here and here. 

Update: Jay Rosen's 8-tweet presentation, 'The Great Horizontal', had a lot of overlap with mine below - and a lot more lucid too (I think I'm a bit too ludic...). 

Original post: Here's the presentation I've just delivered to the Media140 conference in Barcelona - hi to all the attendees, and I'd be delighted to hear your responses in comments below. If you want to talk to me directly, please mail here.  BTW, the Twitter hashtag for the conference is  #media140 or #media140cat. 

Journalism, Networks, Ontology: Pat kane presentation at Media140 barcelona

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Some great questions afterwards - I've built and developed my original answers. 

Q: In Castells' era of mass self-communication, how do we ensure that there isn't so much noise that noone can hear the crucial information?

A: This is my point about the editorial function - it has to be more ambitious, as a scarce expertise in an overloaded information environment. But perhaps professional editorial should not be tied to the old business models, bemoaning falling paper sales, shrinking classified ad revenues, and pining for a remonetisation of their sales through mobile and tablet devices. Perhaps they should be talking to charities and NGOs, or thinking about establishing trust funds with philanthropists to secure long-term editorial functioning. Yes there is the public service media option - but I would also like to think futuristically about that too. 

Q: But doesn't reasserting the editorial function just mean that we're going back to the old, pre-internet days of gatekeepers and institutions of information authority?

A: No - because as Clay Shirky says, the costs of creating such an editorial institution are much lower than they ever were, given the "insanely easy group forming tools" that the Net provides. Take the range of ex-Wikileaks employees who are setting up what they regard as better services for handling leaked information (see Open Leaks). I also think that editorial skills becomes something that gets spread through the citizenry. That will pluralise the idea of "objectivity" that is often, in reality, hides an unacknowledged and unconscious world-view among many journalists. 

My Independent review of Jane McGonigal's Reality Is Broken

Here's my Independent review of Jane McGonigal's Reality Is Broken, her long-awaited opus on how computer games can motivate global change - about as pure a manifestation of The Play Ethic as it's possible to express. A short review, nowhere near adequate to the content of the book, but hopefully it'll jar you to buy it.

 

Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change The World

Jane McGonigal (Jonathan Cape)

Reviewed by Pat Kane, The Independent, 25 Feb 2011

 It has been strange to read a book which claims that reality is listless, uninspiring and broken compared to computer games as the Arab revolutions swarm across our screens. We watch real citizens defy real riot police in order to achieve real control of public space and institutions. At this moment, it's not that easy to hear Jane McGonigal tell us that immersion among the trolls and space warriors of virtual worlds is a way to recover our sense of epic idealism and heroic altruism. 

But even in the blazing context of the new Arab dawn, McGonigal might have a point. One of the cheekier posters held up by the Tunisian youth in their mass protests was "Game Over": and we know generally how much cyber-culture enabled the fall of Ben Ali.

Even though Mubarak in Egypt was sharp enough to hit the off-switch early, it didn't seem to matter anyway. Digital-era protestors were already planning to play around with the oppressive reality of Egyptian public life. Remarkably like the "alternate reality games" that McGonigal has created in the streets of major cities for corporate clients, young activists began to stage creative protests that subtly reclaimed their streets. They flash-mobbed in city centres to sing the national anthem; they dressed in black and stood silently beside the Nile.

Egyptian street tactics for the initial "day of rage" on 25 January - in the words of activist Ahmed Salah, aiming "to be multi-polar, fast-moving, and too mobile for the amin markazi [central security forces]" - sound exactly like the kind of collaborative, laterally-thinking play that McGonigal (and others, like Steven Johnson and Tom Chatfield) celebrate as the core cognitive benefit of computer games. Sociologists, here's a brief: how has interactive culture shaped a new sense of civic confidence among Arab youth?

Reality Is Broken is the most powerful justification yet for computer games as one of our central literacies - parallel to literature or movies in the way they connect our motivations and energies with the challenges of understanding and intervening in our social worlds. As with literacy in the first Enlightenment, the huge popular embrace of this medium provides a rich test-bed for new grand theories about human nature and society.

