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. 

Play's The Thing: London conference (22/23 Nov, 2011) & Guardian comment piece

Something I've meaning to post here for a while - but too busy helping get it off the ground to do so - is my hosting of Play's The Thing: Creative Perspectives on Wellbeing (Nov 22-23, 2011 - yes, next week!). Taking place in Toynbee Studios, London, it's been organised by Escape Artists, a social arts charity, and funded by the European Commission. 

I've written this op-ed for the Guardian (see below for a fully referenced version, and this PDF of the newsprint version) setting out the main argument of the conference. This is the second time I've worried away at the relationship between government and wellbeing in the Guardian. Interesting to compare the two pieces, and my shift towards a greater environmental anxiety, which softens my perspective on the worth of "wellbeing" talk. 

Tickets still available for Play's The Thing, don't delay! And all comments welcome.

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The wellbeing agenda isn't navel-gazing, it's innovation and survival

By putting a price on unhappiness we can understand the need for a gentler response to the economic crisis

Pat Kane, The Guardian, 14 Nov 2011

If you were looking for economic hard-noses among our European national leaders, you wouldn’t have to look much farther than Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron. Sarkozy telling an abject Greece there are macroeconomic “rules that have to be respected”; Cameron unrelenting on his deficit and debt agenda, in the face of the tyranny of the bond markets. Homo economicus, in full pomp.

Yet after the last crash – in Cameron’s case, before – both men were talking a different language of the market. Sarkozy launched a commission in 2009, chaired by the now-sainted Joseph Stiglitz, to explore alternatives to GDP as the primary measure of social progress.

Cameron’s stab at a “GWB” (General Well-Being), first essayed in the blithe and creditworthy days of 2005, has quietly proceeded through the machinery of coalition government. At the start of November, the Office for National Statistics announced its “10 indicators of wellbeing”, which will be used to guide attitudinal surveys in the future.

Snorts of derision over your rye-bread, no doubt, as job creation stalls, unemployment rolls rise and political parties sharpen their claws (and clauses) for contest. Yet as I’ve found in helping to organise a conference on creative approaches to wellbeing, we should try to take a step or two back from the grim financial determinism of the moment.

Democracy only functions healthily if we believe we can imagine conditions other than they are. And wellbeing is an open enough concept, firmly at the heart of government, to allow our policy-brains to stop pressing the panic button.

One of our speakers, William Davies, wonders whether the UK government’s commitment to measuring, and then making policy on, the nation’s wellbeing is one of the biggest own-goals ever perpetrated by the administrative classes.

Take a method called “income-compensation technique” – derived from wellbeing studies and psychological damage assessments in legal cases. Using data on the correlation between happiness and take-home pay, it claims to identify the amount of money it would take to compensate a person for losing access to a free public good (for example, arts events or sporting facilities). A Department of Culture, Media and Sport report in 2010 estimated that the psychological satisfaction derived from a person attending concerts regularly was worth £9,000 of extra income.

This method – putting a price on unhappiness – can be extended to other areas. A Young Foundation report calculated that the psychological injury of being made unemployed would require a compensatory income of £23,000 per month. If the wellbeing mandarins are serious about calculating the “psycho-economic return” on investment, they might be forced to admit that the best returns come from public spending and occupational security, not private spending and labour-market turbulence. As Davies quips, in a Marxian way, “a spectre is haunting liberal economics”.

So wellbeing indicators, taken seriously at government level, could justify a gentler, more Keynesian response to the national deficit and global economic crisis. But in these systemically shaky times, the charge of irrelevance and navel-gazing is easily raised.

Rather than angsting about general ill-being, shouldn’t we be firing up the raging energies of "mathletic" entrepreneurs – coding, designing and splicing new markets into being? In the face of Asia and South America, implacably ascending their development curves to middle-class prosperity, don’t we need more edgy disatisfaction and nervy, competitive ambition on these islands – and indeed, this continent – not less?

For figures such as historian Niall Ferguson, the wellbeing agenda is an example of Europeans as “the idlers of the world”. We’ve wrapped ourselves in a wet blanket of psycho-socio-babble, recoiling from the creative destruction and disruptive innovation required to lift us out of a static economy.

