The Play Ethic

State of "The Play Ethic" 2012: interview with Viewpoint magazine

It's nice to be pulled out of the depths of scholarship and enterprise around play and be asked to do a definitive interview on the subject - it forces me to think and speak in a way that makes public sense of my private musings and specialised consultations. This is from a Dutch magazine called Viewpoint, which is a bi-annual consumer trends journal. I'll be part of a bigger article with a number of ludocrats speaking, which I'll post here in November.

Interview with Pat Kane for Viewpoint magazine, November 2012

Why do you think play is gaining currency right now?

I think play is becoming important because of a number of crises in the way we habitually do things. Certainly in the decade before the recent financial crash, many economists and thinkers were talking about how "the Protestant work ethic" was becoming irrelevant to a networked and game-oriented generation. My 2004 book The Play Ethic suggested that these "soulitarians" would become conscious of their creative power and digital skills, and start to demand changes in social, political and occupational structure. It's hard to look at our current tumult of social-media driven protest, at all kinds of levels, and not see the proof of that. But I think play is also becoming central because it's a component of even bigger arguments about what growth and prosperity mean - on one side from the period of indebtedness we're about to endure, but on the other side from the crisis of consumerism, and the carbon consequences of all that material throughput, that a moment's contemplation on the climate-change statistics would incite. We need to find new motivating narratives in our lives, beyond status anxiety and lifestyle excess. Play, as a planet-friendly, convivial way to bring thrills and pleasures into our lives with others, is a prime element of those new "wellbeing" narratives. 

What’s your philosophy on play?

Always evolving and changing, like play itself. But in recent years I have drawn a lot from evolutionary accounts of human nature in my understanding of play. My great guide on play theory, Brian Sutton-Smith, calls play "adaptive potentiation". Play helps neurologically-complex, deeply-sociable mammals (like  us!) refine and rehearse living with other creatures like ourselves. And given our human capacity for self-reflection and conceptualisation, play in humans - the more distant from raw need and survival we get - becomes more and more the central action of our lives, rather than a practise zone for it. Play is the prime indicator that we are (as the title of my next book has it) a "radical animal" (www.radicalanimal.net) - but that this natural inheritance is dynamic, experimental and inventive, rather than just our savannah-era limitations constantly tripping us up - which is my problem with all this "nudge"-style behavioural economics. Presuming we're Homer Simpson, rather than homo (et femina) ludens.

How is the role of play changing, both in individuals’ lives and in society?

As above, I think play is becoming the central activity (arguably, alongside care) of healthy, better-educated, more self-determining people in the developed (and eventually the emerging) world economies and societies - rather than the degraded Puritan residue that the "work ethic" defines it as. There's also a very strong argument for its social centrality in terms of basic public health. For educationalists, it's a global given now that we must extend the play-moment in early years education, in order that neurological and physiological development happens to their fullest degree (the Scandinavians with their world-beating educational scores proves that, as does the brain science). But this will move beyond the kindergarten, into later years, and eventually out of the school and into wider organisational life. The general paradigm of purposefulness and value-adding activity that comes from gamer culture will get stronger and stronger, as a logic for running companies and organisations. How does an activity satisfy our demands for meaning, mastery and autonomy - as the best games do? Might genuinely committed, actively learning and relatively-free-to-decide employees be a real competitive edge in an economy where consumption becomes less important than experience? 

What do you think of the idea of play being co-opted by brands and businesses?

Play can't really be co-opted by any form of social organisation - as it is one of the elemental processes that lead to any effective social organisation itself. But I'm happy to see play being invoked as a positive term or signifier by corporate brands - as I think it is a term which has radical implications for how we think of time, space and resources in our lives. Genuine playfulness is not leisure, something you do after the daily grind - it's an open, experimental and socially joyful way of being that, if embraced, has incalculable consequences for the norms of how we produce and consume. Play will as easily co-opt big biz!

How has digital gaming influenced play?

Answered at points above, but digital gaming is to the 21st century what printed books were to the Renaissance - it's a fundamental reorienting of how human beings see reality and how its elements interrelate. It's as profound as the shift from seeing one's life as a narrative line, a story running through a book, to seeing one's life as an element in a system, in which one's actions are profoundly wrapped up in others. The question for me now is the degree to which we can teach games-making literacy, in the way that the study of literature encouraged new literary genres - the systems that we enter into with our games are too much scripted from above, it's interpassivity as much as interactivity. But that will come. 

How do you see the role of play evolving?

My small moment of pride recently was the news that my work has been exhibited on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art in New York - or to be precise, an axiom about play I've been promoting for years was part of an exhibiton called Century of the Child that showed there this autumn. The axiom runs: "Play will be to the 21st century what work was to the Industrial Age - our dominant way of knowing, doing and creating value". I think it's going to be as important to that in our daily lives. 

The past and future of public play: Olympic meditations (keynote for Hide And Seek)

The slides to my opening keynote for the Hide And Seek Weekender conference, 'Playing in Public', at Queen Elizabeth Hall, South Bank Centre, London, 17.9.12. Any thoughts, responses, questions, let me know. (It's much more legible in full-screen, btw). 

 

Getting Play/Game Right and The Consequences For Comms: PK at Creative Social, 5/10/11

My presentation to Creative Social's Fanboy series, at an event titled "Mania of the Geek"  My prez's title is "Getting Play/Game Right and The Consequences for Comms" All comments welcome. 

GETTING PLAY/GAME RIGHT AND THE CONSEQUENCES FOR COMMS

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Coupling Up & Powering Down: PK's Final Day @ Wonderlab

Last day of Wonderlab, but more than a few of us are feeling like it's mid-week at summercamp. Particularly since we are given the starting injunction that “now we're on a deadline, with an important audience coming in later on, and we have to produce an original game by 6pm”. Phrases like “invisible prototyping” and “games that embody their challenge in the rule set” are flying around, even before coffee and buns are properly ingested. 

I'm trying to locate that strange tension in my neck, and then it clicks: school sports day, third in the relay team, shitting it that the baton won't slip from my sweaty fingers at the last. Sometimes in this space, the distinction between play and games feels very clear indeed. 

