The Play Ethic

Play Ethic gets del.icio.us

One of the things I like about Sutton-Smith's seven-fold map of play forms - see Eric Zimmerman's great discussion of it in Rules of the Game (PDF) - is his identification of "play as imaginary", meaning the play of forms in art, music, ideas and science. It's this sheer joy in being able to connect ideas to one another, to pursue lines of thought, that the web enables.

Google keep confounding all big-company suspicions by link-ups like this - a scheme to put the contents of major world libraries online. Are they ensaring us with gifts to commodify us later? Or should we believe their company motto, 'Do no evil'?

But net-people keep coming up with new ways to explore this new global mind. I have been completely lost in something called del.icio.us for the last two days - which is the most mentally playful thing I've done in a while. It's all based on 'tagging' your blogged links - you make up your own taxonomies on the fly, initially based on what interests you. It's quick and easy - you build up a list very quickly.

But, fantastically, you can then check to see whether others in Del.icio.us have put up similar tags. Or (and I'm waiting for this) you make connections with someone serendipitously, who thinks that 'end-to-end' or 'castells' or 'precarity' is also a fascinating topic. Usual 'fax' law, of course - the more that use it, the more it becomes valuable. I've discovered this is called folksonomy (of course, there's a del.icio.us tag).

I always harvest more links than I blog to Typepad - so I've put my own del.icio.us in a feed at the bottom of this blog, liberating this site to be more of a publishing tool and discussion space, than a brain-dump. I may be posting less frequently, but more reflectively and substantively here...let's see what the right groove is. But bliss it is in this very dawn... (Thanx to Matt Jones for setting the precedent.).

Update: just found a posting from the Many-to-Many site, that compares del.icio.us's folksonomy to Carse's infinite game: "Digital networks have massively increased the scale of the intimate networks we can potentially create, and therefore have increased the number of participants that can create and share ad-hoc vocabularies. The internet has created tools that preserve the loosely-connected, the playful, the ad-hoc, vernacular, or amateur - the conditions of the infinite, rather than the finite game." Well, exactly!

The Trials of San Precario

Excellent round-up from the stern-but-fun digital magazine Mute on a concept I've been keeping my eye on for a year now - precarity. It's an attempt by the more militant types in the creative community to acknowledge their 'precarious' existence - short-contract, project-based, though fuelled by camraderie and sharing - and connect it to other 'precarious' workers (migrants and asylum seekers, or retail workers, for example). Can they find a common identity? 

The Meta-Mutants are sceptical (as are other interactivists).  But I have to say I'm thrilled at the activism of the Italian group Chainworkers, who (among other stunts) have created a new saint of the precariat - Punto San Precario (pictured above, and for the linguists, a French interview with him). Apparently San Precario can be seen in supermarket malls, in full benedictory pose, bemoaning the plight of flexible workers.

I know I've been theorising about a 'soulitariat' which tries to align its meaning and values with its technology and networks... but this is almost too good to be true.

Blinkwatch: good on sports, bad on logic

And the Malcolm Gladwell wagon rolls on... the hair, the one-word book title, the pithy pitch. A player, no doubt. But it still seems like the most banal, dinner-party version of the Third Culture to me. Though I liked this line in his interview with the website of the US sports channel ESPN, on how the instinctuality of great sports players gives them problems in being managers:

That's precisely why top athletes so often make bad coaches or general managers. They often don't really know why they were as good as they were. They can't describe it, which means that they can't teach it and they quickly become frustrated at their inability to lift others up to their own level. Mediocre players -- or non-athletes -- tend to make better coaches because their knowledge isn't unconscious. [Note to UK readers: recognise Bobby Moore? Or Billy McNeill?] It's the same thing with writing. I know very little about science. But I think I write about science more clearly than many scientists, because I have to go over every step, carefully and deliberately.

Not carefully enough for Thomas Homer-Dixon, fellow complexity theorist and author of the Ingeunity Gap. In what is quite a catty review all round - Gladwell galls the heart of many an ideas-trader - Homer-Dixon makes this tough point:

A lot of people are going to thin-slice this book. In other words, they’re going to blink at Blink. They'll read the first few pages,and they won't get to Gladwell’s acknowledgment, muddled though it is and far later in the book, that human fast cognition is an astonishingly powerful ability that can also be astonishingly dangerous if it's undisciplined, misused, or badly trained. In our infoglutted world, we're all under huge pressure to move quickly, to multitask, and to increase our information throughput. So we're all looking for excuses to thin slice, and we're all looking for excuses to avoid the hard work that makes thin-slicing effective...

Within a few weeks, Blink will be part of the Zeitgeist. Blink will Buzz. And its wide influence will subtly allow people to rationalize prejudice, stereotyping, and the premature closure of reflection and thought. Simple storytelling sometimes comes with a high price.