Armed with an impressive bibliography in psychology and neuroscience, McGonigal makes the claim that the huge rush towards gameplay is a kind of exodus from what Theodor Adorno called "damaged life" - work that doesn't satisfy, relationships that don't persist, societies that don't find a place for hope or ambition. She brilliantly links the growing scholarship on happiness to the gimmicks and tricks that commercial game designers devise to engage their febrile audiences. Games help us get off the "hedonic treadmill", in which our consumer choices are fated never to satisfy us, and help us build up what she calls hedonic resilience.

The tough challenges we willingly embrace in computer games generate an internal sense of satisfaction that spills over into other areas of our lives. For example, and counter-intuitively, she cites numerous studies that heavy social gamers display greater levels of community-mindedness than non-gamers.

Ambitiously, McGonigal wants to take that emerging swell of human engagement and connect it to the solution of real-world problems. She has been involved in games about peak oil and other global instabilities, where the fun comes from playing out possible futures, using comic strips, web videos and elaborate avatars.

McGonigal begins and ends her book with Herodotus's tale of the Lydians, who turned to dice games to help them get through their 18 years of famine - and then played one final, giant game, drawing lots to choose which half of the population would leave the country to seek prosperity elsewhere. Her point is that games can both raise spirits and build collective understanding, particularly at moments of extreme crisis.

As Arab activists grapple with the grown-up difficulties of a free public sphere, they may currently have a less-than-ludic take on their "broken" reality. But there was an imaginative component of these protests which took its cue from something other than the usual verities about civil rights. As McGonigal might say: watch this game-space. 

Pat Kane's 'The Play Ethic' is published by Macmillan

My Indepdendent review of Evgeny Morozov's The Net Delusion

My review for the Indepdendent - unedited version in this post. All comments welcomed -- PK

The Net Delusion: How Not To Liberate The World

By Evgeny Morozov

(£14.99, Allen Lane)

Reviewed by Pat Kane

In the world-theatre of geopolitics, where hubris sometimes seems like the only hit production running, Hilary Clinton's 'Internet Freedom' speech of January 2010 deserves some kind of special critics' award.

Drawing a parallel between the Iron Curtain of the Cold War and the "information curtain descending across much of the world", the US Secretary of State praised "viral videos and blog posts" as "the samizdat of our day... We need to put these tools in the hands of people around the world who will use them to advance democracy and human rights".

Wiki-oops! Since then, of course, we've seen April's "viral video" of trigger-happy US soldiers killing Reuters journalists in Iraq. And over the last few weeks we've been reading the world's most incendiary collection (so far) of "blog posts", a recent selection from a vast cache of secret US diplomatic cables spanning the last forty-odd years.

In one of Evgeny Morozov's three cursory references to Wikileaks in over 400 pages of the The Net Delusion - ah, the perils of papery publishing schedules! - he notes that the American political elite "can't be calling for imposing restrictions on sites like Wikileaks" (already being proposed earlier this summer) "and also be disparaging China and Iran for similar impulses".

Quite so. Yet it's strange to read this truculent but extremely well-informed critique of "cyber-utopianism" and "internet-centrism" - with its demolition of such phenomena as the Iranian "Twitter Revolution", never mind Clinton's vapors about digital freedom - in the aftermath of the structural shock-waves that Wikileaks has set off around the world.

Morozov builds up an almost unarguable case that the internet is easily deployable by authoritarian states to serve the time-honoured oppressors' trinity of censorship, surveillance and propaganda. Much of his book is a useful tour d'horizon of the ways that the security regimes in Russia, Iran, China, Turkey, his homeland Belarus and many others are matching, mimicking and populating the best of Web 2.0 - all those idealised "social tools" from the coding labs of California.

Yet we've seen an American establishment successfully putting pressure on some of the poster-boys of the network society - be it Amazon, Paypal, Mastercard, Visa and now Apple - to cut off the digital and financial supports of Wikileaks. Federal employees and students have been blocked or banned from visiting the site; prominent politicians and columnists have called for Wikileaks' founder, Julien Assange, to be assassinated.

It's getting a little difficult to discern one repressive cyber-regime from another these days.