Before we split up into two games-making teams, who will magically morph their ideas into one clear platform after lunch, we hear a presentation from Mark Earls (click on name for video of presentation), who wants to talk to us about the importance of copying in culture, beginning with the Oscar Wilde quip, “most lives are quotations from the lives of others”. Mark's work is lauded and admirable, and he's had many nice things to say about my stuff on play in the past. 

But I have to confess: I've always had a problem with a busy and active advertising man telling me, from a range of psychological and behavioural findings, that my sense of unique selfhood is an illusion, and that I am much likelier to shape my behaviour by copying others than by proceeding from my own cognition or reflection. Doesn't that mean marketing just shifts its focus from the individual's identity to the conversation they're involved in – a subtler field, but surely just as (maybe even more) determinable than older appeals to class, gender or region? 

Citing his work with a very ubiquitous family food brand (who shall remain nameless), Mark says that the brand's meaning now belongs to the consumers – the company's job is now to host and enable their conversations, rather than weld consumer desire to produced object. But this raises again the whole question of how much power resides in the hands of the “referees of social games”. The softer and less coercive capitalism gets, the more it tries to engage consumers through hosting games and discourse, the more it diffuses itself into every corner of our interior and exterior lives. Thus, again, Jesse Schell's nightmare vision. 

It felt like a purifying, light-hearted act of play to then sit down and learn some nerdy card games. This was training for our closing act of game-making, where our main prop was a pack of blank playing cards, ready to be inscribed as tokens in our rule-sets. With others, I got lost in a very abstract game called Set – very similar to the 'Snap'/Twist games I play with my daughter regularly. As I've been wanting to reduce my anxiety about performance-in-competition throughout these days, I found myself adhering to one single internal strategy – pick a winning set of cards that are as different from each other as possible – and judged myself internally as to how well I was doing, than bothering in any way about victory over others. 

Many of the other games were ingenious, and sometimes beautiful: Labyrinth, through a very simple arrangement of tokens, made the path of the game itself morph and change; Lost Cities wove a flickbook narrative across its gaming cards; Lightspeed turned cards randomly scattered onto a table into an almost 3D-action space. But my own abiding motivation for playing is to use the game as a pretext for finding out the depths (maybe also the shallows) of my fellow players. For me, the contestation enables the wider, broader sociability. 

So we split off into our two groups, and our group was guided by one participant's declaration that “we should remember we're making a game for London media wankers – like us!” Thus followed much discussion about Neil Strauss's seduction manual The Game. What rules and scenarios could we devise to subvert the stylish sovereignty of the thoroughly capable and self-possessed people coming through the door tonight? Battering together something along these lines, we met up with the other group and delightfully discovered that (no doubt under the guiding intent of that old Marxist Momus) they had come up with a partnering game, under the rule of love and attraction, in which nobody really wins. Our task in an hour was to try and fuse these two games together – one aiming to dent the arrogance of those media selves in a Regency room, the other aiming at the fusion of souls based on part luck, part flirting, part real empathy. 

Coupling and De-Coupling Up

Under Margaret Robinson's guiding hand, we managed it. We called the game "Couple Up". And it was, first of all, utterly specific to the space itself: two large rooms, an adjoining passageway which controlled access to each. It was also specific to the event: a group of people whose relationship varied from friendship to acquaintance to being strangers, coming to witness the result of a gaming process. The first move was to herd them into one bare empty room: the other room - roped off - was visibly full of wine, chairs and nibbles. The room of plenty - called, with crushing crudity, the "Upper Club" - was protected by a Maitre' D (Momus in a pink Post-it bowtie). Then two cards were given to each of the players – one card from a number set of 1-4, another a “fortune” card which described a personality trait or behaviour. 

Armed with these cards, the attendees had to “couple up”. First numerically (their cards must add up to five), and then in terms of character traits: you asked a potential “coupler” questions based on the personality trait on your card (eg, likes coffee/hates Arsenal/indifferent to Lady Gaga, etc). But the game constraint was that you could not use any of the words underlined on the card (eg, coffee, Arsenal, Lady Gaga, etc).

Once you had gone through that bit of social fun and forged yourselves as “couples” (all mixes of ages and genders permitted), you were able to march up to the Maitre'd and ask for permission to the “Upper Club”. And then the exclusions kicked in. For our Maitre'd had a secret rule for turning couples away from the Upper Club, denying them access to the revelry. This was decided by observing the guests gathering, and picking out some obvious regularities in their sartori (eg, either or both had to wear glasses, or have their sleeves rolled up). And as couple after couple presented themselves and were rebuffed, the challenge for them was to deduce what arrangement of themselves would allow them to make the cut. 

How did it play out in practice? Well, Momus could not have been a more gracious and polite Maitre'd (I was posted as his Coatbridge muscle, ready to repel any game-trashers). But I certainly saw him wilt under the burden of his authority, and let some couples through who decidedly did not fit the criteria. And while some couples enjoyed figuring out the door-entry policy, one or two at the end were getting visibly frustrated and annoyed at not being able to guess the hidden rule (we let them in before tempers began to escalate). 

Did we labour mightily in the fields of game-making theory, and bring forth a veritable mouse? Unfortunately, I think so. One of the shaping concepts of this final day was whether we could imagine a game where “the topic was embedded in the rule-set”. Undoubtedly, if this was a game being made by media wankers for media wankers, then it's perhaps no surprise that the joys of social association were made to thump straight into the severities of social exclusion: Toughen up, folks, this is a world for fluid networkers, not stiff-backed dullards! For all the (often brilliant) consideration of the abstract components of game-making in the previous days, and the grand ambitions about “behaviour change” erected upon such abstractions, we ended up expressing the tedious “culture” of our time and place all-too-predictably. 

And there it was, "Couple Up". Probably not coming to a conceptual arts venue near you anytime soon. 

Wondering at Wonderlab

Coming down from this experience over the last few days, I'm struggling to say whether a greater understanding of games-making techniques has made me more sympathetic towards, or more critical of, this cultural form as it currently stands. I'm happy not to drive to a conclusion at the moment – usually best to let these things work themselves out through more thinking, talking, or “iteration” (as the designers love to say). I'm enough of a play scholar to know that games are as eternal as the human cultural record, but also that there can be a contestive fundamentalism in thinking about games which is all too easy to fall into (we do live in a competition-oriented, market-dominant society after all).

