The last thing we are around here is blithe or starry-eyed about the power of play - it's an often dark and dangerous principle of possibility in the human condition. To 'take reality lightly', as the essential philosophical definition has it, does not necessarily imply (though it doesn't exclude) taking reality ethically. (Thus my quest for a 'play ethic': how do we monitor and direct our elemental playfulness, without drying it up at source?)
A case in point is the eternal relationship between play, toys and war (I've explored this previously in this Guardian article, this blog category and this Delicious tag). A wander round the iTunes videoblog section yesterday turned up this startling character - Ralph Osterhaut (interviews here and here) He's been presenting at an entertainment conference, with the title 'Toys That Find Their Way Into Combat'.
It's hard to know how to begin to respond to this guy. As the interviews above reveal, Osterhout is a driven, possibly damaged character, who seeks a certain psychological refuge in engineering stuff that can give you extended powers - of vision, subterfuge, detection of enemies. (Wired tells us he even pretended to live the Riviera life of Fleming-era James Bond as a young man, keeping strange guns under his seat). The tough-guy military talk ("he'd jump on that quicker than a tramp on a muffin", "these Navy Seals guys are superfit, near-enough triathletes, you just wouldn't believe") protests just a little too much - though it surely gives the male toy execs he usually deals with a thrill.
And since 9/11, Osterhout has clearly been hanging around the military-digital complex a lot. He presents himself as a transmission belt between the toy manufacturers and the military contractors - miniaturising and computerising in each domain, and gleefully transferring best-practice to the other.
But it's the gusto with which he throws himself at the problems of American hi-tech ground-warfare in the Middle East that shows the scary end of play culture. You can't deny Osterhout's identity as a creative engineer, his cognitive capacity for playing with materials and structural possibilities. But ally that to the 'Cowboys and Indians' play impulse - what Sutton-Smith calls contestive and collective forms of play - and Osterhout becomes a man-child playing with the "real" men that seemed to be absent from his abusive early childhood. With lethal consequences.
It may be no surprise that Osterhout's geopolitics are an equally childish bluster - "terrorism is here to stay, my friends", "Abdul is using our equipment to fix his tv", "most sniper killings are inter-ethnic fire between Sunnis and Shias" (as if the steamrollering of Iraq by American shock-and-awe, and their absence of a nation-building plan afterwards, had nothing to do with unleashing that kind of emnity in the first place).
Osterhout does try to forge some ploughshares out of his cybernetic swords at the end - little helicopters that can video disaster areas, techno-glasses that can restore sight to the sight-impaired. But as our soulful President takes his office, soaring on thermals of warm rhetoric, it's useful to listen to this voice from the other side of American power - where prodigious invention can harness itself to an impoverished military world-view.
And for play advocates, too, characters like Osterhout are just as cautionary. He makes the need to build a kind of psychological development spiral for play extremely acute (see Gwen Gordon's studies). For wherever this guy's playfulness comes from, we need to be very careful about where it's going.
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