Yet when you gather together the tribes of wellbeing, you hardly discover a lack of enterprise or innovation. The question is the nature of the “new” that’s being sought. The other “spectre” that haunts liberal economics – other than the lingering unhappiness that its happy-clappy consumerism generates – is the broaching of planetary boundaries for survival. This was forcibly restated in last week’s report from the International Energy Agency, which referred to the extreme climatic urgency of de-carbonising our industries and economies.

Yes, let’s fund primary science to keep open the possibility of radical innovation around energy and efficiency. Let’s retain a Victorian-style ambition about constructing grand new infrastructures to answer our needs for mobility, housing, communication.

But what also needs to happen is precisely the kind of innovation around lifestyles, cultures and values pursued by those at the eco-minded end of the wellbeing agenda – seeing a low-carbon society as an opportunity for social excitement and behavioural novelty. For who else will build the mindsets, and communally forge the habits, that prepare us to cope with radical change – both the changes we invite, and the changes we’ll have to endure?

And in terms of leading people out of their consumerist echo-chambers and into engagement with these prospects, play’s the thing. Take architect Indy Johar, who founded HubWestminster in cavernous empty office space behind the Institute of Directors. It’s a new incarnation of the Institute for Contemporary Arts 1947 slogan, “a playground for the mind”. Go there any evening if you want to sample the nexus between Occupy St Paul’s and the “big society”.

In this milieu, people with ideas are driven to create new practices, not just deliver papers. Writer Marek Kohn is advising the Sunshine Bank, which hopes to turn the desire for mutual recognition into an alternative currency system for communities and companies. Alice Taylor, ex-head of games at Channel 4, is building a new platform for toys that combines virtual play and local manufacture, aimed at fomenting craft values and ideas of non-disposability among kids. Tech entrepreneur Dougald Hine has a sideline deploying local bohemia to revive moribund retail outlets, such as the revitalised Brixton Village.

At our conference, we also have Buddhists and neuroscientists, radical artists and improvisers – people who have always found a way (mostly internally) to maintain their mental and social resilience in the face of endemic change. The point is that a real diversity of input is essential to thinking and feeling our way beyond the cyclical hysterics of capitalism.

Wellbeing is the kerchief in the top-pocket of the suited men striding through the current economic drama. We should give it a good tug, and see what comes out.

Pat Kane hosts www.playsthething.org.uk, Nov 22-23, at Toynbee Studios, London 

Swings & Roundabouts in Whitehall: Pat Kane article for Play England's Play Today

 

This is a short piece I wrote for Play Today, the regular journal of Play England, the advocacy charity for children's play (original PDF is here).

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Pat Kane, 'Swings and Roundabouts in Whitehall', Play Today, Issue 72, Spring 2011

These are tough times for those trying to guarantee the grounds of play for children, adults and communities. Michael Gove’s cancellation of the playground building programme last year (though a brutally stripped-down version has survived) came as no surprise to those familiar with the Gradgrindery of his general educational philosophy, all history and Latin lessons. In the light of this, it's worth remembering just what an unlikely triumph the programme was for the previous administration.

It is true that when the then children’s secretary Ed Balls announced close to christmas in 2007 that over £200 million was to be earmarked to build 3,500 playgrounds, and then followed it through in the subsequent two years, advocates of play were pinching themselves.

New Labour, with various invocations of a renewed work-ethic for the work-shy and a notoriously exacting measurement culture in education, did not seem the most propitious sponsor of the value and benefits of play; oblique, messy and experimental as play is. Ed Balls did not join up his thinking when he rejected the Cambridge Primary Review in 2009, which showed conclusively that an extended period of kindergarten-style play up to the seventh year was the best developmental start for school children.

But there it was; alongside play initiatives from the lottery fund and echoed throughout the devolved parliaments, a commitment to building playgrounds as a step towards rethinking how we regard the activity of children in our public spaces, town and cities. It’s tempting to say that in a similar way to our shifts on climate change, the scientific consensus on the health, the cognitive and social benefits of more play in our lives - both for children and adults - was becoming indisputable.