As a corrective, apart from grumpy leftists like Momus and myself, I'd certainly suggest that the next Wonderlab builds an ornate Lego throne and royally installs the great Bernie De Koven (founder of the New Games Movement in the 70's, and currently blogging at Deep Fun). Bernie has devoted a lifetime to thinking about games (and toys) that evade the obvious and coarsening effects of zero-sum competition. A quote from one of his recent posts will suffice (with a nod to Tassos):

...No matter how new the game, a game can be no more than an invitation to play. It’s not the game itself, it’s play that renews us. Play without goals, rules, reasons. Play per se.

And the quality of the game, the well-playedness of it all, frequently has little to do with the game itself, little to do with the goodness of the players themselves, and everything to do with the unqualified goodness of being in play.

Play is a taste of health. A momentary engagement in the natural exuberance, exhilaration, ebullience of life at its liveliest. An affirmation of our boundless wisdom, limitless capacities.

And when play is especially good, transcendentally, transformationally good, it’s because of the people with whom we are at play, in play. The community of players. The people with whom we play community. The people with whom, when we are at one with ourselves, we are at one.

But after the event, I came across two stories which express my genuine ambiguity and ambivalence about games. This weekend, the FT magazine reported on the pre-eminence of board games over computer games in German culture. Tim Harford gave an account of the difference between a major “Euro-game”, called Settlers of Catan, and You Know What:

The Settlers of Catan superficially resembles Monopoly. The board is assembled from hexagonal tiles, but the components include wood houses that look much like Monopoly buildings. The idea is similar, too: players use resources (money in Monopoly; timber, wool and other commodities in Settlers) to build property; the property then collects further resources, and the process of expansion continues.

Yet after Monopoly, Settlers was a revelation. Monopoly ends in the slow strangulation of the weaker players and usually feels stale long before the official end, assuming it isn’t abandoned along the way. Settlers didn’t take long – perhaps an hour – and even as it was coming to an end, every player was still involved. In Monopoly, many choices can be made on autopilot; in Settlers, there is scope for skill throughout a game: the decisions always matter and are always interesting. Settlers has its own elegant economy, in which the supply and demand for five different commodities are determined by tactics, luck and the stage of the game. Players constantly haggle, wheedle and plead. It’s convivial experience, a game of incessant banter. In the course of an evening, I was hooked.

The game as generator of “banter and conviviality”, as a means of “tasting the health of play... as we play community”, is precisely the kind of game that I, and I bet many others, would like to see emerging from the computer games sector. I've no doubt Hide and Seek, and others who are thinking at this intense level about the aesthetics and ethics of their sector, are on the case with this.

My other cultural moment – which falls on the negative side of my ambivalence about games – came from watching Christopher Nolan's new movie Inception. There's no doubt this is a movie for the gamer generation. The thieves who enter other people's dreams conceive their territory, the dream space of a person, as comprising of different levels or worlds, in which the rules can be self-consistent, but utterly arbitrary – gravity failing at certain points, injuries not really being injuries, etc. So far, so game-like.

Even the group which comes together to do the dream-exploring – charlatan, teen maths whiz, bureaucrat, mad scientist, intense hero - feels like the cast-list of a particularly nerd-esque team adventure movie. But David Denby's review of Inception in the New Yorker nailed precisely why all this dazzling elaboration left me intellectually charged, but emotionally unmoved. There are two breathlessly mentioned realpolitik referents in the movie: i) the fact that “the military” developed this dream-surfing science. And: ii) their mission is to manipulate the dreams of the heir of a massive energy empire, so that he can decide to break it up, preventing its total dominance of world energy. But as Denby says: 

Why would we root for one energy company over another? There’s no spiritual meaning or social resonance to any of this, no critique of power in the dream-world struggle between C.E.O.s. It can’t be a coincidence that Tony Gilroy’s “Duplicity” (2009), which was also about industrial espionage, played time games, too. The over-elaboration of narrative devices in both movies suggests that the directors sensed that there was nothing at the heart of their stories to stir the audience. In any case, I would like to plant in Christopher Nolan’s head the thought that he might consider working more simply next time. His way of dodging powerful emotion is beginning to look like a grand-scale version of a puzzle-maker’s obsession with mazes and tropes.

Might a “puzzle-makers obsession with mazes and tropes” be a way of “dodging powerful emotion”, rather than taking it on? I am always struck by how rare it is when gamers can say that a game experience made them cry – and the wonderment in the voice when they do so. I sense that there is much thought and practice to do in exploring the emotional dimension of game experience, beyond the exultation of a “win-state”. (Brian Sutton-Smith's newest turn of play theory addresses precisely this issue - download this article). But I hope that will be a topic for future Wonderlabs to come. For now, I'm extremely grateful for the experience. Hope you get the next golden ticket...

Lifestyle Nazis, Beckett Meets Tetris & Rules Are Crystals In Your Pocket: PK @ Wonderlab, Day 2, PM

A muggy afternoon on Day 2 of Wonderlab, the huge windows at the end of the Nash room in the ICA opened as high as they can be, so we can gulp in a little air. And I, along with my fellow Lab technicians, am going to design my first ever game. 

Which is immediately untrue. I'm sure that when I was a child, with Lego and soldiers strewn across my toyroom floor, I was inventing games and scenarios incessantly. As a father, when I got a chance to hear my children at play with their pals -  particularly up until about middle of primary school - I was always thrilled to overhear how they would roughly compose the rules of a game among themselves. The materials to hand might be pop songs, or a found object, or something they were wearing, or the staples of rope or ball. I simply know that children are natural game-makers, as well as players. The promise of these few days, for me, was about learning a way to recover that innate capacity. 

Was it my first technologically-inspired game? Even then that's not strictly true – every game is determined by the materials it faces and the setting it's in. If it's a half-broken branch on a tree that affords a little springyness before it snaps entirely... well, there's your technology. I'll have to settle for “first game created according to explicit game-making methodology”. 

