The Play Ethic

Have a playful 2005!

Borrowing from the estimable Powerful Robot site - run by the equally estimable Gonzalo Frasca - I bid you all a playful 2005.

Making Science Samba

More Latin ludenism - a story from American Scientist about the endeavours of a young Brazilian carnavalesco [carnival designer), Paulo Barros, who wanted to create a 'science float' for the Rio Carnival this year. And as it turned out...

The star of the parade was one of Barros's floats called Criação da Vida [see picture above], or Creation of Life. One hundred twenty-three young people, spray-painted blue-black, were strapped onto this pyramid, and they performed a spectacular choreographed dance as it moved through the Sambódromo. At times their arms and bodies evoked the helices of DNA and proteins; at times they just celebrated life.

And what do you know? It won second place overall! Perhaps the evident nubility helped...

Cities of Joy

Well, if the Net decides I must turn my focus to playful cities, I must attend... An extraordinary story about civic leadership that aimed to transform cities through play and creativity, of the most elemental kind.

From the Harvard Gazette comes a story about the recent Mayor of Bogota, an ex-philosopher and mathematician called Antanas Mockus (no kidding), who used street theatre and innovative rituals to bring order to a city heading towards chaos. The picture above is one of his "traffic mimes", which tried to highlight the consequences of bad driving. Other initiatives included a "woman's night", where women were invited out on to the streets, while their men were encouraged to stay home and look after the kids. And the distribution of 'thumbs up-thumbs down' cards, where other Bogotans were asked to publicly approve or disapprove of the civic behaviour of their fellow citizens in the street. The writer notes that Mockus is considering his presidential run - one of a line of 'anti-politicians' making their way in South America.

Update: I just discovered that Mayor Mockus's regime was actually interrupted in Bogota by another visionary urbanist-mayor, Enrique Penalosa, who now lectures at New York about how to create "cities of joy" - meaning cities built around the primacy of children. Fascinating stuff, contextualised here.

Managing the Gamer Generation

Observing this Got Game? book from Harvard Business Press with a slightly gory fascination. I kinda accept that gamers might well have the kind of team-and-contest mentality that could add to the bottom line of the standard corporation, if their managers could but see past their pizza-stained unkemptness. From an author interview:

Q: How have video games changed the way this generation views the business world?

A: Gamers approach the business world a bit more like a game. They see the different companies—and maybe the people they work with—as "players." They're way more competitive and are very passionate about "winning." They are both more optimistic and more determined about solving any kind of problem you can imagine; they think there's always going to be some combination of moves that will result in success. That drives them to be incredibly creative. They're a bit suspicious of company leaders: The game world is not big on following hierarchy. Plus, they are very confident. Like entrepreneurs, they would rather rely on their own abilities to succeed or fail. They're also more comfortable with risks, but aren't reckless.

Q: What traits mark the gamer generation that could make them especially good managers, and what traits work against them?

A: Gamers are ready to be great leaders, so they're motivated to contribute and to earn their way through whatever hurdles it takes to get to the (pretty elevated) place they believe they should be. Gamers are also resilient. They know failure is survivable, because they have each failed literally thousands of times on the way to whatever success they have had with games. (The failure hasn't been "real," of course, but it has felt as real to them as the success has.) They're also savvy—it's tough to pull one over on them. They may be a little overconfident in their own abilities, and they may not believe something doesn't work until they actually see it fail themselves. But with some guidance, managers should be able to marshal their best instinct, which is their love of being the hero.

But I'm also reading McKenzie Wark's Hacker Manifesto on and off various flights at the moment, and something he says about the 'co-optation of the hacker class' is niggling me. From this recent interview with Wark:

I see the formation of a hacker sensibility and ethic as an expression of this new level of conflict over the enclosure of the commons and the subordination of free productivity to the commodity form...So while writers, programmers, biologists, or musicians tend to see themselves as separate cultures with specialized ways of thinking, I think there is an over–arching class interest there as well. An interest in preserving the autonomy of the way we labor that farmers and workers have already lost. We are the new front line in a very long struggle.

Is this what I meant by the 'soulitariat'? Maybe so...