A staple in the rise of neuro-psychological and biological accounts of human nature over the last twenty years has been the role of play: joyful experimentation, imagining and gaming with others as the best exercise for the growing human mind. Melvin Konner’s The Evolution of Childhood and Stuart Brown’s Play are at the summits of research here. The UNICEF report on children’s well-being in rich countries in 2007, which placed the UK at the bottom of 23 industrialised nations, was an embarrassing wake-up call for a government which had made the welfare of children one of its moral back-stops.

Whatever the determining forces, it was certainly the feeling among the community of play workers and advocates that a line about the legitimacy of play as a key part of human development throughout the life-span had been crossed. Given such positive support and signals, much ingenuity, commitment and invention has been pouring into this area in Britain.

The Coalition has made sure it will not let a crisis go to waste, taking the opportunity to brutally shrink the state to pre-new-Labour levels. As a result, the playground building programme goes in its entirety; not even shrunk or trimmed, but dumped wholesale.

If you wanted to find "an inch in which to live" (as the great 60's play advocate Richard Neville put it) between the Tories and Labour - and for that matter, any of the left-leaning devolved polities - a play policy for children would be that inch. Enabling good conditions of play is an investment in the ultimate long-term health and capacities of future citizens, a crucial and dynamic element of the “sure” start promised to children in the UK after the harshness of the Tory years.

Of course, play policy should have been extended beyond childhood to teenage-dom and adulthood. There is too much evidence – ably pulled together by Daniel Pink in his new book Drive – that the most creative and profitable modern organisations ensure “play” time for their employees. A small zone of self-determination increases overall productivity and effectiveness by considerable degrees. Shouldn’t we be socialising our future creative workers to expect a degree of creative play in their lives?

There might be some wriggle-room for play advocacy in the Coalition's big idea of the Big Society. According to one of its theorists, Jesse Norman, the "active, creative self... fizzing with possibility" is at the core of its vision - a citizen aspiring towards "mastery, autonomy and purpose", and expressing that through free voluntary activity.

Yet this glowing civic vision runs into the wall of a brutal deficits-justified contraction in public sector budgets. And as any playworker would tell you, the anxiety and fear which mass redundancy will generate are the least likely circumstances for such a playful, active self to flourish.

The Labour government managed to join up the dots between play, well-being, health and employment. Facing the contradictions and confusions of the current government, play advocates must take a deep breath and restate the case for the power and potential of play. The game, as they say, is worth the candle. 

Can we become 'happy citizens' in a climate of insecurity? My piece for Open Democracy

Delighted to be able to contribute to Open Democracy's Happiness debate series, commissioned by Potlatch's William Davies. Here's the published piece, full text below.

 

Can we become 'happy citizens' in a climate of insecurity?

 Pat Kane, Open Democracy, 6th April 2011

At the start of this debate series on the potential of happiness to shape political discourse, William Davies hoped that it would return our attention to production - or more specifically, how our experience of work in organisations is a crucial determinant of our wellbeing and life-satisfaction. A long history of economic thought in the 20th century had led up to a moment where the consumer was sovereign, and the producer his willing slave: workers' conditions were always ultimately malleable - flexible, just-in-timed - in the retail service of this whim-laden desiring machine.

Of course this machine, as Davies plaintively says, was often a worker too. Can't our politics encompass producer as well as consumer identities? Buttressed by the The Spirit Level and the happiness science of Richard Layard, Davies wonders if might there not be a new political appeal to the "workers" available to Ed Miliband's Labour Party. A health-oriented, moral-political rhetoric that could render bad employers (and the paltry labour market regulations binding them) "toxic" and "polluting" - perpetrating injuries upon the bodies and souls of their employees as mendaciously as cigarette vendors, or nuclear-powerplant owners. (And who knows, perhaps just as vulnerable to class-action litigation on the basis of prior knowledge of harm?)

I'm fascinated to observe the battle raging between the major UK parties for ownership of the new sciences of the "social animal" or "social brain". They're all struggling to realise their own political capital from the intellectual collapse of utility-maximising "economic man", in the face of consiliences between neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, epidemiology, network theory and more. And not forgetting a financial crash that caused its architects to doubt their own intellectual edifice.

