The Play Ethic

Mobile Play

Just back from an excellent global symposium in Vancouver with the Nokia Ventures Group on Play - many thanks to all those who shared ideas and insights. (This is a brief sample of the kind of thinking that went on there). I also scooted over the border to Seattle, and had a mind-meld with Richard Tait of Cranium, a fellow Scot and Microsoft refugee who's created the biggest board game in America - which has as explicit an ethic of play as you could imagine. 'Lighten and enlighten' is their motto - a perfect encapsulation of my own vision of play as both a way of knowing, and an impetus towards creative action. As America darkens in general, it was great to meet such capacious, humane and progress-oriented people.

Hip: A History

One, two, threereviews and an excerpt of a book you'd have to be brave to write - a history of Hip. It's good on the intercultural/racial aspect of hipness:

There is no hip without African Americans and European Americans, inventing new identities for themselves as Americans in each other's orbit. These first-generation arrivals, black and white, and their second-, third- and fourth-generation heirs, learned to be Americans together. As a self-conscious idea, America took shape across an improvised chasm of race. Some of the most passionate arguments over slavery were economic rather than moral: Adam Smith argued that it undermined the free market for labor; defenders countered that the peculiar institution was more humane than the "wage slavery" of northern factories. But on a practical level, people on both sides of the divide needed strategies for negotiating the conundrum that held them apart, interdependent but radically segregated.

These strategies are hip's formative processes. While we often think of hip as springing whole into the world in the 1920s or 1950s, its roots go back at least another century. Hipster language, stance and irony begin not in the cool poses of the modern city but on the antebellum plantation, in the interplay of these two populations. For all their difference in standing, the black and white foreigners taught each other how to talk, eat, sing, worship and celebrate, each side learning as it was being learned. Customs passed back and forth. Though history texts talk of Africans becoming Europeanized, or of Europeans stealing the blues, the ways the two populations dealt with each other were more complicated than that. Such borrowing is never indiscriminate, nor the copying exact. Like digital samplers, the borrowers pick and choose what works for them, and shape it to their own ends; the final product comments on both its origins and its manipulations.

Roll 'em!

The UK government is in unexpected hot water over their gambling bill, which will legislate for a real expansion of betting and money-gaming - a 'casino in every town'. The Guardian has a running news and feature archive on it, and there's a new poll which shows the majority of the British public against it.

Gambling fascinates me as an example of pure play that challenges our current norms of the ethical or valuable - yet has existed since the beginning of human civilisation. (The gods in the Mahabarata threw dice to birth the universe). Sutton-Smith, my major inspiration in the Play Ethic book, devotes one of his 'rhetorics of play' to chance, fate and chaos - we gamble because we are willing to throw ourselves on the play of possibilities in the universe.

So my take on the gambling controversy has to be nuanced. Is gambling addictive as a leisure activity? Sure - and it fits foully into that work-leisure divide which over-rationalises our productive time, and over-hedonizes our reproductive time. Yet can I oppose the profounder implications of gambling, and particularly the National Lottery, as an sign of genuine playfulness? Is it part of a general willingness to open up to surprise, possibility, sudden change in our lives?

Gerda Smith, the Glasgow sociologist of betting, describes well the primordial place of gambling in our lives:

Behind the glamour of wealth and the tension of winning and losing, gambling encapsulates a more fundamental human instinct: the drama of our relation to chance.

The concept of chance -- and the way it is played out in gambling games -- has fascinated mankind for millennia. The idea that things happen for no reason is a deeply unsettling one, and for thousands of years human thought has tried to get round it by working out causes, looking for reasons, finding explanations. Gambling, it turns out, is the perfect medium through which we can experience chaos and uncertainty. Games can be seen as miniature worlds where chance can be brought temporarily under human control, struggled with in the briefest of encounters and forced to give up its secrets over the turn of a card, the spin of a roulette ball, the fall of a die.

Gambling is a kind of theatre where the major features of the human condition -- power, money, greed, our relation to chance and luck -- are played out. The drama unfolds through the cabalistic inscriptions on cards, dice and roulette wheels: stark patterns in red and black that symbolize man's struggle with Fate. Games of chance encapsulate the basic human urge to take risks, and they also tap into our desire for transformation: to be in charge of our destiny and to be, for a moment, whoever we want to be.

Chance is crucial here, because it possesses a kind of transformative power in itself. The existence of chance allows us to dream of the Big Win; the life changing event, and to imagine a situation where the future is wide open and the possibilities are endless. And in this world, everyone gets an equal share of the dream because, unlike the inequities of everyday life, chance is absolutely democratic. It is no respecter of title, wealth or merit: as Gogol put it, all men are equal at cards.

I'd be keen to hear what she thinks of the current bill. Myself, I think it may be too much - rather than extending this form of play, government might be better extending others (what would 'creative support'/citizens income do for play-as-imagination and play-as-sociability, for example). As this Observer piece shows, the National Lottery has turned out to be a ludic enrichment of common life in Britain. Wise legislators should probably leave it there. This is me being unctiously "play-ethical", for once...

Progress won't 'emerge'

Reliably adversarial article from an old sparring partner, Sandy Starr from Spiked Online, objecting to the idea that democracy and enlightenment can 'emerge' from social and technical networks (the social-software movement that fuelled the Howard Dean campaign, or the text-politics that brought down the Phillipines government, the usually cited examples). Here's his sum-up, with predictably pejorative ludic metaphors:

Common is the sentiment [among emergent democrats] that all we need to do, in order to use the internet to our best advantage, is to submit to the chaotic patterns that emerge from our playful use of it. As Jim Banister argues, 'eventually, collective consciousness within networked media will evolve to the point that it surpasses collective ignorance - a collective conscience, if you will'.

