The Play Ethic

The Intimate Planet

Great post from that most grizzled and charming of cyber-libertarians, John Perry Barlow, on the wonders of VoIP - to you, using broadband internet as your telephone provider. It seems, if you're using Skype to do this, that people can search out your name and ask to talk to you from anywhere in the planet. The other night, JP was sought out by two young Asian girls, wanting to practise their English on him... Yes, he anticipates our scepticism. But I find his characteristically idealistic spin more appealing:

The bottom line is this: they reached at random out into the Datacloud and found a real friend. And I feel like I have been graced with a real friend in both of them. Given the fact that I've been getting interesting messages from distant strangers since 1985, why do I think the big deal? Why is this different? Because these strangers have voices. There's a lot more emotional bandwidth in the human voice. I'm always surprised by the Meatspace version of someone I've only encountered in ASCII. I'm rarely surprised by someone I've only met on the phone. But one doesn't get random phone calls from Viet Nam or China, or at least one never could before.Skype changes all that. Now anybody can talk to anybody, anywhere. At zero cost. This changes everything. When we can talk, really talk, to one another, we can connect at the heart.

The potential of establishing a real emotional connection is exponentially advantaged. And I honestly don't think it would have been any different had they been guys. In the days since, I've received another random call from a guy in Australia. We talked, very entertainingly, for awhile. I'm glad to know him too. (He wasn't trying to practice his English. He actually seems to prefer his version. He was just doing it because he could.)

I've been calling the web-world a 'love-toy' or 'soul-toy' for a while now (and Rushkoff's been alive to the emotional dimension of internet for even longer). The noosphere's a-comin'...

How Roth works (or engages)

Worth considering: a rigourous weblog entry seeking various opinions - from artists, scientists, movers and shakers - on how they work. What gets them up in the morning, how diligent are they, what's their routine, etc. Again, for me this is more the zero-sum game that enables the non-zero-sum game - the ritual that sustains the vision - but we have to allow scholars and creators, doing little more than shifting symbols around, to orchestrate some guilt for their freedoms (I suppose). Philip Roth is my favourite:

"I have to have something to do that engages me totally," he says. "Without that, life is hell for me. I can't be idle and I don't know what to do other than write. [...] I don't really have other interests. My interest is in solving the problems presented by writing a book. That's what stops my brain spinning like a car wheel in the snow, obsessing about nothing."

As ever, I love to note the e-word (engagement) that slips into these discourses - and remind the world of the etymology of play. Engagement is play, at its very core.

Go Animal!

Delighted to recieve a message from Frank Forencich, a physical philsopher (that sounds about right) from Seattle whose site and practice, Go Animal, already has a very evolved play ethic, based on solid research into mammalian play and development. He's read my book, and has done me the honour of devoting one of his newsletters to it, titled 'There oughta be an ethic'.

I really like his attempt at a table of work(out) ethic - play ethic attributes - and the astute observation that there might be some kind of loop (he goes as far as a yin-yang symbol) between the two. Ultimately, yes: but for the moment, I think there needs to be a clear critique of the joylessness of the work ethic, from a play paradigm that's renewed in confidence and power. For myself, I prefer the finite-game/infinite-game vision: the deadlines we need to meet, the skills and craft we need to master, in order that we can sustain our visionary lives. (Professor Carse again).

But that players need to attend to their energy levels to maintain their elemental engagement, whether the energy is spiritual, psychological, physical - or the union of all three - is Frank's strong point. And it's well taken. I recommend his book, Play As If Your Life Depends On It, highly.

Everything else is proofreading

Been sent this by regular correspondant Scott Gunem, and it is indeed wonderful - a Guardian piece from Philip Pullman, author of the epic His Dark Materials, called "common sense has much to learn from moonshine" - an attack on overly-grammatical literacy teaching for kids, and a celebration of linguistic playfulness:

It's when we do this foolish, time-consuming, romantic, quixotic, childlike thing called play that we are most practical, most useful, and most firmly grounded in reality, because the world itself is the most unlikely of places, and it works in the oddest of ways, and we won't make any sense of it by doing what everybody else has done before us. It's when we fool about with the stuff the world is made of that we make the most valuable discoveries, we create the most lasting beauty, we discover the most profound truths. The youngest children can do it, and the greatest artists, the greatest scientists do it all the time. Everything else is proofreading.

Great Guardian postbag on it today. A sample: "Philip Pulman saves the best till last, when he writes, prophetically, 'true education flowers at the point when delight falls in love with responsibility'. In some future time, when Sats, league tables etc have all been discredited, this neat encapsulation of the joys of learning may well be seized upon as the basis of a new educational revolution."

Sometimes, the world seems very civilized...

Castells and Gil: Digitocracy DeathMatch

Have to agree with Worldchanging.org that the event for soulitarians at this years World Social Forum in Porte Alegre is the debate between Gilberto Gil and  Manuel Castells on questions of copyright and free software. It might be time to revise some personal heroism, if the debate is between Gil (an advocate of open-source as a way for Brazil to evade the Microsoft hegemony), and Castells (opposed? really? After providing an afterword for the Hacker Ethic?). Let's see... anyone who's there, let us know how it went. 

Blink! Life Is Random (and don't worry)

Smart NY Times piece on the Apple slogan for the new I-Pod shuffle ("Life Is Random") and Malcolm Gladwell's book (blogged here already) Blink (which is about the power of first impressions). It being the NY Times, they'll take it off in a week (so I've put the piece in extended post below). But they're making the connection that both ideas

speak to the feeling that there's too much data and not enough knowledge, too many choices and not enough good ones, says Seth Godin, an author who focuses on marketing issues. "This desire to completely control the environment has started to unravel in the past five years," he said.