Read Conservative MP Jesse Norman's ideas-tour of The Big Society, and then read some of the papers coming from the Compass group of the Labour Party. Both of them cite the same sources - particularly Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum's work on capabilities - to claim that a "social recession" has been occurring, regardless of economic recession. They share a figure of the healthy, happy citizen as needing "meaning, mastery and autonomy" - a purpose, goal or shared cause; an avidity for learning and new skills; the freedom to choose one's engagements in life.

In the midst of my own creative consulting practice, I did a double-take recently, when this trinity of capacities popped up in a discussion of what makes for a truly satisfying video-game. Yet surely it's all too obvious what the differences are between a PS3 "player" and a Big-Society "creative, active self". The former pursues meaning, mastery and autonomy (MMA) as a voluntary and joyful act, under conditions where there is a surplus of time, space and materials, essentially socially secure. The latter is being asked to become a "fizzing bundle of energy" (in Jesse Norman's words) under conditions of social insecurity, with extreme deficit-driven cuts slashing employment in public services. As far as my expertise in play tells me, these are not the most enabling conditions for MMA.

It's very easy to see The Big Society as an attempt to gull the aspirational and "creative" classes into supporting widescale privatisation, by talking their beloved language - specifically, appealing to their desire to achieve personal wellbeing through pro-social activities. But the Big Society falls down on its own terms, unravelled by the Oscar Wilde one-liner about the problem with socialism: "it will take too many evenings".

One might imagine that there could be a joyful, playful volunteerism to be pursued - if the Conservatives got tough with business and regulated for a shorter working week (say 30 hours), without a directly proportionate wage reduction. This would provide a rich systemic support to all that volunteering which, of course, has already been going on (one of the sharpest objections to the Big Society is that it's an opportunistic re-branding of what already exists). But a Conservative party that's brazen enough to preach democracy in Egypt, while hawking arms to Arab autocracies, is hardly going to take that kind of stand against squealing employers.

But while it's easy to critique a Tory philosophy on happiness which over-emphasizes voluntaristic "risk" and "creativity", and under-values the collective "security" and infrastructures which give a platform for the "active self" - you'd expect them to do that - I am doubtful that the Labour Party will find a better balance between these two in the modern workplace. How much of the sense of meaninglessness that pervades work in the commercial services sector, for example, comes from an awareness that much of what occurs there is the excitation, administration and sustenance of false needs, or delusory social-positioning? How much MMA can really be achieved by employees in hyper-consumerist industries based on the exploitation of guilt, shame, envy and anxiety?

At least the Green critique of current working practices, as exemplified by think-tanks like the New Economics Foundation and writers like Tim Jackson, Juliet Schor and Jeremy Rifkin, has the urgency of carbon-reduction and global warming at their backs. "Meaningful work" - which could as easily be fully-engaged, hacker-like play, or absorbed, intrinsically-motivated care - is what they hope will substitute for the planet-crisping satisfactions of lifestyle consumerism.

In a low-carbon economy that takes itself seriously, "flourishing" in the form of participation, self-provision and conviviality will have to compensate for "growth", "wealth" and its mountains of stuff. But no party will be able to preach the benefits of plenitude-without-trinkets, the happiness that comes from relationships, mindfulness and autonomous labours (see the five virtues extolled by the NEF's Happy Planet Index), while the financial plutocracy cavorts freely and unemployment rolls burgeon.

Cameron's plan for happiness began in the blithe financial-bubble-bath of the mid 2000's: pursued in these brutal conditions, it seems more like an idee fixe than a thought-out component of political hegemony. For Labour to succeed with its own version, some guarantee of greater security has to be offered - but it'll be through bold proposals on labour-market regulation, new networks of public goods, visible restorations of income equality - and an honesty about how our indicators of progress and prosperity will have to change. And not, I'd suggest, through workplaces the majority of whose enterprises contributes toward the consumerist tumult that guarantees unhappiness.

Pat Kane is author of The Play Ethic and one half of the band Hue & Cry.

On Thoughtland: the green, playful and post-consumerist case for the Scottish 30 hour week

Introducing to the Play Ethic readership my new Scottish ideas blog Thoughtland, mostly concerned with mapping the ideas culture as it supports and extends the politics of Scottish independence. But as it has an explicitly global and universalist framework - bringing the best and most visionary policies to bear on the independence movement - it will draw from my interests in play, well-being and social innovation explored here.

