PARENTING THE PLAY-KIDS?
The net is one big playground for kids, a space where they can productively fool around with ideas, identity and media. Should the BBC join in? What can Auntie do for the Playful Generation?
For any modern parent, it's a familiar scene. You stand over your children's shoulders, however covertly, watching as their nimble fingers flutter over the keyboards, nunchucks and touch pads of their digital devices. An Arsenal-themed Powerpoint sits under three separate browser windows – one for chat, one for music sharing, one for Bebo or Facebook.
Someone's sending links of pics for the Powerpoint; fingers flutter back a rebuke, adding their own snippet of information-plus-emoticon. (The mobile intrudes regularly into the exchange, an angry buzzing fly trapped in a tin). And like some kind of domestic water-feature, the sports or cartoon channel shimmers, murmurs or explodes at the other end of the room, the tv merely an ambient input – or waiting to be turned into the full spectacle of a console game.
Yet strip out the flashy and mutable interfaces of these technologies, bracket off the sheer plenitude of material available to the digital child, and what kind of behaviour do we have here? Nothing too far, I'd suggest, from the classic moment of play – that developmental scene present in most human societies that have achieved some distance beyond scarcity or sheer survival, and can thus provide a surplus of toys and materials for their irrepressibly ludic young ones.
Despite the hi-tech means, collages are still being made here, songs are still being sung and learned, teasing and hazing is still being conducted (across the input boxes), intensely imagined worlds of heroism and camaraderie are still being constructed and explored (frame by frame, level by level).
It's not that our children aren't 'digital natives', whose amateur (i.e. passion-driven) literacy and facility with ICT presents such a challenge to less hyper-mediated educators, broadcasters and parents. It's more that play, in the very way it constitutes our basic, complex-mammalian humanity, has itself always been digital – if by 'digital' one means the ability to compose and recompose culture and experience, with absolute combinatorial freedom, using abstractly redefined elements and materials.
The evolutionary urge and animus of play is to serve what the great play scholar Brian Sutton-Smith calls "adaptive potentiation". The very principle of variation that play seems to stand for – all those ways of 'taking reality lightly' that stretch from the crudest jokes to the most elaborate glass-bead games, from dressing-up to situationist art – functions to aid human survival and flourishing.
Our play moments generate hypotheses and possibilities, rehearsing us for the complex business of getting along with other complex, linguistic and self-conscious human animals. But play also delivers an emotional payoff, primarily optimism and hopefulness. We get a surge of positive, coping feelings from the games we construct, enlist others to, and try to succeed at ourselves. We are energised by the simulations we build by ourselves and with others to address some deficiency, or mitigate some challenge, in the real world. This child-like, but not necessarily childish indefatigability (or "neoteny", as the academics have it) is a particularly essential survival trait.
If this is the deep meaning of play in human socio-biology, then what becomes particularly powerful about our digital platforms and technologies is that they actually match, map and mimic the essential variability of play to an unprecedented degree. These children may be such 'digital natives' because they might well be the first generation of humans whose 'playful nature' has been given such powerful and appropriate tools of virtualisation, recombination and communication. Their phantasmagorias of play can now be made into robust worlds and environments, in which the playmates are numerous and global, and the experience can be as physical (eg the Wii console) as it is pixellated.
This will certainly be a generation of children who expect to manage their company's inventories via game consoles, or do their five-way business meetings via smart mobile phones. But their natural embrace of networks-and-digitality may have deeper, perceptual consequences. As the futurist and programmer Marc Pesce said in The Playful World a few years ago,
our children will have a different view of the "interior" nature of the world, seeing it as potentially vital, intelligent, and infinitely transformable. The "dead" world of objects before intelligence and interactivity will not exist for them, and, as they grow to adulthood, they will likely demand that the world remain as pliable as they remember from their youngest days.
A generation demanding that their material and social world remain as pliable, as infusable with imagination and desire, as their childhoods: is this a step-change to be welcomed or feared? It seems, at least, to be a possibility we should be prepared for.
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Yet how organisations, institutions and infrastructures should change when faced with the Playful Generation is an incessantly thorny question. The BBC's challenge - as a public-service media organisation with a remit to maintain certain standards of content quality, inclusiveness and educational value, its operations funded by compelled state subscription than by consumer choice – is particularly spiky.