As it was laid out by H&S's Margaret Robertson, the methodology was fertile and productive. What's the verb that describes what happens in a game? (I had a little dispute about whether crown bowls – my father's favourite pastime – had “target” or “shoot” as its core verb. In no way was John Kane a sharp-shooter at the Blairhill Bowling Club). We considered the three layers of game design: mechanics (the basic rules that specify action), dynamics (what things possibly happen in the game when you play it), aesthetics (what it feels like to play it, what its culture is, what's the "fun"?). If we knew the objective for a game, what would make it “interestingly hard” to meet that objective? And finally, how do you know you've won – what does “victory” look like?  We were sent off in groups of three to create our game. As well as the verbs, we were asked to each name our greatest fear: from both of these elements, our game would spring. 

I think the most charitable description of our team's game was that it was an instructive failure. Our three fear words were 'ignorance', 'confidence' and (my own) 'fascism' – and immediately, the whole question of how a game could articulate or explore something as horrifying, but substantial, as fascism gripped our over-intellectualised minds. We all shied away from trying to create a “serious” game – one where the gameplay was at the service of a message (say, transforming the attitudes of BNP half-sympathisers) – and tended towards making a set of rules that implicitly or abstractly tested the exclusiveness, the antipathy, the power-relations of fascism. How could you be made to feel or act like a fascist, even if you didn't want to, using an aesthetic symbolism which was far away from the obvious signs of that creed? How could you obliquely explore the dangers of that psychology and behaviour? 

And so, building up from what seems to be the initial move in game-design – ie, reduce the psychology of your player to a basic series of binary decisions about yes/no, stronger/weaker, happy/sad, mine/thine  – we began the intense, strange journey to “Lifestyle Nazi”. The crucial, indeed hilariously weird moment, was when our team was sitting in the ICA cafe. I was spluttering out some game scenario which involved Seinfield's Soup Nazi gag; plus the inevitable arrogance about sensibility and taste that came with membership of the creative class; plus a kind of weekly social network game, where your job was to try and guess what your friends' excellent consumption and service choices were, so you could join them as a...Lifestyle Nazi! At that point, one of our team did the oddest thing. “I'm sorry, I can't get involved in this conversation any more”. Why not? “I'm in a situation where... it's a patent thing... you really have to carry on without me”. And with that our colleague sat silently, literally cast speechless by some far-off Non Disclosure Agreement. Copyright Nazi had just entered the room. 

I looked up at the wall, more than a little frustrated - and there, as a giant photo in the ICA cafe, was the simplest game about fascism imaginable. A white working class woman in a St.George's-flag-bedecked neighbourhood was peering at a tent on a lawn, which had Arabic script across one side of the sheet. “What's In The Tent, Sharon?” I muttered to myself, my mind running on the rails of a game-logic that was beginning to take me over.

The games from the other two teams – a card game where people auction themselves to establish greater personal worth, another one using Plato's cave as a device to explore chaos and imposition – were also thoroughly determined by the fears used as the starting-point for creation. Though it was an enjoyably demanding process, I'll admit my heart sank a little at the pinched, petty image of human subjectivity that sat at the heart of each of these games (ours included). If our initial question had been, “what do we love most?”, would our gaming have been different? 

At some point in our Lifestyle Nazi making, it struck me that the way many people use Twitter is as a love-game, or at least an attraction-game - a positive, indeed helpful display of their sensibility, a showing-off but also a sharing of their internal and external resources. Could the reason we embrace these networks be much less about farming or Mafia games, and much more about the way they enable easy self-expression and rich discourse, the way they amplify the sharing dimensions of culture? A conversation depends on the abundant resources of language, which is fuelled by intersubjectivity, and in principle never needs to end; a game (at least one which aims at a “clear win-state”) deliberately limits its resource base, which equally delimited subjects scrabble over, to get to something "that feels like victory". 

(I kept bringing up James Carse's Finite and Infinite Games in the course of these days – though he's a scary reference. Carse says that a finite game can be in the service of an infinite game – we're winning these victories so we can learn better how to sophisticate the rules of the game, include more people in the game, learn about ourselves and our culture through the game. But one of his definitions of evil is that of an infinite game in the service of a finite game: that is, a never-ending, war-of-all-against-all commitment to victory. Funny enough, he calls that Fascism/Nazism...). 

All this brings a different take on Jesse Schell's bemusement – quoted in my previous post - at why these “crappy, flash-based, turn-based games” on Facebook and other social network platforms have been so successful. The answer is, they're just finite (indeed, crappy) little pretexts – alongside other pretexts like gift-giving, sharing/curating, commenting/expressing – to help us engage in the potentially infinite social communication that something like Facebook (or more generally the internet) affords. 

I've never come across a more synoptic framing of play than Brian Sutton-Smith's seven rhetorics – and he places “play-as-power-and-contest” as only one mode of play among many others, one instrument in the evolutionary repertoire (and in no way the most dominant) by which play helps us complex mammals to adapt and flourish. So much of Wonderlab seems like a self-conscious deep-dive into the rhetoric of 'play-as-power', with all the other rhetorics hovering around as the lovely assistants to the main magician. A very useful exercise, but a very particular experience.

Such was the quality of curation at this event, though, there were always grace notes against the main theme. Aleks Krotoski's charming presentation spoke about three instances of delicious anticipation – her participation in a volleyball competition, a roller coaster ride, a promenade theatre experience – when she had “put herself into something, knowing that something was coming along to surprise or shock me, but also feeling completely safe”. Knowingly I'm sure, Aleks described there the primal moment of developmental play, what I was trying to show with my laughing/biting baby clips in my opening presentation (turn the sound right up) – play as a place for ultimately safe and healthy experimentation. 

But as with the biting baby, who simply wasn't able to calibrate his strength over someone else's flesh, play in the shape of contestive games can always threaten to go too far. There's an intoxication when power gets amplified by a sense of ultimate possibility, the “spiel macht frei” etched invisibly over the door of DeSade's boudoir, or the Abu Ghraib torture room presided over by the fun-loving Lindie England. (My friend Momus nodded imperceptibly at that one). 

