The Play Ethic

Lost in Inaction

A combination of children, deadlines and other intractable chunks of life has kept me from this blog for a week. Normal service now resumed.

A little human touch

Is pat on back a way to stall aggression? One of those social-science factoids that makes you pause for a moment: are we raising a generation of touch-deprived children? And might it affect levels of child aggression and depression?

Ghettopoly

I rolled a two - and got a ghetto stash. From the Guardian:

The Ghettopoly box bears a large, stern warning: "Warning: CHOKING HAZARD - small parts." Among these small parts are a tiny pimp and a machine gun. Players may also choose to be the basketball or the rock of crack cocaine. On a miniature plinth. According to the instructions, "Da object" of the Ghettopoly is "to become the richest playa through stealing, cheating and fencing stolen properties." But the instructions are largely superfluous: you play Ghettopoly exactly as you would Monopoly. Only the terms are different: roll a six, land on Trailer Trash Court, buy it and collect your protection fees ($25, or $120 with a crack house on it). Or roll a two, land on Ghetto Stash and collect $50 "for services your hoe [sic] provided".

Where to begin? Best to go to where the intellectual action is: my favourite weblog on the arguments around "playa" culture is Davey D's Hip Hop Corner.

Rules of play (there to be broken)

The 'Cahiers Du Cinema' of computer games? I've mentioned this before, but was delighted to see it mentioned in my favourite mensch Bernie De Koven's blog. Isn't it fascinating to watch the game sector go through the same arc as movies - starting out as audience pleasers, getting a critical conceit of itself (through studies like this), and next maybe coming up with its own Movie Brats - console Scorsese's, Truffaut's, Ozu's? Eric Zimmerman, the co-author, is right in the Cahiers mode - a game developer with a deep interest in the aesthetics of his medium. (I also note from his website that he's a black-belt in Shorin-Ryu Karate. Natch.)

Brian Eno Keeps Time

How soon is now? One of the world's most interesting players on his project to create a 10,000 year clock. The design principles of such a clock, says the man - longevity, maintainability, transparency, evolvability, scaleability - might be design principles for other projects too.

Cyberpunks @ Play

Thanks Bruce! Just had one of my links requoted by the dean of CyberPunk, Bruce Sterling (who has this excellent blog at Wired). He says all the nicest things:

I got the link from Pat Kane, who has the most sober, scholarly, ethical, politically engaged approach to "play" that I've ever seen in a weblog. Or, well, anywhere really.

We aim to please, dude.

The Curse of the Creative Class?

City Journal, Winter 2004. Enjoyably scrappy right-wing publication gets stuck into Richard Florida's Creative Class thesis. Much grumpy assessment of statistics (do Florida's artist-friendly cities perform that well?), along with this interesting prediction:

As Florida’s ideas reach beyond urban-planning types and New Age liberal politicians, they are at some point likely to find resistance from the hard-core urban Left, composed increasingly of social-services activists and representatives of public-employee and service-industry unions, who demand ever more government spending for social programs, not art and culture. Indeed, the professor’s relentless argument that governments should help furnish bobo-friendly amenities ultimately comes to sound like a new form of class warfare: old-economy workers have no place in his utopian dreams.

This is what I try to address in the book, in my discussion about how the "play-care continuum" needs to supersede "work-life balance". If we want a society of mass players, we must devise mass safety nets (or trampolines) that can catch those who inevitably fall or fail in their performance - and remove all stigma from such failure. Without a complementary care ethic to the play ethic, the possibilty for social resentment of the creative classes, in all their gaudy, heedless spectacle, is great.

Take Risks, Live Longer

Don't be neophobic, be neophilic. So say some lab-rat-watching psychologists at the University of Chicago, who have noted that exuberant, chance-taking rats live longer, and even fight off tumours better, than safety-obsessed and fearful animals. The interesting scientific bit is their discovery that "neophobic rats were shown to have elevated levels of corticoid—a hormone typically secreted as part of the flight-or-fight response". I know it's a big jump across the species - but does this reveal some of the deep wiring behind the capacity to be a player? Brian Sutton-Smith's theory of play as "adaptive potentiation" - complex mammals testing out the world, to improve their survivability in it - is part of the same debate.

Soccer vs. McWorld

Spheres of influence. Article by Franklin Foer, about how the rise of Planet Footy shows "the limits of globalisation as much as its strengths". Franklin interviewed me a while ago for his new book: our topic was the religious and ethnic rivalry that still stamps the relationship between Celtic and Rangers, Scotland's two main football clubs. I'm glad to see he's integrated my main point:

Glasgow has kept alive its tribalism, despite the logic of history, because it provides a kind of pornographic pleasure. Thousands of fans arrive each week from across the whole of Britain, in ferries from Belfast and buses from London, all aching to partake in a few hours of hate-filled tribalism. Once they release this bile from their system, they can return to their comfortable houses and good jobs.

Love in the space of flows

Lost In Translation: Post-modern or Orientalist? One of my favourite blogs, I-Society, has an approving entry on the new Bill Murray/Sofia Coppola movie, where an ageing American film star has a gentle romance with a philosophy student in Tokyo. I-Society guy finds it perfectly illustrative of the present: I thought it was the subtlest form of white Western supremacism. Your thoughts?