There are two particular challenges for the BBC as a 'state' entity. One is the fact that so many of these interactive platforms derive their vigour from the commons of the web – itself a well-constituted 'play-space' that grounds and supports a multitude of initiatives and enterprises, yet which is governed neither by state nor market. And secondly, it's a commercial and enterprise culture that almost entirely propels the development of the interactive experiences that young people are embracing so avidly. When Anglo-American children reach for their messaging, gaming, or blogging software, they naturally find it in civil or market society – and not with the state, however 'enabling'.
There are many questions, of course, about exactly how viable the commercial models are for vast reaches of this interactive technium. As the veteran web guru Kevin Kelly wrote recently in Wired magazine, noting the unstoppable culture of collective play and free sharing of web 2.0, "when masses of people who own the means of production work toward a common goal and share their products in common, when they contribute labor without wages and enjoy the fruits free of charge, it's not unreasonable to call that socialism."
If the internet in its social mode is indeed tending towards restoring the reputation of collective action, the effect this is having on the rest of the media landscape is profound. For so many private media industries on the web, from news to music and movies, there is a battle royale on to establish the very basis of commerce. It's a battle between immaterial products dropping to zero cost because of digital ubiquity, and intellectual copyright lawyers desperately trying to re-license the almost un-licensable.
Meanwhile the BBC's digital platform occupies a curious space in this landscape. As a public service it's able and willing to serve the 'commons' values of the Web, in terms of its commitment to online news and services, and user-friendly content initiatives like iPlayer. The success of the fit between the Web and the Beeb causes some consternation among UK commercial web enterprises (the arrival of Channel Four's 4iP fund for public service new media hardly improves their mood). But it's not inconceivable that the next wave of development of interactive culture in the UK might happen on a more stakeholder-like model, with public and private investment and planning, instead of the venture-capitalised, 'build-it-up-and-sell-it-off' buyout model of Silicon Valley.
So what public-service role might the BBC perform in the emergent tumult of interactive culture? It might be to bring some kind of institutional or infrastructural gravity to an otherwise weightless, Darwinian whirlwind of applications and ventures. Perhaps, when faced with a legion of young players, it might be useful for BBC policy makers to return to some of the deeper play paradigms for guidance.
The ethology of play – its role in animal behaviour – tells us that play happens in conditions of relative surplus, and relative safety. The lion-cubs fight and chase, groom and explore – in short, pursue their adaptive potentiations - in an area which is usually delimited and overseen, even at a distance, by parents. Play also usually happens as an expiation of surplus energy, which builds up as a result of adequate nutrition and standards of health in the animal.
To what extent might the BBC, in the new-media landscape, perform this distant paternal role? Not the 'paternalism' of old, but the parent as a guarantor of the robust security of the 'ground of play'? By both nurturing the capacities and health of digital players, and also providing tools and platforms for their play, the BBC could find its secure footing in the interactive society.
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From reading some of the AHRC/BBC essays, one can see the BBC's role as the 'distant parent of the play generation' already being realised. We have to recognise at the start here that the BBC has had a long history of thinking developmentally and educationally about its television programming, from idiosyncratic approaches like the late (and sorely lamented) Oliver Postgate to the work of Anne Wood, with shows (like Teletubbies and In The Night Garden) informed by cutting-edge research in child psychology.
It's fascinating to read children's assessments of the utility of the classic BBC news programme Newsround in the KEP study “What Do Children Want from the BBC? Children’s Content and Participatory Environments in an Age of Citizen Media”. The researchers are right to carefully draw out the already existing models of citizenship that lie in the minds of the show's target audience, the 7-11 age-group – the need to "know what's going on in the world". (If I can make a personal note here: very often my youngest daughter would make a clear declaration that "Newsround was the best show ever", precisely because its editorial agenda gave her a sense of mastery over a world of news.)
They are also right to pick up the demand from the children themselves that Newsround could open itself up more to the possibilities of news creation, audio/visual/textual, that lie within the hands of the play generation themselves – literally, these days, as the mobile phone adds ever more multi-media functionality. As the technology editor of BBC Online News Darren Waters said at a recent conference on Twitter and real-time media, the BBC is evolving its own strategies on 'citizen journalism' – finding ways to establish protocols on monitoring and verifying content that comes in from outside the corporation.