Of course this must be part of art's armoury, what it has to do to map the perimeter of our human condition. One of our Wonderlabbers Melanie talked about her theatre experiment In A Small Town Anywhere, which cast the audience into two groups in a town – the Wrens (New Labour) and the Larks (Conservative) – who the dramatists then consciously “gamed” or catalysed (by urging them to get a Mayor elected, by strewing a poison-pen letter writer in their midst, by inducing them to scapegoat and then murder someone). “At some points I have to say it was sheer anarchy, pretty dangerous” said Melanie, citing the Kent State experiments by Philip Zimbardo. (Though see this correction by a co-producer of this experience, Tassos Stevens, in comments below). 

So contestive game-spaces crackle with energies which demand a lot of monitoring - which again for me raises the question of the governance, even the "parenting" of a healthy play experience (and to be fair, exploring that topic was something that Alex from Hide And Seek's wanted from this event at the start). But after two days of nerve-jangling rule-making, it was a total joy to hear a presentation from games maker Tassos Stevens which completely re-asserted the necessity and primacy of play, and the way that games are only ever secondarily dependent on play's wide, messy field of free conjunction and connection. I'd be happy to quote you the entire text,  so thoroughly do I endorse it, but here's a favourite passage:

Game arises from play. A rule-set crystallises a set of actions distilled from an experience of play. That crystal can be popped in your pocket to be played with again and again, any time, any place, with anyone entranced by its sparkle. It gets chipped and scratched, then rubbed and polished. It becomes a lens that focuses action in time and space and for one brief encounter let’s us act as if we lived in a simpler world, the kind of world that can be described in a rule-set. But the very best thing about it is that if we want to, we can smash it up and grind it into paste to make believe anew. Even if let alone, its inherent ephemerality will let it pass; like a playful version of the second law of thermodynamics, people stop playing attention and soon the game dissolves into flux. It’s the playful spirit of the game that’s more important than the letter of the rules.

Well, exactly. 

Maurice Suckling's second presentation on how storytelling and narrative work in games was worthy of an entire post to itself - which I will attempt over the next few days. But in essence he was laying out a complex map of how games should (and shouldn't) use the power of story; and that perhaps theatre was a better cultural analogue for games makers than blockbuster movie – a sense that games similarly set the scene, allow the attention to rove around the stage, and develop dramatic potential within that. 

Our day closed – I presume with intentional mischief – with exactly one of those blockbuster-aspiring games makers: Richard Lamartin from Naughty Dog, makers of the Uncharted series, on a Skype line from California. Apart from his confession that at some point he'd like to stop making “popcorn munchers”, and start thinking about a cross between Tetris and Beckett (“I'd call it Waiting for a Straight Piece”), the relevant question was again put by Momus: was his games-making imagination being subsumed by Hollywood, or was he actually on the way to being the dominant new paradigm? 

Richard mostly demurred at that one. But one thing that perked my interest was their embrace of machinima – players getting their hands on games-making tools as part of the game experience – at the heart of Uncharted. The news that all it had been used for was by fans making rave vids about the game itself was a bit bathetic (I prefer what Xtranormal is making possible for all the new generation of comic-strip detourning situationists). 

And so day 2 of Wonderlab ended. My one thought as I left the ICA, head bubbling and reeling: You know what, Kane? Ten years after you named them, the soulitariat has actually turned up. Now, be responsible about what you wished for. 

Buckets of sound and Sabbath games: PK @ Wonderlab, Day 2, morning

Day two of London game designer Hide And Seek's Wonderlab sessions, and it's a morning to be substantially impressed by the taste and sensibilities of the organisers. (The videos of all our presentations are piling up here). 

Maurice Suckling, a computer game scriptwriter, first delivers us a small conceptual tap-dance around the idea of infinity. It involves Hilbert's Grand Hotel Paradox, the infinity of decimal points between 0 and 1, and our own coming longevity crisis when we figure out how to switch off cell decay.

Maurice's charm overcomes my long-standing maths anxiety, though I find myself prodding away at my iPhone Google to look up Antonio Negri's elevation of eternity over infinity: “It then becomes clear why the eternal is not equivalent with the infinite. Love, indeed, is not infinite but eternal, it is not a measure but rather measurelessness, not individual but singular, not universal but common, not the substance of temporality but the arrow of time itself.” Luckily the poor man escapes before I can regale him with this counter-mathematical thesis. 

Yep. It's one of those kinds of events. Godel, Escher, Bach and Italian Marxists in a baking hot room in the Pall Mall.

We then have a refreshing round of what is effectively Call My Bluff – give two statements about yourself, one a lie and one true, and subject yourself to the audience for verification (mine's is: I was once a Lord [true: I was the Lord Rector of Glasgow University 1990-93]. And: I have a Polish great-uncle – false, it's actually my mother's father). Thoroughly rubbish at dissimulation and easily rumbled, I'm given two great techniques for lying well: tell the fake story in the wrong order – liars always try anxiously to make their stories sequential. And lie with as much natural unevenness in your presentation as possible. And I won't tell you whether I ever apply these (or not). 

Then Nick Ryan, a music and sound design consultant, gives us a startling tour de force of his work (all videos here). He shows a 1944 Polish animation rendering a classical choral in graphical shapes (though I do remember Disney's Fantasia making the same move a few years earlier), and some elegant materialisations of sound: a bucket that you make noises into, which you can then physically pour out; a psychedelic projection of graphic shapes onto a vapor cloud, matching the howls and roars of the crown; and a textured wall piece where your touch on its surface modulates a mutant orchestral wail.

The only lurch into inelegance is a piece called Bicycle For Two Thousand, where Ryan used Amazon's Mechanical Turk – a site where you do little bits of informational piece-work – to make a bellowing, lurching version of Daisy, Daisy from over 2000 tiny contributions (never did “the wisdom of the crowd” sound so unattractive, which I guess was the point). 

I wanted to know whether we were getting anywhere near the Cantina scene in Star Wars, where the alien bands play new instruments; Nick replied that he was reverse-engineering musical instruments from any sound you could imagine, using CAD to visualise the cavity in which they'd sound most true (a project called The Shape of Sound for PRS). Tom Armitage of Berg sidled up to me and showed me a musical sock puppet they were designing, in which a blues scale could be expressively performed by opening and twisting its knitted maw (all this inspired by the Japanese tradition of musical toys, exemplified by Maywa Denki). It's been quite a few days for casually sharing the motivating obsessions of capacious people, as we take respite from the rule-dominated juggernaut of the games-making process.