And more:

both suggest to consumers that there is a way to remain thinking, feeling people in a world overgrown with data, options and demands, said David Bennahum, who writes about technology issues for the online magazine Slate and for Wired magazine.

"They are two things that say your rational process of making sense of things is a model that may be obsolete," he said. " 'Life is random' is a really great way of shrugging your shoulders in a Buddhist way of nonattachment."

"It's kind of grim, actually," Mr. Bennahum added.

But then so was Jobs' diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. Life is random, indeed.

Gamers change the game

Great Wired feature piece on the inventor of Bit Torrent, Bram Cohen, the last web download phenomenon to worry the copyright lawyers (apparently, very good for complete feature movies). I particularly enjoyed the ludic opening (the writer, Clive Johnson, is a notably bright boy):

"That was a bad move", Bram Cohen tells me. We're huddled over a table in his Bellevue, Washington, house playing a board game called Amazons. Cohen picked it up two weeks ago and has already mastered it. The 29-year-old programmer consumes logic puzzles at the same rate most of us buy magazines. Behind his desk he keeps an enormous plastic bin filled with dozens of Rubik's Cube-style twisting gewgaws that he periodically scrambles and solves throughout the day. Cohen says he loves Amazons, a cross between chess and the Japanese game Go, because it is pure strategy. Players take turns dropping more and more tokens on a grid, trying to box in their opponent.

As I ponder my next move, Cohen studies the board, his jet-black hair hanging in front of his face, and tells me his philosophy of the perfect game."The best strategy games are the ones where you put a piece down and it stays there for the whole game," he explains. "You say, OK, I'm staking out this area. But you can't always figure out if that's going to work for you or against you. You just have to wait and see. You might be right, might be wrong." It's only later, when I look over these words in my notes, that I realize he could just as easily be talking about his life.

Amazing ourselves to death

I know that players love their tech - but they should also treasure the time and space for contemplation, or sheer idleness, to figure out what they should do with it. (I write after a visit to the new London store for Apple, which has literally left me reeling). So I occasionally print a mildly neo-Luddite corrective to my own technophiliac tendencies - this one's from The Seattle Times, titled 'Life Interrupted'. Here's a particularly useful and eloquent passage:

Technology helps connect us to friends and, on occasion, soul mates. It prevents phone tag. It sorts and recalls massive amounts of information, simplifies writing, and even aids those who want to mellow out by working from the boonies.

Yet, some who study this modern phenomenon say the speed and ubiquity cause problems for those who are either psychologically ill-equipped or ill-trained to face dogged expectations that come with the package. Some of us get obsessed, checking e-mails while on vacation or late at night. We will e-mail to avoid talking and expect prompt reply, or fire off text-messages or gab on cellphones not because we have something to say, but because we can. (What? Am I interrupting?) We get lost browsing and sinking down one rabbit hole after another, dodging pop-ups and never quite focusing. Some of us hang around chat rooms trusting people who often are not what they seem, and "flaming" — harshly criticizing — people we will never meet.

This is such a topic of study that it has sprouted a number of terms, from "online compulsive disorder" to "data smog." Two Harvard professors see evidence of what they call "pseudo-attention deficit disorder" — shorter attention spans influenced by technology and the constant waves of information washing over us. When the brain gets excited over some rapid data and is stimulated, it releases a "dopamine squirt," they say.

"We have so many options, reward centers that we never had before," says John Ratey, who teaches at Harvard and is a psychiatrist specializing in attention deficit disorder. "I think that's why we're seeing more of this. There are more demands on our attention and less training for us to stop and take it all in. We seem to be amazing ourselves to death."

Monopoly Meditations

Now this is how to present an essay of ideas. From the excellent (and slightly mysterious) high-school play-theorist, Roll The Bones, a link to an essay on the playful significance of Monopoly, as a mirror of society and economy. But it's done as a little corner of the board (see left). This is where I rue my graphix talents...

Happy workers (play with themselves)

From Fast Company blog, news of an exciting new development (cough) in toy action superheros. Meet Geek-man, Boss-man and Money-Man! Much hilarity (of a vaguely sado-masochistic kind) to be had here: hoping to see some weird internet toy action with these. I particularly enjoyed the specific toy instructions for Boss Man:

"BossMan’s left hand has been specially engineered so it’s cigar compatible. Just squeeze the cigar gently in-between his thumb and index finger. When the cigar is in place, you can shake BossMan around vigorously and the cigar will remain snugly in his grasp..."

"While some bosses are two-faced, BossMan, being the super manager that he is, comes with 3 faces: serious boss, happy boss and angry boss. He can also lose face and become faceless, but it’s not his most attractive look. To remove a face: place your thumb under the chin and index finger on the top of BossMan’s head. Pull the chin outward and upward, and his face will come off. It’s kind of like that John Woo movie, but without all the special effects."

Stop press: and there's more! Boing Boing reports on 'The Cubes', "a corporate drudgery playset for grown-ups":

Bob, Joe, Ted, and Ann spend eight hours a day, five days a week, at tiny desks in tiny cubicles in a giant room packed with countless similar cubicles in a giant building filled with countless similar rooms.

Each set has one 2-3/4" posable plastic figure and all the necessary plastic parts to build a classic corporate cube: four walls, desk, chair, file cabinet, in/out box, phone, and computer. Comes with a sticker sheet of decor for your cube, complete with graphs, charts, screens for the computer and pithy office posters.

Also includes a job title sticker sheet so you can create a convoluted and meaningless position for your employee.

What would they say at Serious Play?