James Carse lecture on "Infinite Games and Holy War"

Some fine correspondants have let me know that the author of Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse, has had his recent lecture, 'Religious War in light of the Infinite Game' to the Long Now Foundation uploaded as an MP3 file from the Long Now seminar page (warning: it's about 23Mg). As well as this slightly mad transcript from Future Hi, there's also a more dutiful one from the Eric Nehrlich's Rantings weblog. I've listened to the recording, and he's a somewhat infuriating and hesitant speaker - but for those of us who are devotees to the book, it's great to hear Carse's mind operate in real time. From Nehrlich's post:

[Carse] described a friend of his who'd put all his savings into a business that was heavily dependent on a particular supplier, and who then got screwed over by that supplier. He ran into his friend at an airport, asked him how things were going. His friend said that he'd run into that supplier just then. Carse asked "So what'd you do?", imagining a thrashing (the friend was a former Marine). His friend said "I bought him a beer". When Carse's mouth dropped open, his friend said "It's only business." It's just a finite game. Move beyond those self-set boundaries, and take on the infinite game of life. We have the "freedom to give up the involvements of daily life." So easy to say. So, so, so hard to do. Or I'd be trying to turn this blogging thing into a job right now.

Which, btw, makes it clear for me what relationship this blog has to my other, more prosaic consulting gigs: it keeps my infinite game in play. But this is a marvellously expansive lecture, at least in content.

A network is a network is a...

Always keep my eye on thinking about networks - it's a spatial metaphor which I think suits the notion of the player best, rather than say 'society' or 'community'. Partly that's because a life lived as a player is a necessarily complex affair - full of individual initiative, goals and agency, but not expecting predictable results and outcomes from this. Which is very much how networks, in many other realms, form themselves - local iterations and connections building up to big forms and structures. (The think-tank I'm an associate of, Demos, has an excellent set of papers on Network Logic).

And here's some fascinating news from the labs, about how networks from four wildly different areas - "the World Wide Web; a network of actors who have been in films together; networks of proteins with links between those that can bind to each other; and networks of other cellular molecules with links between molecules involved in the same biochemical reactions" - exhibit 'self-similarity', meaning that they look roughly the same at any scale (see graphic above). This wasn't expected, precisely because each network comes from such a different locus.

It's mind-wrenching to think that so many different phenomena - from actors to proteins - might be constituted according to a common network-like process of development. But from a play perspective, which already presumes that play is a deeply biological and natural process, this isn't so scary. In the Play Ethic book I quote a lot from Erik Davis, who has investigated what kind of consciousness and ethics is required to live with a networked reality. I recommend this piece from Erik on 'the network path', and also David Loy's classic on Indra's Net, as well as Fritjof Capra's essay [PDF] in the Demos collection.

More Oz coverage for Play Ethic

Two great pieces about the Play Ethic book in Australia have come to me - one a review from the Melbourne Age (in extended post below), from an educational psychologist who's captured the energy of it:

For Kane, play has many forms. It is about progress, imagination and self-mastery. It is also about power (who outperforms who), identity (what I learn about myself), and fate and chaos, as in winning in chance games such as lotteries. The play of childhood features as a vehicle of pleasure and learning from Rousseau's Emile, to Shelley, Wordsworth and Byron and Maria Montessori. Then there are the contemporary players such as Trotsky, Richard Neville (playfully referred to as the "Wizard of Oz"), Frank Sinatra, Robbie Williams and Victoria Beckham to name just a few.

And the other is a feature piece from the Sydney Sun-Herald, by an energetic and sharp writer called David Astle (who's kindly sent it to me as a PDF download ). Here he gets the 'childness' - not childishness - of a play-ethical lifestyle:

Lego block by Lego block, my hallway is turning into the Lost City ofAlakazoo. I made that name up but the kids don’t care. The city is theirs – they made it, that’s enough. My children – aged nine and seven – are knocking skulls with their cousins of roughly the same age, raking the Lego bucket in search of that perfect piece. Click.

Patterns emerge but that’s an adult talking. This is play, after all, not Urban Design 101. Let Alakazoo sprawl where it will. If the city’s rocket depot is pink, let it be pink. In play, there are no rules from above. The make-believe city develops ad hoc.

Game theorists would call it engagement, a style of play given to interaction rather than outcome. Kids are brilliant at it – they mix as equals. They co-operate, experiment, adapt. They improvise and imagine. They allow the game to shape itself. And, ideally, they pack up before dinnertime.

As adults, we lose sight of play in so many ways. Maybe you nurse an Xbox vice or go for a spot of pub trivia on a Wednesday night but the days of spontaneous play seem to evaporate after 25. Travel might be seen as one big hide-and-seek across three continents but once the backpack is stowed, it’s work and mortgage for so many Australians.

We narrow our lives along fixed paths and neglect the art of fun, of freely engaging with each other. In short, we play less. And guess who loses out?

