The Play Ethic

Up for the Cup (and the steroid, and the prosthetic...)

Transition Game: Sports for the Enabled. My visionary friend and "neurosociologist" Zack Lynch is promoting a new blog on the relationship between sports performance and technology. How far could one go in "playing with the body" to make the ultimate "play on the field"? I've mused on this topic already on the Brainwaves blog

Nazis vs Play

Biog of Johan Huizinga. Noticed this in my researches on the book - Huizinga is the author of the classic work on play, Homo Ludens - and am somewhat rocked by the lines, "Finally, when his life was drawing to a close, and he was a prisoner of the Nazis, he collected his thoughts on this subject [play] into a book... From 1942 until his death in 1945 Johan Huizinga was held in detention by the Nazis." On second thoughts, what better book to write under National-Socialist confinement than a volume on play. Does anyone know more about Huizinga during this time?

The Sixth Sense

Tag and Scan. The mobilisers realise another dream: filling the wireless air with comments about a particular place, which you can pick up with your phone when you pass through. "When you walked down the street you saw buildings and signs, but all traces of the thoughts of the millions of people who proceeded you had disappeared. Now the city is alive with the past. It's layered with public grids of information."

Mirth of a Nation

Helping the President tell jokes in public. Fascinating piece on the White House's resident humorist, hired to help the Prez be funny rather than hectoring in public. I'm immediately wondering who doesn't do Blair's gags...

Update: More on humour and politics, from Robert Altman.

1968: You Had to Be There

...Or do you just have to stand and wait for the next one? Review by Robin Blackburn of 1968: The Year That Rocked the World in The Nation. The year when play became most politicised, through the student revolts and the Situationists rhetoric. Blackburn, ever the optimist, thinks it's all coming back again. More below.

A Jester at Davos

Well, he said it. Sustainable capitalism hero Simon Zadek reaches for the most ancient play rhetoric of all to justify his attendance at the world's premier power-fest. "How do I fit into this picture? Well, I am one of the Shakespearean “fools”, invited to amuse, surprise and, within moderation, attack, the gathered throng: an insider-outsider with attitude - yet reasonable manners."

Happy talk

Hmmm... I've been quoted in a piece in the Sunday Herald on happiness, by Peter Ross. Basically, not that trustworthy of governments seeking to increase the national happiness - a certain amount of 'unsocial sociability' (Kant) is required for a player's society, not just bucolic contentment.

The Dangers of a $100 Website

Playing with Ethnic Regionalism.. I'm fascinated by the political uses of play at the moment - here's a shout from Montenegro in the Balkans, about how one virulent website can throw a delicate ethnic truce into a tizzy.

Swings and Roundabouts

Thanks to Iain Pate from the DCA for two beautiful artworks about children's playgrounds - the first a photo-and-essay book about London's adventure playgrounds, called An Architecture of Play. the other from a gallery in Frankfurt based on shots of South African playgrounds, backed up by interview material with kids.

The Sunday Play

A sunday paper is always a good opportunity to measure how 'play' is doing in the culture. The Observer this week was almost a test-case. Play-as-power came alive in the Hutton reports: there was even a "Key Players"guide. On the flip-side of that page, a piece about the new dating games sweeping the nation. In the Review section, an interview with the Artificial Intelligence pioneer Steve Grand, who started out his quest by trying to create a new kind of comptuer game, "simulations in which figures appear to make their own decisions with the benefit of learned knowledge" (play-as-imagination, mental play). And the cover story in this section is about a journalist's experience of "faking it" as a tv producer, playing with the idea of work itself. In the "Life" section, a story about depression finds the solution in a combination of "play and pray" - workouts and sports, plus meditation. I could go on... but given that it was the Observer that first broke The Play Ethic story in October 2000, I shouldn't be that surprised.