Jason Anthony gave a thrilling presentation on how games and religion could have an amazing relationship together in the 21st century (see video), as exemplified by his own Ten Year Game project. I've been fascinated by play and spirituality since the Play Ethic book in 2004, and it was a delight to hear such a theologically informed talk. The core of his notion – that religion is both deep truth and active ritual, both logos and praxis, and that games might be a new medium to extend and develop the second term – is summed up by his beautiful axiom: “the Jews have preserved the Sabbath, but the Sabbath has also preserved the Jews”. (And as the Buddhists might retort, mindfulness surpasses all reality anyway). 

The comments came thick and fast: if we think about religion, are we thinking about system design rather than game design? Is the difference that games are played for a short time, but religions has to sustain themselves for a long time? “While technology evolves forwards”, quipped Jason brilliantly, “religions evolve backwards”, reflecting endlessly on their originary moments. But that hermeneutic dimension doesn't mean religions can't be gamed – it just shifts the nature of the gaming. Both the Olympics (as an originally religious event), and gambling (where the Gods of luck are propitiated), are both games where skill and strength wrestles with chance and cosmic luck. 

I wanted to know what Jason thought of the 'basic rule set' of all Axial religions as outlined by the theologian Karen Armstrong, in her attempt to bring about some peace among the fundamentalisms: that Buddhism, Islam and Christianity are all founded on the Golden Rule of com-passion, doing to others as you would have done to yourself. Too soft a rule to generate something ludic? Someone suggested the board game Pandemic – where players have to collaborate to stamp out a whole range of different diseases – but is a game of collaboration the same as a game of compassion? 

I asked whether Scientology was a caution to Jason's ambition for the religious opportunity for games – a pyramidial belief-system, founded on ever higher levels of adeptness, cynically invented by a bad SF author in California! Tom from Berg gave the characteristic designer's response: as a religion, Scientology is just a terrible game, where participation is stratified and kept at its appropriate levels. Where's the fun in definitively knowing you're a lesser being? But essentially, he conceded, there's no difference between Scientology's world-imagining and a game designer's. 

Momus leant over to me and whispered a distinction between orthodoxy (which compels Western Christians to feel guilty when they violate the deep truth of their religion) and orthopraxy (which means that Confucians feel shame when they're caught in a misdemeanor, but hope that a speedy apology will return them safely to their web of relationships). 

That was useful (as Mr Currie endlessly is). I sometimes wonder with this lot whether their game orthodoxy is too limited - “where's the win-state in this?” I hear all day, as if there hadn't been thousands of years of koans, paradoxes and non-zero-sum games where “winning a game” is at least an exercise in irony and hubris. And that, indeed, they don't think enough about their game orthopraxy – the fact that games are not little abstract machines for sorting out winners and losers, but are always embedded in the thick physical-emotional soup of multitudinous humans interacting with each other. That was my lesson from playing Nomic the other day – how an open, rewritable rule set generated conviviality, performance, laughter, social capital among us. Where a game of Monopoly, a very tight and competitive rule set, often just generates – at least in my family experience - the worst fights and the most unpalatable behaviour.

I'm writing this before the beginning of Day 3 of Wonderlab, so I'll stop here at our lunch break on day 2. But look out for the next post on the afternoon of day 2, in which some of my real misgivings about the culture and mindset of gaming gets put through both spinner and tumble-drier, and comes out feeling crumpled but definitely cleaner. In any case, all props to Hide And Seek - a genuinely demanding and illuminating event. 

My review of 'Fun Inc.' and 'A Casual Revolution'

My review for the Independent of two excellent books on game culture. All comments welcomed.

Fun Inc., By Tom Chatfield (Virgin)

A Casual Revolution, By Jesper Juul (MIT) 

Reviewed by Pat Kane

Friday 15th January, 2010

Those of us who have been dented in a tender financial place by the latest tera-byte crunching games platform may be up for a little intellectual justification of our Xmas spending. So here are two crackers: Tom Chatfield's Fun Inc. is the most elegant and comprehensive defence of the status of computer games in our culture I have read, as well as a helpful compendium of research. And Jesper Juul's A Casual Revolution provides even more conceptual filigree to justify the refinement of your cyber-tennis forehand on the Wii.

But are computer games "the 21st century's most serious business"? The numbers surrounding the sector are certainly thudding. By the end of 2008, annual sales of video games - not including consoles or devices - was $40 billion, comfortably outstripping the movie business. In the same year, Nintendo's employees were more profitable per head than Google's.

The sheer pervasiveness of game experience - 99 per cent of teenage boys and 94 per cent of teenage girls having played a video game - means that instant naffness falls upon those who express a musty disdain for the medium. Chatfield wickedly punctures Boris Johnson's vestigial urban chic by quoting his description of video-gamers as "blinking lizards... without ratiocination, discovery or feat of memory".

In fact, as Fun Inc. elegantly explains, computer game-playing has a very strong claim to be one of the most vital test-beds for intellectual enquiry. Rather than shock-haired politicians bemoaning "vanished dreams of an unmediated society", they should be looking to massive multi-player online games (MMOs) as a laboratory for the better angels of our civic nature.

As anyone who has even tentatively stepped into the virtual world of games like Eve Online or World of Warcraft would corroborate, Chatfield finds there "elections, formal debates and fundamental discussions, self-organising task forces, mass communications and mass motivations", and every shade of human grouping. That you may be a citizen with bejewelled tusks, or a trader of interstellar cargo, does not for Chatfield signify a weird retreat from political engagement. In the spirit of the best play scholarship, he sees games as a tool for learning how to handle offline complexities - as social rehearsals that make us wiser and more sophisticated in our responses.

Corporations are now scouring CVs for evidence of "level 70 guild leader status" in online games, signifying responsibility and leadership skills. There is a clear-eyed chapter on the mutually-supportive relationship between the US military and computer-game players - one just as strong with medical trainers and environmental modellers. Economists are using virtual worlds to conduct controlled experiments on our spontaneous behaviour as traders. And there's an unequivocal thumbs-up to the Scottish education sector, which seems to be the global leader in adapting games for use in schools.