This is not a story about throwing a Frisbee at lunchtime or face-painting with the kids. It’s deeper than that. Play is more a state of mind, a joyous state of readiness, an appetite for new challenges. Think of play not as the opposite of work but the opposite of depression and inaction.

Sunny Dissectum, or Gutsy Corpuscle

Fun fun fun: a splendid Boston Globe article on the games that tv makers play with the names of their characters. The below quote should lead you there (who says I'm just a perversely grim ludicist? Hey I can be trivial...ish):

The most ironic TV name may be Soprano. On ''The Sopranos," Tony is all about being a man -- no high-voiced singing for him, or from him. While castrati often sang the soprano part in a chorus, Tony lives in fear of castration by the women in his life. And the Soprano women -- they're a cacophonous lot, particularly the late Livia, whose presence was as negative as her first name (after the ambitious mother in ''I, Claudius") was affirmative.

Of course, ''Sopranos" creator David Chase may have a surprise in store for us, if Tony winds up singing to the FBI by the series finale. In that case, he would be true to his name, if not his family.

BTW, the post's title is the writer imagining what would happen if Charles Dickens was writing CSI: Miami, and was trying to name the lead detective.

Shaquille O'Neal, Game Theorist

So we should be interested in game theory in this here blog - the science that tries to model how competitive relationships generate trust, as well as emnity. Yet as a tart little piece in Fast Company notes, very few business leaders or gurus are particularly clear on how (or even if) they use it. Robert Wright's book Non-Zero should convince most thinkers (it did for me) that game theory reveals something profound about the complexity of human relations and reciprocations, over a very long historical period. But in the meantime, let us unproblematically enjoy the writer's comparison between game-theory's key concepts, and the court wisdom of slam-dunk titan, Shaquille O'Neal:

Game Theory Concept	Game Theorists Say...	Shaq Says...
Practice tit-for-tat	"What accounts for tit-for-tat's robust success is [that] its clarity makes it intelligible to the other player, thereby eliciting long-term co-operation." 1	"When I was young, I got whuppins ... It was a cause-and-effect situation. The cause was I did something wrong; the effect was I got a whuppin."
Make credible commitments	"There must ... be a credible commitment on the side of the relational monitor to the prescribed function in each contingency." 2	"It's about honesty ... I'm like toilet paper, Pampers and toothpaste. I'm definitely proven to be effective."
Ensure repeated interactions	"There is no solution that achieves reciprocal cooperation in a one-time game." 3	"My personal opinion is, how, if you never hung out with somebody, do you know them so well?"
Employ "mixed" strategies	"Apparent irrationality can become good strategic rationality." 4	"I suggest you don't get near me / I'm psycho, and I don't think clearly." (rapping on his song "Psycho" -- 2001)

¹ Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation , p. 54
² Masahiko Aoki, "An Information Theoretic Approach to Comparative Corporate Governance"
³ Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff, Thinking Strategically , p. 100
⁴ Dixit and Nalebuff, p. 148

Speech Tools Rules, Sez Nathan

Some satirical soulitarianism is the "Wasp T-12 Speech Tool" (advertised on hoardings all over my home town Glasgow), a vicious piss-take of all things mobile and techy, and part of the promo for the new C4 anti-ad-land sitcom Nathan Barley, originated by the legendary Brit subversive (there, that sounds like a line from the show, doesn't it) Chris Morris.

It'll hopefully do for the creative industries what The Office did for corporate bureaucracy: drench mediocrity with cynicism and bile, in order to help us figure out what we should be doing with our early-21st century talents and passions.   

Players or Dole Bludgers?

An intriguing Australian review of the Play Ethic book, picked up from Google Alert, from a slick website called Sydney Anglicans - a portal for, well, Anglicans in Sydney. I'm fascinated by this paragraph:

Kane makes the case that we have denigrated play for far to long in Western culture such that we have limited the potential for human creativity and enjoyment. For us, work is the serious business. Serious people work hard; and it is morally good to embrace hard work. Both Labor and Coalition politicians appealed to the ethic of hard work in Australia’s recent election. A dole bludger is one of the most shameful people in our culture. Think of the way we speak of “wasting time” as if it is morally wrong.

When I was in Australia in 2002, doing some consultancy for educationalists, I remember this term 'dole bludger' coming up regularly in conversations - usually with people shaking their heads at the prospect of playful values having any purchase in Howard-era Australian society. Strange, in that aboriginal culture is surely one of the most profoundly playful - meaning mobile and imaginative - lifestyles imaginable. Yet this nexus of issues - how Australians cope with aboriginality, combined with their residual Britishness, and the immigrant multicutlure of its big cities - means that I'm always fascinated to see how my own little idea-virus might survive and thrive there.

Any Oz correspondants, I'd like to hear from you. How does play survive the spectre of the dole-bludger?