Perhaps one constituency they could easily involve in forming these strategies are the budding 'citizen journalists' of a children's news audience. And, as the Children and the BBC study points out, the BBC also needs to begin to embrace a distinctively teenage audience, somewhat lost in the gulf between Newsround and the often punishing, baffling or tedious agenda of adult news. Indeed, in terms of the emotional intensities that shape much perception of daily reality in childhood and teenagehood, there might be much to be learned from applying social media tools to the experience of children's news.
As the media analyst Clay Shirky said recently, these playful communications platforms do lend themselves to waves of mass emotion driving awareness of news facts – positive in the light of something like the Obama campaign and its harnessing of national idealism, negative in the way that the swine flu epidemic creates waves of panic on platforms like Twitter. Is this a real awareness building and critical media literacy opportunity for the BBC and young audiences – perhaps 'playing' with the idea of social media frenzies, doing a 'Memewatch' and subjecting them to critical analysis? Channel Four have provided a lead in this area with their multi-media show for activist kids, Battlefront (www.battlefront.co.uk), which mixes media criticism with advocacy of issues, all of its content very much driven and created by the users/viewers.
Yet I was delighted (and not at all surprised) to notice from the paper that the news topic valued by all children over all others, by a very clear points lead, was – sports! Again, as a play-ethicist, I would want to stress that the play moment for 21st century kids - however 'networked-individualist' they are - will still be rooted in some of the psychological constants of development. In short, their whole bodies, as well as their minds, need excitement, exertion, testing, and basically throwing about in these growing years – and it's no surprise to see that sporting activity, our most esteemed physical play form, is what kids most want to watch from their news show. For them, physical bliss, self-possession and change is always big news.
To the Corporation's credit, it seems to realise (without much forethought) that developing the capacity of young players is a multi-sensorial, multi-disciplinary affair – an event in real time and space, involving bodies, percepts and affects, and not just something which can be exhausted in a platform, interface or gamespace. The paper "Alone Together: Social Learning and Blast" is a detailed assessment of the impact of the BBC's Blast project, an extremely well-meaning initiative that aims to nurture and encourage the performing and creative talents of the BBC's young viewership.
Yet there are some fascinating tensions revealed by the report, mostly around the lack of integration between the live Blast road shows (3-4 day events where classes and competitions around all kinds of media skills and art forms are stages) and the online community - which to some extent fuels participation, and archives the results from, those shows.
Clearly, in a wider online environment which hardly lacks in opportunities for upload of material which is then shared with peers, the Blast site itself somewhat palls in comparison with the rude, anarchic vigour of Bebo, Facebook, MySpace or YouTube. The children and teenagers themselves seem to recognise that posting such material to a BBC site implies a kind of cultural approval or status above and beyond the usual social-networked melee – and in the message boards, seem to seek out the expert "mentors" that respond to their work.
But in a media environment where voracious meritocratic talent shows command mass audiences (and mass hysteria) on one side, and hundreds of millions of iterators and mediators decide to upload their content for whatever audience they can find or amass on the other, BBC Blast sits quite curiously – part arts college, part community centre, with little of the user-generated content prioritised or thematised either by the sites' managers or its peers.
It's instructive to compare the Blast site to something like the Ning social-network platform. Ning gives users the chance to build their own powerful and media-rich website, with copious opportunities for members' to initiate groups and forums, all of these easily embeddable with audio-visual content from inside and outside each Ning network. Many of these sites have been able to support quite easily the kind of "pedagogical" role and function that Blast aspires to. Yet the pedagogy is formulated by a pretty equal combination between the site instigators and the users themselves, seeking out from each other (and from wider sources around the web) what they need to improve their craft, practice or fan obsession.
To return to our central image: should the BBC be 'playmate' with this emergent, often wild play of community formation – that is, join the civic/market space of facilitatory social tools, and let the carnival commence? Or should it be 'parent' to a different kind of play – more developmental, more focussed on 'professionally-derived' techniques ('how to make a radio item', 'hip-hop Shakespeare', etc), on guiding people to a 'creative career'.