This couldn't be further from the truth. Ignorance cannot be overcome, nor progress maintained, through this passive stance; these things were hard won by our historical predecessors, and they have to be continually fought for. The natural process of evolution may have supplied us with the bodies we inhabit, but it is we who have taken things forward from there - developing, among countless other achievements, medicine with which to combat infirmity, transport with which to traverse the globe, electrification with which to power our technology, and yes, the internet with which to communicate.

We could just drop the baton and leave it at that, using the internet as a playground in which to be indolent humanodes, letting things emerge as they will from now on. Or we could live up to our potential as human beings and take the next step in the march of progress.

They're useful as 'enlightenment fundamentalists', these Spikers - keep us playful types on our toes. But their inability to think through paradox - that humans can imagine both playing with reality, and playing a part in reality - is a legacy of their old ultra-left activist past. (Though I always thought the old man understood this: 'Men make their own history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing?').

Got game? (says Harvard Business Review)

Exciting news of a book that confirms many of the Play Ethic's theses. Got Game: How the Gamer Generation Is Reshaping Business Forever is a study of how the 'soulitarian' generation, and particularly those who've grown up with video games, will shape the way that organisations are formed and led over the next few years. From the blurb:

Think video games are kids' stuff? Think again. Provocative new data show that video games have created a new generation of employees and executives--bigger than the baby boom--that will dramatically transform the workplace. And according to strategists John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade, managers who understand and harness this generation's distinct attributes can leap far ahead of their competition. Got Game shows how growing up immersed in video games has profoundly shaped the attitudes and abilities of this new generation. Though little-noticed, these 90 million rising professionals, through sheer numbers, will inevitably dominate business--and are already changing the rules. Although many of these changes are positive--such as more open communication and creative problem solving--they have caused a generation gap that frustrates gamers and the boomers who manage them. Got Game identifies the distinct values and traits that define the gamer generation--from an increased appetite for risk to unexpected leadership skills--and reveals management techniques today's leaders can use to bridge the generation gap and unleash gamers' hidden potential.

Here's an extract, and here's what Tom Peters could blog from the original FT review:

"Perhaps surprisingly [the authors] found no evidence of short attention spans. Far from it. Avid gamers have the ability to spend hours, days, or even weeks in single-minded pursuit of an objective. Nor did they find violent tendencies. They argue that behind the hyperviolent veneer, most video games are actually sophisticated simulations that reward perseverance and learning-by-doing. The result is a generation that can seem like 'arrogant slackers' at first but are in fact highly motivated—if given the opportunity to develop and play a starring role in their own projects."—FT

Now, go read McKenzie Wark's A Hacker Manifesto (on Harvard University Press, funny enough). Can you smell the cordite of the new class war? Or, er, not?

Harvard Business Online

The Play Ethic @ Demos

My ideas buddy Paul Miller has written a nice posting on my Demos discussion on the Play Ethic, with Charles Leadbeater as my interlocutor. I have copious notes on Charlie's and others' acute and useful comments, which I'll note here in a few days. In the meantime, enjoy Paul's Guardian article on how far the open-source model might be extended.

Hip-hop scholars

Here's a useful review of a selection of the recent academic literature on hip-hop culture - not as irrelevant as you'd think, given the amount of media consciousness that hip-hop has had from the very earliest days (count the amount of communications studies graduates there are among leading rappers and DJ's. For all this and more context, see Davey D's newsblog). This is a very useful line on hip-hop - one that begins to explain the harshness of the 'playa' culture:

"Organizing the Hip-Hop Generation" by Angela Ards uncovers the possibilities of using hip-hop as a tool for black youth political mobilization while recognizing the ironies of using such a commodified art form as a vehicle for social change. Ards writes "whereas blues embraced pain to transcend it, hip-hop builds walls to shield against further injury. So getting to a place where music might once again speak of individual frailty and collective strength is a difficult task."

The Catholic Play Ethic?

Hmmm... maybe, if it was a small c. Curious little piece from the Church Times, where The Revd Dr Giles Fraser - Team Rector of Putney, and lecturer in philosophy at Wadham College, Oxford - picks up on how Puritan predestination keeps the work ethic in place. 'Am I saved or not? I better work hard, and duteously, to ensure the result'. Here's the Rev's alternative:

Let me suggest a different theological paradigm. As the summer holidays draw to a close, and the trips to the zoo and the beach have dried up, late August again delivers the highlight of the season: the show. As boredom ignites creativity, the children transform the garden into a proscenium arch of swings, buckets, and washing-up lines. Isabella sits for hours, making tickets. A play is endlessly rehearsed and the casting bitterly contested. Adults are then dragooned into place for a half-hour of princesses and chaos. It is wonderful, bizarre, and entirely pointless.

Here is a much healthier theological paradigm than the anxious instrumentality of the Protestant work ethic. Perhaps it’s naff to call it the Catholic play ethic; still, here is a joyous celebration of life which is not designed to elicit any advantage. It’s godly play: an act of thanksgiving for freedom, gardens and friendship. These things are celebrated in and of themselves, not because they advance any cause. Like the eucharist, the show is holiday as thanksgiving.

The television will be revolutionised

A play theorist I deeply admire, the technologist Marc Pesce - inventor of VRML, the programming language that brings 3-D to the web - is stirring up fuss again. He's convinced we're in a coming age of Open Source Television, with the battle cry of 'Liberte! Facilite!! Egalite!!!' (His point is further elaborated in the pithily titled 'Fuck Big Media'.)