The Play Ethic

Play is how we shape the world with our minds

From the World Question Center at Edge.org, Alison Gopnik on how she's re-evaluated the role of play and the imagination in human cognition:

I thought that kids' pretend play, and grown-up fiction, must be a sort of spandrel, a side-effect of some other more functional ability. I said as much in a review in Science and got floods of e-mail back from distinguished novel-reading scientists. They were all sure fiction was a Good Thing - me too, of course, - but didn't seem any closer than I was to figuring out why.

So the anomaly of pretend play has been bugging me all this time. But finally, trying to figure it out has made me change my mind about the very nature of cognition itself.

I still think that we're designed to find out about the world, but that's not our most important gift. For human beings the really important evolutionary advantage is our ability to create new worlds. Look around the room you're sitting in. Every object in that room - the right angle table, the book, the paper, the computer screen, the ceramic cup was once imaginary. Not a thing in the room existed in the pleistocene. Every one of them started out as an imaginary fantasy in someone's mind. And that's even more true of people - all the things I am, a scientist, a philosopher, an atheist, a feminist, all those kinds of people started out as imaginary ideas too.

I'm not making some relativist post-modern point here, right now the computer and the cup and the scientist and the feminist are as real as anything can be. But that's just what our human minds do best - take the imaginary and make it real. I think now that cognition is also a way we impose our minds on the world.

Via Positiva: the Play Ethic in Croatia

Ridiculously long time not blogging on the Play Journal, I agree, but have been dealing with family illness (all well now), paradigm revolution in the music business, constitutional evolution in Scotland... But with some luck, I'm back.

And to kick off, an interview conducted with the Croatian online journal Via Positiva - nothing new, but I find that answering familiar questions allows me to update the Play Ethic without too much labour...

Pat Kane Interview with Via Positiva, January 2008

1) What is the play ethic? Why do we need it? Why should we leave the work ethic behind?

The Play Ethic is what truly supersedes the Work Ethic, and is more relevant to our times than the Leisure Ethic. The Work Ethic was a story about self-discipline and self-denial that the first age of industrial capitalism needed its workers to believe in (basically to watch the clock and accept their place in the factory system). The Leisure Ethic (what we used to know as the 'leisure society') was a mid-to-late 20th century story about the benefits of affluence - that work would be reduced to a minimum by technology and automation, and that we would have to get skilled at recreation, relaxation, self-improvement. The Play Ethic comes after the internet, and globalisation, and is a story about how to live (or try and live) a coherent life in a dynamic, unstable and emergent world. We have an innate resource by which we can do this - our formative experience as players, that burst of enthusiasm and experimentation that forges the adults we become. We need to recover the power of play in our lives, to be capable for this new world.