There is clearly a civic demand for authoritative craft and expertise online, with quite a few successful peer-to-peer public learning networks. Instructibles (www.instructibles.com) gives anyone the chance to show others their techniques in craft, repair or modification: Now Play It (www.nowplayit.com) does the same for music, using big-name stars; School of Everything (www.schoolofeverything.com) aims to be an E-Bay for informal learning, bringing enthusiastic learners and teachers together to trade and share. Not to mention the vast archive of instrumental tuition and virtuosity that amateur and professional performers freely and happily upload to YouTube and other video platforms.
I wonder whether this report also shows that Blast Online should be more about what the media theorist Simon Yuill calls "distributive practice". Should Blast be a repository and conservatory for transmitting good technique, in as many art forms, and to whatever enabling depth of complexity, as is requested? This would make it much more than a "me-too" of existing user-generated content platforms.
The difficulty, but also the exciting possibilities, of situating the BBC in the contemporary matrix of play culture is only made more acute by the paper on "Virtual Worlds: An overview and study of BBC Children’s Adventure Rock". This is an excellent reflection on the strategic challenges of creating an immersive, 3D online gamespace for 7-12 year olds. The authors and game-makers seem well aware of the developmental possibilities of virtual words for children – in terms of an active relationship to media, an experience of agency and world-creation, the rehearsal of responsibility for others, etc. Their sagacity is reminiscent of The Sims' creator Will Wright's observation that all his games have been inspired by Maria Montessori's theory of toy-play as the most powerful educational tool.
It's certainly understandable, as the Virtual Worlds study says, that the BBC needs to "keep up" with commercial immersive virtual worlds (World of Warcraft, Lego Universe, etc) in order to maintain audience share in the future. Though this might sound strange coming from a play advocate, I wonder whether the BBC should get too deeply involved in the hugely capital-intensive enterprise of creating massive multiplayer online worlds, at least with the same ambitions for richness and graphical excellence as commercial rivals. (And one should always remember just how "non-commercial" some of the core investments are in these "synthetic worlds", to use the American economist Edward Castronova's term. By which I mean the heavy investment in gaming platforms by both military establishments in the US, and state-totalitarian sources in China).
Perhaps looking towards a "distributive practice" of game culture might be more in tune with the Corporation's ends, if you accept the framing of the BBC as "parent of play". For example, the subculture of machinima – that is, modding and hacking game engines to enable stories to be told – seems to me to be crying out for the kind of TV broadcast/online-platform integration that the BBC managed with the Bamzooki virtual-bot game shows. Simon Yuill's main project is to create what he calls a 'social versioning system' for game-creation. In this, local communities are given both the tools to create virtual worlds, and encourage to reflect on the social, economic and ethical rules they embed into those worlds. This strikes me as a classic developmental template for the BBC to explore with its audiences. It's not as if the BBC hasn't seeded the environment with playful and powerful technological riches before: remember the BBC Micro?
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The BBC's overall relationship with a now mainstreamed culture of digital play – always driven by young and teenage audiences but now, of course, including the 'greystation' generation of older gamers – is a crucial matter for the Corporation's continuing legitimacy as a public-service media organisation. From my own multi-disciplinary perspective of the role of play in human flourishing, I'm arguing that the BBC should adopt and develop the stance of an enriching, nurturing "parent of play", rather than an eager and heedless co-player.
There are plenty of other beasts, both sleek and rough, in the digital jungle – whether cavorting on the commons, or at battle in the marketplace. In these varied terrains, many enterprises can pursue their "adaptive potentiations" to their hearts' content - all of which diversity and change brings energy and incessant change to our now dominant play culture. But beneath the tumult, there are deeper, socio-biological contours of play in human nature: the need for a platform of stability and resource upon which all the enriching experiments of play behaviour can flourish. For me, this is a great opportunity for the BBC – but to grasp the moment, I believe it must develop its own, public-service version of a play ethic. By which I mean an ethos that justifies defending, sustaining and supporting the 'ground of play' as a crucial moment of human development. We know the one that's encoded into the very DNA of that famous nubbly-brick manufacturer: lego. Which means: to play well. What might the BBC's version of that be?
ends
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