The Outsiders

Delighted to post a review of Counterculture Through the Ages, a compendium of exactly what it says, by cyber-veteran Ken Goffman (aka R.U.Sirius, who graced me with an interview a few months ago on his Neo-Files site). Ken's covered himself on his own site, and what a trove of enduring hippie wisdom it is. Relevant passage for players:

Today, I think the real revolution is technological. This view gets me in trouble with most counterculturalists. I would put consciousness a very close second, but tech and consciousness are merging. Politics is really just for holding back the flow of authoritarian shit and making conditions that are humane enough to allow us to work and play on the technology and ourselves.

No time for 'real' play

A great piece from USATODAY.com warning parents against buying toys for kids this Christmas that are too electronicised - or too didactic:

Children are being taught that there is only one right answer, a track sure to breed conformity rather than ingenuity. We are raising a generation of children who have no idea what to do when they are not being entertained.

Mounds of evidence suggest that children learn through active play, not through passive feeding. They learn math when they play "chef" and set a table for four. They learn physics when they build a fort and carefully balance the cushion atop the roof. They learn language by talking with excited friends when they jump through the leaves or build an igloo.

Research on young children has shown time and again that PLAY = LEARNING! The world is a virtual classroom filled with opportunities to stimulate the brain and encourage intellectual and social growth. In this Google generation, our children will have plenty of time to look up facts. To succeed in the global marketplace of tomorrow, they need to be creative problem-solvers — not robots equipped with pre-wired answers to yesterday's questions.

So what is a parent to do? Take refuge in the scientific findings of today and reinvest in the toys of yesteryear. The recipe is clear. Toys should be 90% child and 10% toy. They should be props for children's fantasy, not directors for their every behavior. In the zero-budget category, think about pots and pans that make rhythm instruments. Think about appliance boxes that become taxis and fire trucks.

Kaos Pilots vs. L.Vaughan Spencer

I'd never heard of these people until Demos posted about their possible demise - but the Kaos Pilots seem to be a very wild Danish business school/consultancy, whose aim is to "change the game" of the organisations they consult for. (Well, don't we all?) What's unusual is that they give an account of one of their consulting moments that might be a gift to any passing business satirist:

The main purpose was to draw attention to the way in which the employees are interconnected and potentially able to influence others and ultimately the whole organisation like a ripple effect - the rings of waves created by a movement in water.

Water was chosen as a metaphor for the work environment in the organisation. Water was represented visually through projected images of ocean life and a mini (toy) aquarium on each of the groups’ tables that held a floating candle. Sounds of waves and waterfalls at times filled the room. Some stories incorporating a water element were told and there was an exercise asking the participants which ocean life form they identified with as an employee of the Hospital Pharmacists of the County of Århus.

In fact, here's a passing business satirist now - the inestimable L. Vaughan Spencer, motivational speaker and guru, whose headline is 'Don't be Needy... Be Suceedy!'. (Mr Spencer is actually Neil Mullarkey, a very pleasant and intelligent alternative comedian, who has said approving things about the Play Ethic in the past). All this stuff reminds me why I should maintain my interest in weird political theory...

Quitting the Paint Factory

A rather florid hymn to idleness from Harper's magazine (and thanks to J from Lifestylism for this). The title refers to a story of a facto ry boss who had to feign madness in order to abandon his prestigious job. I'm not an automatic fan of the more louche forms of idler culture around at the moment. But Mark Slouka makes a beautiful argument for idleness as a political necessity:

Idleness is not just a psychological necessity, req­uisite to the construction of a complete human being; it constitutes as well a kind of political space, a space as necessary to the workings of an actual democracy as, say, a free press. How does it do this? By allowing us time to figure out who we are, and what we believe; by allowing us time to consider what is unjust, and what we might do about it. By giving the inner life (in whose precincts we are most ourselves) its due.

Which is precisely what makes idle­ness dangerous. All manner of things can grow out of that fallow soil. Not for nothing did our mothers grow suspicious when we had "too much time on our hands." They knew we might be up to something. And not for nothing did we whisper to each other, when we were up to something, "Quick, look busy." Mother knew instinctively what the keepers of the castles have always known: that trouble – the kind that might threaten the symmetry of a well-ordered garden – needs time to take root. Take away the time, therefore, and you choke off the problem before it begins. Obedience reigns, the plow stays in the furrow; things proceed as they must.

Which raises an uncomfortable question: Could the Church of Work – which today has Americans aspir­ing to sleep deprivation the way they once aspired to a personal knowledge of God – be, at base, an anti-democratic force? Well, yes. James Russell Lowell, that nineteenth-century workhorse, summed it all up quite neatly: "There is no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on its keel, and sav­ing it from all risk of crankiness, than business."