One wonders whether Morozov's dull antennae towards Wikileaks' potential in this book (though ironically enough, he's making up for it now, in his unstoppable stream of tweets at @evgenymorozov) comes from his own institutional conditioning. From his days as a scholarship schoolboy, Morozov has been sponsored by Soros's Open Society institute, on whose board he now sits. This has clearly been an entree to fellowships at Stanford, Yahoo! and the New America Foundation, generating bylines at the Economist, the FT, the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek.

And throughout The Net Delusion, Morozov shows a degree more sympathy for the kind of diligent, time-and-people-intensive democracy promotion of the diplomatic classes revealed by the Wikileaks cables, than he does for the crackers, hacker and platform-makers of digital evangelism.

Indeed, his central caution is that the unthinking Western promotion of cyber-tools as enablers and organisers of dissent under authoritarian regimes - sometimes driven by Cold-War nostalgia, sometimes by a lazy and mistaken search for "diplomatic efficiency" - can sometimes make things worse for those concerned.

Encouraging dissidents to use Twitter, YouTube, Facebook or mobile texting - even if those services protect the identity of users and don't cave under state pressure (whatever the state) - still provides a stream of social data which can reveal networks of activists, or alerts regimes to protests and concerns well in advance.

The powerful "sentiment analysis" software required for these tasks is being provided to regimes by Western tech-corps like IBM, Cisco and Ericsson - an amoral info-commercial complex about which Morozov is enjoyably robust: "we don't just need a wikinomics, but a wikiethics as well".

Though his demolition job on the embarrassments of Cupertino-driven "internet freedom" is comprehensive, Morozov does have more than a few positive suggestions on how Western powers can fashion information networks to give power and voice to those who need it most.

Encryption and security protocols are high on his list. He suggests they are a "win-win" for Western tech giants, who might both placate the increasing data-privacy concerns of their domestic customers, as well as give dissidents a much safer medium for informing and organising themselves.

Of course, security is at the heart of Wikileaks' offer to whistle-blowers everywhere. As Assange said in an interview with David Frost on Al'Jazzera recently, their extremely secure upload technology means that they cannot know the identity of any particular wikileaker to their service in advance.

Indeed, Assange's insurance policy - against heaven knows what depradations from the American state - is an encryption key that will unlock the complete archive of Wikileaks' documentation to the world, unfortunately described by his lawyer as "the information equivalent of a thermo-nuclear bomb".

Yet Morozov, no doubt directly informed by the particularly fustian nature of Belarussian oppression, reminds us that hammering in your safe code at a keyboard is only a secreted micro-camera away from revelation. And apparently, it's not yet possible to use long-range audio equipment to tell what characters are being distantly tapped out on a laptop (for that, some small mercies).

The Net Delusion is most useful as a reminder of how fleet-footed, rather than leaden and second-rate, many authoritarian regimes are in their cyberpolicies. China is a veritable powerhouse of disinformation-technology - not only building effective mobile, social networking and gaming platforms in which users trade off efficiency for surveillance, but also inducing the required netiquette on those services.

The Fifty-Cent Party, for example, is an army of blog-commenters who get paid for every dissident blog they snow with patriotic, party-approved rebuttals. And more subtly, China encourages blogging that highlights local corruption or poor services, while keeping a ceiling on more ambitious political critiques.

It's also a delight to be reminded that, in their search for ever-better propaganda techniques, a most honoured guest of the Central Party School in 2001 was one Peter Mandelson, there to "share his insights about the re-invention of the British Labour Party". China is inspiring the same burst of innovation in many other regimes: and Morozov usefully reminds us that loyal nationalism and patriotic service can be as much a motivation for the young socio-technical operative as the bohemian anarchisms of Julien Assange and his pals.

Which makes it imperative that the demonisation of Wikileaks stops, and a clear-sighted engagement with the shift in power that it heralds, begins. Morozov himself set out the options in a superb Financial Times editorial recently: these info-hackers, present and future, could become either a new "Transparency International" or a new "Red Brigades".

That is, their desire to be a new "fifth estate" - true to the spirit of the American "First Amendment" which holds a free press to be the best friend of accountable democracy - can be steadily answered by a non-panicked establishment. Or if things go pear-shaped (or bloody) for the likes of Assange, an info-insurrection may be unleashed that could leave considerable swathes of our comfortable, well-functioning knowledge society in ruins.