The essay out today in the Sunday Herald, Towards a Scottish Thirty-Hour Working Week, (link to the Herald website here) begins to point towards the next stage in my thinking around play, which will involve a much more detailed engagement with the politics and culture of sustainability and climate crisis. As ever, all comments welcomed. 

Play And Ecology: our joyful - & troubled - connection to nature (lecture to Big Tent Festival)

I presented at the Big Tent green festival in Falkland, Fife yesterday - the brainchild of Mike Small (a Murray Bookchin scholar, founder of both Bella Caledonia and The Fife Diet, and one of the most innovative social entrepreneurs in Scotland). 

It was an opportunity to consciously begin a dialogue between environmentalism and the Play Ethic - something that was explicitly (and to a degree inexplicably) missing from the 2004 Play Ethic book, and something that I'm thinking about seriously as the basis for my next book. These are only some opening thoughts on these topics - happy to hear all feedback. Thanks very much to the generous and intelligent audience at my event. (Yes, it's a rather - as the kids say - random first slide, but it makes more sense later on...)

  Pat Kane: Play and Ecology - our joyful (but troubled) connection with nature

View more presentations from theplayethic.

Cyberspace ≠ big bad wood: children and the Net

Update: found a great symposium on Protecting Virtual Playgrounds: Children, Law and Play Online - video presentations. Supporting blog from Terra Nova. 

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Here's an essay I wrote for my old employer, The Sunday Herald in Scotland, on children and the internet (the uncut version is below, here's the edited version). I was commissioned under the headline, "Who's afraid of the big bad Net?", so it begins a little more luridly than I'd like. However, I think it grapples with a lot of the phobias about the topic pretty well, and suggests some creative (rather than just regulatory) proposals towards how cyberspace might exercise a "duty of care" to children. 

Who's Afraid of The Big Bad Net?

Pat Kane, Sunday Herald, 22 Nov 2009

You're hovering at the door, and your beloved has turned back to her machine, a moon face in the monitor's glow. You've been what they call in the instant-messaging world a "POS" (Parent Over Shoulder) – asking about this online game and that customisation, smiling at the Twilight obsession and the LOLcat video sitting side by side on her social networking site. 

So far, so early-adolescent, so familiar. Yet you know that, at this age, there's a genuine need for privacy with her friends: a space to work out who she is, who she wants to be. So you close the door and leave her, for her allotted 45 minutes, as she taps out incomprehensible mixes of mnemonics and icons into a message box.

The question in the mind is: have you sent her off to a virtual version of the local playpark – with good facilities, chatting to friends in the sunlight, in a well-run, somewhat monitored space? Or have you left her to wander into the gloomy, unpredictable woods of cyberspace, where duplicitous wolves, terrible visions and worse lie in wait? 

There's no doubt that the latter metaphor describes most of the tabloid headlines about our children's relationship to cyberspace. If the internet service provider TalkTalk is to be believed, more than half of UK parents believe the internet is a more dangerous place for children than the real world. In other words, it has replaced the deep, dark forest – where Goldilocks, Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel confronted their demons – as the locus of our most visceral fears. And even as an evangelist for the networked world, I'd be the last to minimise the issues.

The recently revealed operation by Central Scotland Police, sweeping social network sites like Bebo, Facebook and MSN, identified some alarming numbers – like 1700 men involved in 4000 sexually explicit chat logs with children over the summer, a small proportion of which led to arrests in the UK and abroad. Bebo itself has just announced what they call a "Panic Button" for their websites. This links directly to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (Ceop) Centre, allowing any user, child or adult, to report their worries about online activity to child protection workers.

And it's the predatory monsters called other people's children that cause almost as much popular anxiety. A report on 'cyber-bullying' in England and Wales last week identified that 22% of schoolkids had reported being harrassed or intimidated via internet or mobile phone. 

Yet some aspects of these stories deserve an instant reality (and history) check – mostly around the degree to which an age of networks merely amplifies existing social disorders. 

Work, family and the dance towards a 'play ethic'

This is a piece I wrote for the charity Working Families, as part of their 30th anniversary celebration, marked by the publication of Tomorrow's World, an anthology of perspectives on work-life balance. 