Where Chatfield inspires most trust is the way he handles the unavoidable fact that "a player is actually 'doing' rather than merely watching" acts of violence and cruelty - neither or which is "peculiar to, or even common in, games". He notes that of the top 20 bestselling console games of all time, only one - the infamous Grand Theft Auto - involves explicit violence. The top three are Wii Play, Nintendogs and Pokemon.

Even a figure as mainstream as TV supernanny Tanya Byron, in her report on children and cyberculture last year, came to the conclusion that we need to move from a model of games "causing harm" to "the adult business of education, contextualisation, responsible classification and regulation". All the violence-and-games research, exhaustively cited in Fun Inc., makes clear that the onus should be on identifying those who need social support, rather than hyping up the negative effect of one newer media over any other.

Chatfield concedes one medical scare-quote on the impact of games, on their addictive powers. Indeed, given the way games are designed to tap into our compulsive, species-deep desire to learn, it's perhaps no surprise that they tap into the same neurological joy-loops as alcohol or sucrose.

This is where the "incorporated" part of the title starts to seem a little less witty, and a little more creepy. Many cyber-critics are beginning to identify "playbour" in net culture - play as exploited information-labour. The fun of games online is, on this view, a commercial fly-trap. As their ludic gizmos entice our social and imaginative natures to keep pressing the fun-button, all manner of civic and consumer data is being harvested by corporations. And maybe worse - witness the mega-surveillant Chinese state's heavy investment in online game worlds, not mentioned in Chatfield's book.

These "casual" games, purchased cheaply or downloaded freely, and played across the screens that occupy not just our living rooms but our pockets and laps, are the subject of Jesper Juul's The Casual Revolution. In its way, this delightful, straightforward book is an exercise in what they used to call in my English course "practical criticism" - a theory-light disassembling of the essential components of an art form. We are introduced to robust concepts like "juiciness": the visual and aural rewards that these simpler games give their mildly distracted users.

Juul reveals a hightly entertaining schism in the gamer community - an elitist disgust from "hardcore" gamers at the rise of this cheap'n'cheerful sector. It seems as much a response to the maturing of existing gamers (as one interviewee says, "I'm a dad now, I've no time to disappear into the loft for days with a virtual platoon"), the raw economics of the bigger games (now costing scores of millions to develop), and the desire to broaden gender appeal, as a retreat from the kind of sublimity that Chatfield promotes.

The wildly successful Wii Golf or Tennis, or music games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero, are often about adding a virtual element to the existing physicality of a familiar play-form. Yet one should always be alert towards the return of the ancient in the world of play. At the end of Fun Inc., Chatfield invokes the Dutch play-theorist par excellence, Johan Huizinga.

He makes a comparison between Huizinga's idealisation of chivalric and carnivalesque play in the medieval era and the patriarchal guilds, wilfully embraced hierarchies and mass triviality of digital play today. Is our current ethos of play to be defined as "happy inspiration" in a world of neo-feudal and neo-militarist values and structures? This play-theorist would robustly beg to differ. But at the very least, these books make a strong case that we're all ludologists now. As the Tense Tens approach, we might as well get good at it.

Play School: my Times Educational Supplement feature on NY's Quest to Learn school

 Belatedly posting up my Times Educational Supplement article on Katie Salen's Quest to Learn school in New York, which aims at using 'gaming literacy' to develop a new kind of education that teaches kids to think systemically and creatively. I also have a podcast composed of the interviews I did for the article, which I'll post up some time after Xmas. (And there are some pics of the day in this post). All comments welcomed.

Play school

Published in TES Magazine on 18 December, 2009

By Pat Kane

I am in New York, with an appointment to visit a school of the future. But when you jump out of the yellow cab in the city’s Chelsea district - where panhandlers strike up fights in local coffee shops and you are surrounded by Manhattan tenements - it’s difficult to see where it might reside.

When you discover the actual location - a large, bolted door on a crumbly old building, where security guards check you into care-worn hallways right out of the 1950s movie Blackboard Jungle - you might wonder how the reality will match up to the school’s impressive website.

The photocopied A4 signs eventually lead to a bright, busy - though decidedly ad hoc - inner-city school on the third floor. There I am greeted by Robert Torres, co-founder and research head of Quest To Learn (Q2L), the world’s first secondary school dedicated to educating 11 to 18- year-olds in “gaming literacies”.

He is immediately at pains to say that “this isn’t a place where kids just play games with consoles all day; we are educating here in ways that people will be able to recognise”.

As instant proof, Mr Torres stops to have a quiet word with a pupil who has just been put outside the classroom by his sure-footed teacher for “talkin’ over everybody”.

Julio has just been sent out of a class called Codeworlds, which teaches a combination of language and maths under an approach that sees both as “systems that convey meaning”. He is also missing out on an explorers’ visit to the land of Blubonia, where they are using gaming technology and role-play to pick up the local lingo (which happens to be first year Spanish). Clearly, something new is going on here, even if the built environment is echoing hallways and squeaky linoleum floors.

Pat Kane keynote at Media140: the challenge of Twitter to News Media

Update: two great precis of my presentation at the first Media 140 conference in London yesterday, from The Guardian and Journalism.co.uk. Media140 have also posted up a video too:

Pat Kane - Media140 Keynote - 20th May 2009 from media140 on Vimeo.

The challenge of "140" to News Media

View more presentations from theplayethic.

Alter-globalist, meet benign capitalist: the encompassing attractions of "creative play"

My journey back to Scotland had me furiously ripping articles out of today's Guardian, in a chain of play-ethical topics I just couldn't ignore. Forgive the cognitive leaps, they were irresistible...

Carnivals against banksterism

My first example is Katherine Ainger's op-ed on how the anticapitalist movement of ten years ago is gearing up for a comeback, timed to the coming G20 conference in London. It reminded me of some of my political aspirations in the Play Ethic book (which I'm re-reading with a macabre interest at the moment). I'd hoped that between the 'work ethic' espoused by orthodox, growth-oriented government and companies, and the 'protest ethic' coming from the streets and the South, a 'play ethic' could perhaps be a mediating argument - translating the idealism and utopianism of the latter into new institutions and policies for the former.