"Internet freedom", in short, is a valiant sword with a number of blades, existing in several dimensions simultaneously. As we go down the rabbit-hole of Wikileaks, Morozov's humane and rational lantern will help us land without breaking our legs.

Why Wikileaks should be an asset to the brand called democracy

Followers of the Play Ethic should be interested in my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - thoughts on the Wikileaks controversy. A huge moment for net-activists everywhere, where the openness of the web as a structure meets the self-defined boundaries of state power. High stakes, no matter your assessment of Assange. The research references for this column are available on my Scottish-affairs website Thoughtland

 

Social Media and M-City: how trade can tell a story about a creative urban community

Hi to all at the below event, here's the presentation as promised - all the hotlinks work within the presentation, and I'd be delighted to hear any further reactions in comments below. Please pass on to those in the Merchant City community (and elsewhere) who might be interested. Contact details above.

Social Media and M-City: Pat Kane, theplayethic.com

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Pat Kane review of Nicholas Carr's 'The Shallows' and Palfrey & Gasser's 'Born Digital' for the Independent

 
Very nice to be back on the book-reviewing routine for Boyd Tonkin, the Independent's book editor.

Here's my joint review (unedited version below - printed version here) of two books which thoroughly cover the waterfront of digital culture, but in two entirely differing moods - Nicholas Carr brooding about the net's neurological destruction of our deep reading and attention spans, and Palfrey and Gasser much more enthusiastic charters of the variety of internet usage and culture. 

 

 

The Independent, Arts and Books section, 24 Sept, 2010

Pat Kane

Google announced a new refinement to its search engine last week, called 'Google Instant'. For those of a certain literary era, just beginning to get used to having a Borgesian library at their fingertips, it may prove a drop-down window too far.

Put in "po", on the way to completing the word "poetry", and the company tries to instantly guess what you're looking for - anything from "P&O ferries" to "poundland" to "Pontins". Until you get used to it (and you do), the experience feels a little insane: the spewing-forth of some vast language machine, using Burroughsian cut-up or Joycean word-association as a way-station to that elusive Jamie Oliver Elvisburger recipe.

Nicholas Carr cites this as exactly the kind of scattering of attention, and devolving of mental rigour, that we should be exceedingly alert to in our cyberculture. Described in some American reviews as the 'Silent Spring' of cyberculture, Nicholas Carr's new book attempts to put some scientific and humanistic substance into the headline claim that the internet is, literally, rotting our brains.

But whereas Born Digital is a diligent attempt to chart the digital lifestyle of Millenials, The Shallows is an impressively assembled but ultimately misguided broadside from a former tech-head and business editor. Who, I fear, might be mistaking a subjective midlife crisis for an objective paradigm shift.

Carr's psychological charge against the Net is simply put. The excess of possibilities that an average web page gives us, the way it crowds our short-term memory with scores of relatively inconsequential choices, is reverting us to our earliest human state. The average click-fest in front of our networked screens makes us into twitchy hunter-gatherers: that same propensity to be easily distracted – which saved our haunches from slavering predators on the savannah - is that which makes the hotlink and the Flash animation so compelling. Depth of thought is being sacrificed to our nervy addiction to interaction.

As is the way with evolutionary accounts of the human mind - at the very least, this is not yet a settled science - there are other explanations available. As Carr says, the dynamism of the internet has recapitulated centuries of media change over its brief 15 years. But if we need a socio-biological root for the pervasive, explosive take-up of this medium, there's a survival trait that's just as credible as our distractedness on the paleolithic plains. And that's our playful natures.

The moment of play in human (and higher mammalian) development is almost exactly homologous with the internet itself. Both allow organisms to freely and joyfully act; they create spaces for play that are open, robustly structured but distantly monitored. And both provide a mess of usable materials, by which players can test and explore both themselves and the world.

From this perspective, Carr has been cherry-picking the neuroscience to suit his neo-Presbyterian prejudice. Research also point to the “neoteny” of our brains, a perpetual youthfulness of response, which under the right conditions of surplus and security, can evade all habit and fixed behaviours – stretching way beyond the glorious, growing splurge of childhood into adulthood.

