The Play Ethic

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.

Virginia Massacre: Losing the Battle of Who-Could-Care-Less

Here's a piece that was commissioned from me only a few days ago from my old paper, the Sunday Herald, an essay on the Virginia campus killings.  It's a ghastly event, and I feel for all the parents of students involved - my own daughter is about to go to an American college - but it does raise some contrarian thoughts in my head about how we can respond to certain kinds of violence in our societies. Not usual play-ethic territory, though careful readers will see the playful society hovering on the borders of the piece. But I hope it makes some sense. The unedited version is below, and I'll hotlink the references over the next few days.

Not well-being, but well-becoming

I've just posted to the Guardian's Comment Is Free blog again - this time, responding to their 'Politics of Wellbeing' debate. I've recently finished reading a beautiful excursus on Gilles Deleuze by Todd May: I was able to incorporate a lot of his points about the 'ontological creativity' evoked by Deleuze into the piece - it gave force to my critique of the well-being agenda as paternalist and overly-normative.

And it allowed me to coin the term 'well-becoming' as an alternative - which (now that I think about it) is actually not that far away from the 'pursuit of happiness', taking joy in the endless search for happiness, rather than the attainment or even management of it. (At some point, I'm going to sit down and properly engage with the relationship between Deleuze's ideas and the Play Ethic: something tells me they're very similarly founded, at base).

But my suspicions about the new consensus of values sought by the well-being advocates were raised by several degrees this morning, as I came across Prospect magazine's new survey of intellectuals, asking them what they think the great opposition of the current century will be (after the demise of right and left).

Opium in the livingroom

Just written a short-ish column for the Guardian comment pages about the forthcoming PS3 game console - an example of the hyper-real cul-de-sac that computer games are heading into, where verisimilitude becomes as important as the gameplay itself. They've edited it a little too neatly for their slot, so I'm putting the original copy in extended post below, along with a whole load of hyperlinks to references that aren't in the Guardian original.

UPDATE: Conducted a very nice interview with an alternative radio station in Australia, Radio Adelaide, about this column. You can download the clip from here, for the next month or two.

To infinity and beyond

Finally broke my blogger's block on Comment is Free yesterday, with a piece that wrote itself - about the crisis of physics studies in the UK, and how my beloved daughter is bucking the trend.

The Return of the Sunday Salon

Have to report a closing-of-the-circle here, in the nicest possible way. About a week ago I got a call from an old newspaper colleague of mine - David Milne, who was the news editor on the Sunday Herald, the Scottish paper I was a founding editor of in 1999. David has always been the most digitally literate journalist I know, so it was no surprise that he was asking me to blog to his new Sunday Herald Salon (a respectful copy of the Guardian's Comment is Free site, which I also contribute to).

But as he twinklingly reminded me, somewhat painfully, this is the second Sherald 'Salon'. The first was a true editorial nightmare. As the paper's Cultural and Digital Editor, my brilliant notion was to try to simulate the format of BBC2's Newsnight Review on paper - with four pundits opining on four bits of culture, one of them the lead reviewer in each. Actually, I think we managed about three versions of it, before I collapsed in a heap. Many of the reviewing team didn't go to all four items (which fucked the process up royally), claiming 'they weren't getting paid enough' (which they weren't).

Of course, now we have our wonderful blogosphere, everyone can get involved in analysing the zeitgeist, in real time, whether punter or pundit (for the expertise on that, go here). And where, additionally, there's enough of a 'participation ethic' that people don't expect to get paid for their commentary. It's a wry realisation - that what I was trying to do was awaiting the information infrastructure (and its supporting 'social' culture) to make it happen. But as I think about it, I can feel my 'stress eyelid' beginning to flicker again. No nostalgia for that time, thank you.

Though as it turned out, I couldn't help but write a nostalgic post. Consistency, virtue, hobgoblins, etc. 

The dangers of 'game-changing'

I've written another post on the Guardian's Comment is Free site, this time adding to a theme I've been pursuing for a while in the Play Ethic context - the relationship between play, games, war and the military (see this blog and my del.icio.us tag). You can comment there, or here - be glad to hear your responses.

UPDATE: See this article in Harper's magazine this month, Luke Harding on the 'God-mode' in American politics. An excerpt: "We, as a nation, seem to be seeking a technological circumstance that allows the United States not just to dominate but to dominate so absolutely and effortlessly that we need not even think about our enemies, much less fear them—something that allows us to turn off our minds and enjoy the synthetic beauty of the game. The phrase the Pentagon uses is “Full-spectrum Dominance.” I call it god mode."

Ninety-minute Patriots

Just a heads-up to say that I've been taken on as a fortnightly blogger to the Guardian's Comment is Free site - I'll be posting my entries here also. Here's the first one, on the horrors of Scottish Anglophobia during the World Cup.