Most of the pieces are well worth reading (apart from a few politicians posturing), and I decided to stay within their paradigm of the tension between "work" and "life", partly to speak honestly about my own 20 year history of balancing productivity, play and parenting. But regular Play Ethic readers will see my familiar agendas surfacing at the end... As usual, all comments welcomed. 

Work, family and the dance towards a 'play ethic'

Pat Kane

I guess I won't be the only contributor to this volume who's writing this piece under the very same wobbly conditions of 'work-life balance' that is our chosen topic.

In my case, I'm getting to grips with this piece as the school holidays begin: I'm four days over what (I hope) was a soft deadline. My daughter's been getting out of school at 12.15pm the last couple of days (was that a surprise announcement? Yes!). So I've had a few frantic mornings trying to master the inbox of self-managed tasks that face the average cultural freelancer. At the very least, this lifestyle demands clarity and efficiency when you actually do sit down in front of your interface.

After years of good and bad experiences, I've realised that I'm happiest when I can devote my energies fully to either 'work' or 'life' – however unsatisfactory those terms are - with as little overlap between the two realms as possible. Meaning that when my daughter emerges from the school gates, or after-school club, all of my affections and attentions are hers. And the best way to ensure that psychic commitment is to ensure that the anxieties of one's project-driven life are actually - or if necessary, forcibly - abated.

The necessity of a calm and tranquil mind (and heart, if possible) in the face of one's children also comes from a somewhat bumpy personal road. Post our separation eight years ago, my ex-wife and I made a binding pact to ensure that our children never had any sense of lacking access to either parent. We split our fortnight of care equally, weaving between each others' nearby households, allowing each other evenings and alternate weekends to sustain friendships and relationships (in different cities – Glasgow and London). But we've come together to ensure that none of our children ever returned to an empty house.

Who's watching us play - and why? William Davies on networks as "big parents"

I once wrote a phrase up on my website which went something like: "play will be to the 21st century what work was to the last 300 years of industrial society - our dominant way of knowing, doing and creating value". It must have been a zinger of a meme, because it was picked up by people like Dan Pink, Jane McGonigal and many others. First we make our phrases, then we try to understand them... 

And a blogpost from the brilliant and bracing Potlatch (ie William Davies) has driven me to that task. If we increasingly know, act and confer value through play these days, then what form of governance and institutions are appropriate to that social behaviour? The Play Ethic book took some pretty utopian stabs at that question - but Davies has sharpened the question wonderfully.

Essentially, he wonders whether the next stage of post-industrial capitalism is going to be a "playground". A world where we "play" with our interactive tools, consuming, prosuming and creating; and the corporates watch over and monitor our complex online behaviour, all the better to market ever more niche and tailored products to us. The good story with this play-society is that we're all perpetual inventors, pro-ams and tinkerers - "user-led innovation" as the new spirit of public life. The bad story is that, if we use the online tools of the corporations to do this innovating (Google/You Tube, Facebook, and now Phorm), we could be all just "lab-rats" in a vast marketing exercise.

Davies proposes this half-way house:

This is where the metaphor of the playground comes in: the user as child. We are neither scientists nor rats, but children, playing creatively, producing something, but with an audience of adults who we choose, mostly, to ignore. We are lost in our world of play, but we are still being watched. It's not a performance, yet it is being seen and evaluated.

I've also used the idea of a 'ground of play', in the Politics chapter of the Play Ethic, to talk about those collective structures that might enable a society of players. Yet my notion was that a strong, capacious welfare/wellbeing state would be the "parental" institution that would both oversee and enable the free flourishing of citizen-players - that range of social-democratic, market-constraining measures (progressive reduction in working week, basic income, parental and self-development sabbaticals) well known to most of the European left (some of it even traceable back to Tom Paine). 

I'm sure William is well aware of the evolutionary and psychological determinants of play. That mammalian scenario where the cubs gambol and frolic in their playspace, often risking injury to themselves yet developing their faculties, while watchful parents protect them from predators. So I think he asks the right question about our current software platforms, relentlessly harvesting commercial data from our creative unfoldings. Are they "parents" with an interest in our development, or are they ultimately ''predators/exploiters" - with company slogans like "do no evil" as their camouflage? 