It didn't look like anything like that was happening in 2003-2004. But if the ethical and civic vigour of the social software movement in the UK and the US is anything to go by (with Obama's election, if not quite his government so far, the best example of their effectiveness), it looks like those connecting tissues are being formed now - tissues partly made up of the playing, gaming and enterprising nature of net-enabled activism. And not just technological networks, but societal networks too.

Ainger's piece also reminded me of my book's quotation of anarchist David Graeber, who I've mentioned in a recent post (scroll to bottom). Here's Ainger's relevant and fascinating words:

The solutions the "alter-global" networks have developed offer a way out that is based on whole systems thinking. Fundamental to this vision is an economy that meets the needs of everyone on a planet of finite resources.

Which is why the climate camp in the city, with its slogan "Because nature doesn't do bailouts", is one of the most interesting of all the movements coalescing in London next week. It's a potent mix of seasoned anti-globalisation activists who are skilled in creative direct action and a new generation that is energised and refreshingly undogmatic. 

The camp has taken a key component of the globalisation movement - the temporary autonomous zones of street parties and convergence centres liberated in cities during summit protests - to a new level, creating a transformational space which prefigures the world they want, featuring everything from wind turbines and composted waste to decentralised decision-making and creative play.

There's no doubt that 'reclaiming the streets', in a playful, carnivalesque and collaborative spirit, is a powerful experience - both for participants and the onlookers it's intended to challenge.¹ And if a play-ethical perspective isn't open to new forms of democratic creativity, it's isn't worth the invocation. As ever, one hopes that it's Ainger's idealism that characterises the protest. And that the usual marginals out for a bit of cathartic urban confrontation or destruction get reined in by her more "seasoned" activists. 

Doing well by playing well: Lego 

The other piece in today's Guardian that talks about play's power and potential is a lovingly written cover piece by Jon Henley on Lego - pegged to the information that the Danish company is doing especially well in the teeth of this recession, with its sales up 51% in the UK last year.

 

With the creative passions of the alter-globalisation protestors in mind, it's intriguing to read this account of this thoroughly Scandinavian company (who regularly top reputation indexes for corporations), and their seemingly universally beloved product. 

Ainger might talk about 'whole systems thinking' (this kind, I guess). The "Lego System of Play" was introduced in 1955, and Henley relates lots of kindly tales about the founder, Ole Kirk Christiansen, compelling his son to repaint toy ducks because he'd put on only two layers than three, or citing the company slogan about quality control for children's toys Det beste er ikke for godt (Not even the best is good enough). And though it's true that Lego did catch some of the brand intoxication of the 90's - expanding into theme parks, movies, clothes, software, thinking they could be as sexy as Apple - they've since returned to their core business of making toys. 

At the moment, Lego's next new frontiers are fusing virtual and physical game-play ("imagine if kids were telling their playmates, 'Hey, guess what - if you clip a set of shoulder pads onto this guy, he gets three times as many strength points online!' That's the holy grail"), and moving into the world of board-games (Lego Ludo, anyone?). There doesn't seem to be much to object to a company whose aim is to make a toy that gives such a sense of imaginative mastery to children (and as Henley writes, quite a few obsessed adults).

Even if you go online to find any alter-globalisation dirt on the company, there seems to be very little. I found this extensive response to a parent's worry in the company's forum pages, about the extent to which Lego were using sweat-labour in China to make their toys (very little, it seems). And in a toy business conference on safety I spoke at last year, the company's head Jorgen Vig Knudstorp was clearly the poster-boy for an industry which had been badly fouling its own nest, with lax safety and labour-standard practices in the far East.

It's not much of a "full disclosure" to say that I've spoken at Lego conferences, collaborated with their Serious Play consultancy, have met their CEO a few times now, and generally approve of them and their works. But if we're also thinking of a playful critique of current capitalism, it is interesting to consider how much Lego, even as a capitalist multinational, is a product of a certain Scandinavian sensibility. One in which a commercial enterprise regards the pro-development, pro-community values of its products as being its crucial competitive advantage - with these values reinforced by the company's strong base in its place of origin. (Usmir Haque's recent lectures on Constructive Capitalism are relevant here). 

Yes, there are always questions to ask about any company who seeks to extract value from children (or their parents' wallets). Some of their lines still seem pretty badly gendered (there's slashing Bionicles for certain boys, and Belville horse farms for certain girls - though they have reestablished the unisex fire-stations of old. And Spongebob Squarepants' "Good Neighbours at Bikini Bottom" looks, frankly, covetable by children of all ages). 

But I'd like to know from the net-rades in the coming G20 Climate Camp whether they have a positive vision of any company that might fit their "alter-globalising" criteria. (Not to dismiss their critique of existing institutions - but it would be interesting to know). Would Lego fit the bill?

Update: From a few Google searches, I have a troubled answer. It seems the climate campers have indeed used "creative play" to create a "transformational space" - in Legoland, Windsor (see pic at the top, and video below). 

Originally I thought the protestors had constructed the whole thing. But having looked at it closely, Legoland has clearly already built a smoking nuclear power plant (with evident sponsorship from the not-very-well-behaved energy company E-On). The Climate Campers have climbed in wearing company shirts, attached a Lego-sized protest banner, and placed Lego-sized protestors on its polluting rim... 

Now, an activism that makes you broadly smile can't be entirely off the mark. If it makes Lego think harder about their environmental associations, it was definitely worthwhile. And an example of the necessary tensions that need to exist between Ainger's playful radicals, and even the most ethically-playful organisations. We live in inescapably interesting times...

 

NOTES

¹ And we shouldn't forget that they were having their effects. Some dates and places you'll never forget: 8.30am, Sept 11th, 2001, Glasgow. Buying my Financial Times and looking forward to reading its four-part series on "the anti-globalization" movement. "It is wide in its tactics and ambitions, violent and revolutionary on the edges, peaceful and reformist in the main. It rushes in often contradictory directions, anti-corporate and entrepreneurial, anarchistic and nostalgic, technophobe and futuristic, revolutionary and conservative all at the same time", wrote a clearly enamoured James Harding (now editor of The Times). And then, at 8.46am in New York, a screaming came across the sky...