The Play Ethic

Groovy walking cities, man!

For my first picture in Typepad: what architects were like in the Sixties. Archigram have an exhibition at the Design Museum in London. I'm only a boy, so I didn't know about them. I do now: "Archigram dominated the architectural avant garde in 1960s with its playful, pop-inspired visions of a technocratic future after its formation in 1961 by the young London architects – Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron and Michael Webb.

A new generation of architecture must arise with forms and spaces which seems to reject the precepts of ‘Modern’ yet in fact retains those precepts. We have chosen to by pass the decaying Bauhaus image which is an insult to functionalism. You can roll out steel – any length. You can blow up a balloon – any size. You can mould plastic – any shape. Blokes that built the Forth Bridge – they didn’t worry. (David Greene).

Network Logic, Network Spirit

As work is to society, so play is to the Net - the domain of human connection that players thrive in best. And there is a tsunami of theory and practice going on in this area, which would itself deserve a separate blog (hmm... god, no, what am I thinking?!)

Manuel Castells was lecturing in London recently, tieing up with Demos's benchmark new collection of open-source essays on Network Logic, featuring everyone from Fritjof Capra to Howard Rheingold to Castells himself. Usefully, the essays can be downloaded separately on PDF. Net action, as well as net theory: very consistent.

The one element I think is missing is the deeply subjective experience of nethood (maybe not surprising from a policy-oriented think-tank - though there are sociological pieces on friendship and gender). I'm always guided on this by the philosopher David Loy's paper on the fusion between postmodernism, and Buddhist/Hindu notions of a net of existence. We need something like a short-story collection on networks to complement this...

Leadership and Play

Never entirely enamoured of the leadership business, but this is quite an acute analysis from Manfred Kets De Vries - who reaches for the p-word:

Healthy leaders have the ability to deal with the disappointments of life... Very importantly, they have the capacity to establish and manage relationships. Their lives are in balance and they can play.

IE, they're like we all should be, except they have baroquely titled consultants to help develop the lineaments of their superior psyches. I wonder what a school for playership would be like?

Update: I like this paper from the new Demos collection (see above) on network-age leadership. Still, I think playership might be worth thinking about...

Free Culture

Various reviews of the US's Paul Revere of the info-society, Lawrence Lessig, and his new book Free Culture - NYT, Slashdot, Newsday, Washington Post, New York Observer, and Law.com. And true to the man's theories, he has made the entire book available for free download, here (PDF file). A great force for serious play.

From slice 'n' dice to scalpel 'n' suture

A bit of "anecdata", as William Davies puts it, but one I obviously like: computer game players make the best surgeons.

Researchers with Beth Israel and the National Institute on Media and the Family at Iowa State University found that doctors who spent at least three hours a week playing video games made about 37 percent fewer mistakes in laparoscopic surgery and performed the task 27 percent faster than their counterparts who did not play video games.

The idea that video game play improves hand/eye coordination has long been a cliche among defenders of the recreation, but this research gives some substance to those claims.

According to one of the researchers, this study “landmarks the arrival of Generation X into medicine.“ They are working to develop a special game which surgeons can do.

The Toll of a New Machine

Automation Watch. Piece from Fast Company on the rise of automated retail: gradually, it says, we're getting used to it - from ticket buying to customising Big Macs on a touch-screen. Add this to Steven Johnson's creeped-out blog entry on his experience of dealing with a moblie phone glitch, while the person on the other end of the phone was a virtual program, and you have another of the big factors in a future players' society. We will have to cope with the next wave of traditional human services being simulated by machines, no matter how loud the cries of 'technological determinism' or 'we've done that leisure society thing'.

Can't we start the value-shift from defining humans in terms of their ever-more-redundant routines and labours, towards defining them by their creativity and sensibility? Workers versus automation, players via automation? Because if we don't, I think there's going to be a lot of angry and displaced people out there. (My favourite blog on this is Robotic Nation Evidence).

Empire and Creativity

Why we need a new global Magna Carta. Curiously placed essay (the World Economic Forum's magazine) by two of the global left's most militant figures, Antonio Negri and Micheal Hardt. This piece - mostly hard-headed geopolitics - might seem far removed from play.

But the authors' ambition to bring the poor of the world into our systems of productivity and creativity is shared by The Play Ethic: what's the widest circle of players possible in a world society?

Priorities such as eliminating poverty and absolving the debts of the poorest countries would not be acts of charity, but efforts aimed at realizing the productive potential that exists in the world.

N & H also remind us that "productive potential" needs what I call the "grounds of play", and what Larry Lessig would call an "innovation commons" - ie, structures and resources that we all have access to, in order to generate mass creativity. As they put it:

Another priority would be reversing the processes of privatization and creating common access to necessary productive resources – such as land, seeds, information, and knowledge. Making resources common is necessary for the expansion and renewal of creative and production potentials, from agriculture to internet technologies

Is this foosball in the boardroom? No. Is it implicit in the idea of a play ethic? 'Fraid so.

"The most political thing you'll ever do"

Three tales of fatherhood. Delightful, emotional piece from the otherwise determinely radical Bad Subjects magazine, on being a dad. Is this the PlayDad, that supersedes the PlayBoy?

Napping. Changing diapers. Reading stories. Scolding and praising. Bathing. Tickling. Roughhousing in ways that make mommy nervous but that delight H infinitely. Cleaning up the kitchen while mommy puts the child to bed. Arguing with H and either winning or losing. Being bored by and boring to her. It might seem paradoxical, but having crappy time with my daughter is just as important as having terrific time.

Robocop, Virtualized

As an update to Paglia's point below about the rapid-cut generation feeling disconnected from their world... true. But what if you can use digitalisation to warn against a future? Simulating a reality to prevent it coming about? Here's an example of a LA effects house both touting for business, and warning us in the most direct way about a future direction in technology. Welcome to the ordered world of Tetra Vaal (needs Quicktime).

The Magic of Images

Lecture by Camille Paglia.Remember her? Pop anti-feminist art historian who once appeared in Vanity Fair? Here she is making a bid for the role of humanist education in helping the soulitarian generation of digital kids make sense of their info-blitz. Her key point is below, which ends with a startling political link-up between science and art:

The visual environment for the young has become confused, fragmented, and unstable. Students now understand moving but not still images...Education must slow the images down, to provide a clear space for the eye.

The relationship of eye movements to cognitive development has been studied since the 1890s, the groundwork for which was laid by investigation into physiological optics by Hermann von Helmholtz and Ernst Mach in the 1860s. Visual tracking and stability of gaze are major milestones in early infancy. The eyes are neurologically tied to the entire vestibular system: the conch-like inner ear facilitates hand-eye coordination and gives us direction and balance in the physical world. By processing depth cues, our eyes orient us in space and create and confirm our sense of individual agency.

Those in whom eye movements and vestibular equilibrium are disrupted, I contend, cannot sense context and thus become passive to the world, which they do not see as an arena for action. Hence this perceptual problem may well have unwelcome political consequences.

I'm interested in questions of how mind science can inform how we deal with the play of images and culture. See this piece (not free, unfortunately), from the great theorist of flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, on tv's neurologicallly addictive properties.