So if you zoom back a little on the internet, putting its daily churn of twinkly adaptations into perspective, it comes to look more like a glorious amplification of the creative plenitude of human nature, rather than a shallowing of our minds. Born Digital might not have the pop-science ambition of The Shallows, but it benefits from at least trying to map the fulsome diversity of lifestyles, enterprises and dilemmas that net culture generates.

Carr's mistake here is that he mistakes second-order questions about the internet for first-order questions: he raises matters of cultural etiquette to the level of species-being. For example, a well-aimed web search produces as much synoptic intellectual excitement as the inquiring student's first scan of the periodicals shelf, or the titles in a university bookshop – and this is surely no surprise, given the scholarly foundation of the internet protocol itself by CERN physicist Tim Berners-Lee. 

Whereas Carr cites research that seems to show academic references narrowing in the internet age, we can all turn to those ideas-portal sites - not just Wikipedia, but John Brockman's Edge.org, or Bookforum's Omnivore – which demonstrate an alternative possibility: that is, the efficient opening-up of the sequestered resources of the academy for public use.

Indeed, you find yourself applying the same principle of independent-mindedness about the web, that Carr describes as a consequence of the “deep reading” available from literature. You have to keep asserting your own positive, privately-gathered experiences, in the face of his too-neatly-marshalled neurological case.

Carr may be genuinely worried about the internet turning us all into “lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social and intellectual nourishment”. But I think he would do better to defend its textual and dialogical potentials, and focus his anxiety a lot more on the crude game-ifying of cyberspace - the addictions and peer suscepitibility that 'casual games' like Farmville tap into.

I know that gamer auteurs and designers are fighting this tendency, appealing to the better avatars of our nature. Carr takes a huge risk in conflating a trashy stage in the development of games culture with the essentially Enlightenment powers of the open Net. He should be more careful about what he wishes for.

Carr makes a half-point that the business model of the 'free' web - you get it for nothing, if we can capture your behaviour and sell it to advertisers - depends on the relentless interactivity of every web page. But there are armies of authors from many disciplines who say that what this intrusive click-commerce proves is actually the dot-communism of the net.

To the continuing embarassment of many, we seem to have inadvertently built a working socialist infrastructure out of code and computers, guided by the principle “from each according to their ability and to each according to their need” - and whose exemple is inspiring social change in many other non-digital areas. Again, Born Digital is more satisfyingly comprehensive here, in its coverage of the social and civic movements enabled by the Net.

Upon this commons, say writers like Antonio Negri and Yochai Benkler, capital is at best a parasitic mould, and at worst now an antagonistic subverter. See the alliances now between Google (formerly 'doing no evil'), Verizon and other major communication corporations, all of whom want to stratify the speed of the net according to your ability to pay.

Carr's undoubted fluency as a public intellectual has led him up a strange, sylvan path. What he should be doing is defending the liberal openness of public networks (the “net neutrality” issue). Instead, he's thumping his leather-clad classics against his palm, deep in the forests of his new Colorado home. Carr closes his screed by citing that dodgy old purist Martin Heidegger on the “frenziedness of technology...entrenching itself everywhere”. Heidegger: never a good moment in the old quotation game.

I saw Nicholas Carr at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, where net evangelists and sceptics were both happy to swarm around a Georgian architectural utopia from am to pm, joining in the general unstoppable proliferation of book festivals across the islands. I didn't see much twittering, but all the speeches were podcasted for future enjoyment, and the local literary blogosphere was vibrantly a-hum. As those born digital might say: Whatever. It's all good.

So nothing to worry about, because plenty to worry away at, like the inescapably semiotic mammals we are. As the dearly departed Scottish national makar (or poet) Edwin Morgan would have said, there's “nothing not giving messages”. It's a shame that Nick Carr seems to be so tired of the carnival of communication, whether it comes as inert wood-pulp-and-ink, or flickering glass and plastic.

And as for the cluttered web page inhibiting our reading? I just saw a button in my browser called 'Reader', which turns a busy site into an elegant screen-full of Times New Roman. You have to admit: as an infernal desire machine, the Net always seems to be on permanent 'recieve'. They'll give us the Google Dilatory option, eventually.

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.