Quite so. The mind, however, particularly the mind of a citizen in a de­mocratic society, is not a boat. Ballast is not what it needs, and steadiness, alas, can be a synonym for stupidity, as our current administration has so am­ply demonstrated. No, what the democratic mind requires, above all, is time; time to consider its options. Time to develop the democratic virtues of independence, orneriness, objectivity, and fairness. Time, perhaps (to sail along with Lowell's leaky metaphor for a moment), to ponder the course our unelected captains have so generously set for us, and to consider mutiny when the iceberg looms.

Which is precisely why we need to be kept busy. If we have no time to think, to mull, if we have no time to piece together the sudden associations and unexpected, mid-shower insights that are the stuff of independent opinion, then we are less citizens than cursors, easily manipulated, vulnerable to the currents of power.

Bravo. All I would say, after that, is when action issues from idleness, its most appopriate form is play, rather than work - effort in the service of fully-deliberated goals and passions, rather than externally determined or duteous ones.

The Reputation Society

Forgive me, but as this is an 'outboard brain', I have to put in stuff that I know I'll eventually get round to, once I get that six-figure, three-year research grant...

So, two pieces on reputation and game theory. Meaning: I'll reciprocate with that guy/gal, if I believe that they'll reciprocate right back. (Game theory is one of those authentic 'play' sciences that I'm perpetually struggling to keep up on). First one from Edge.org, 'A Talk with Karl Sigmund', who wonders:

Reputation is something that is profoundly embedded in our mentality, and we — not just old professors, but everyone — care enormously about it. I have read that the moment when people really get desperate and start running amok is when they feel that they are considered completely worthless in their society. I should stress that we have been talking here essentially about human nature. The more or less official idea that human beings are selfish and rational — an idea that nobody except economists really took seriously, and now even economists say that they never did — this idea has now been totally discredited. There are many experiments that show that spontaneous impulses like the tendency for fairness or acts of sympathy or generosity play a huge role in human life.

The second piece, from First Monday, seems to require no maths, and is titled 'Manifesto for the Reputation Society'. Here's the abstract:

Information overload, challenges of evaluating quality, and the opportunity to benefit from experiences of others have spurred the development of reputation systems. Most Internet sites which mediate between large numbers of people use some form of reputation mechanism: Slashdot, eBay, ePinions, Amazon, and Google all make use of collaborative filtering, recommender systems, or shared judgements of quality.

But we suggest the potential utility of reputation services is far greater, touching nearly every aspect of society. By leveraging our limited and local human judgement power with collective networked filtering, it is possible to promote an interconnected ecology of socially beneficial reputation systems — to restrain the baser side of human nature, while unleashing positive social changes and enabling the realization of ever higher goals.

And just one tenuous connection with the play theory I know: Herbert Marcuse in Eros and Civilisation, reminding us that play and "dis-play" are both part of human nature - enjoying our ability to project a version of ourselves to others. Is Google and E-bay founding a social architecture on this?

JC Herz Goes To War

From Joystick Nation, to Joystick Empire... Am I wrong to be freaked out by the sight of J.C.Herz, notable and admired digital and games guru, becoming project leader for a US Defense Dept initiative called Cascade, which will (and I quote)

identify emerging technologies, modify as needed, and shepherd them through the Defense Department's Kafka-esque bureaucracy so that they can be used by operators in the field. Focus areas are social software and computer games. Current clients include Special Forces Command, the Undersecretary of Defense (Intelligence), and DARPA.

Of course, everyone needs to keep an eye on what DARPA - the US's own state-run innovation factory - is up to. (GBN's futurist Eamonn Kelly told us yesterday at the Scottish Parliament that DARPA other big thing isn't technologically enhanced soldiers, but biologically enhanced soldiers. Eeek!). But this player is serious - see Herz's piece from Defense Horizons, April 2002:

Game industry customers may be the future officers and enlisted recruits of the military. The current generation grew up playing online. The social ecology of computer gaming is what they have grown to expect from networked simulations and multiplayer virtual environments. This ecology drives them as gamers and as learners. The question is whether the military will harness those dynamics to transform itself, or whether this generation of soldiers will transform the military, over a longer of period of time, despite itself.

Question: are there any peace-niks in the games industry who lose an ounce of sleep about this entertainment-military complex (even though the relationship is long and historical)?  Or about those who get involved? (I've blogged once or twice about this before). Just fascinated to know.