But I've also wrestled with the infantilising implications of a play-society that cleaves too closely to the mammalian model of play. I don't think we should become perpetual kidults, frolicking in a well-fashioned collective playground. I do think that if we want to be full players, we have to encompass within our identities the parent as well as the child. 

In the book, I tried to explore the links between the rights of play and the responsibilities of care - and how the fragility and precarity that underlies both might help generate a mature attitude towards helping the dependent and broken, not despising them. As a musician/artist, I know how easy the slide is from power to powerlessness. From my experience of precarity, I can intuitively support a "safety trampoline" that captures people as they fall, and gives them the resiliency and resources to get back onto the wire. Is there an 'artistic' mentality here that could be translated to others, to help them live the turbulent player's life with more grace and equanimity?

I'd distance myself from a kidult escapism in another way. For me, the adult player has to be ready to take real risks and make real leaps of purpose, not endlessly rehearse the possibility of risk in a series of imaginative or virtual distractions. Thus I'm constantly attentive to the way that "play" and performativity operates as a deep metaphor in politics and business. I'm respectful of the way that play becomes a positive value for socio-technical communities like hackers. 

I think there's even an argument that the Obama victory partly tapped into an aspiration for grown-up play - the agonism of "engagement", "getting involved", and "taking back the country". "Yes we can" and "be the change (you wish to see)" are direct requests to turn imagination and aspiration into embodied actions and practical projects. And the way the interactive platforms were used in that campaign - purposively rather than diversively, collectively rather than fragmentarily - is perhaps a step-change in how the Net sits in the daily lives of Western citizens: that possibility of 'collective action' that Clay Shirky saw as the most elusive goal for social media. 

But how you design 'good governance' for this interactive and playful citizenry is still an acute question - particularly as they use their software networks. Lawrence Lessig's last few books (Code 2.0 and Remix, both of which I've reviewed) have been urging us to be less passive, more aware of how we manage our info-identities online. In Code 2.0, he even suggests a kind of digital passport that we use each time we log-on to the web, which would control what kind of data we reveal to the world. 

Yet I'm entirely with Davies when he notes that the ghastly UK government plans to put up the location of every criminal offender online are the perverse outcome of informational idealism - where "all knowledge wants to be free" (and freely used to facilitate local witch-hunting). In the face of all this, I can't see any other alternative strategy than to use the tools of the Net to keep the Net constitutionally robust (the recent Facebook usage-rights protest as an example). 

Of course we should do some old-fashioned critical analysis of the network institutions that we're signing up to. I did enjoy the fact that Davies' example of an enterprise that was fully exploiting the idea of "children-at-play-watched-over-by-digital-adults" was Find Your Tribe - which turns out (going by his commentors) not to be an evil corporate marketing campaign, but a creative initiative from that public service broadcaster, Channel Four. What do we demand of our public institutions? Make their information public, or at least publicly usable.

But all that is an expression of my kind of civic play - from the Situationists (Vanegeim's "full play of subjectivity"), from Sartre ("As man apprehends himself as free and wishes to use his freedom, then his activity is to play"), from Schiller ("Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays"). This Romantic and modernist tradition says we can be fully conscious and critical adults when we play. 

Indeed, as Richard Sennett says in The Craftsman, we find our first experience of citizenship in play (developing our comprehension of the material nature of the world, submitting voluntarily to "good rules of the game", which we change when change is necessary). And we often lose it when work ensues. 

But Davies is right. We have to be vigilant about who is composing and constructing our grounds of play, and according to what principles, ethos and outcome. When we do that, we're not kids anymore. 

'Driving is not a game': when criminology met the Play Ethic

One of the enjoyable things about forging a meme (maybe it's a strange attractor?) like the Play Ethic is the stuff that comes to you, from expertises and disciplines you'd never even thought about. So it's been a knotty delight to read through Nic Groombridge's paper, Playing Around with Crime and Criminology in Videogames. The original document Nic sent me was actually titled 'iPlod', which is a much funnier title. (PC Plod is a British slang term for 'policeman').

As Groombridge tartly notes, the ambition of most criminologists would seem to be either "doing research for the Home Office or speaking out on behalf of the criminalized". He tries to steer round the obvious point of intersection between games and criminology - the debate about whether computer games are a factor in teen violence. (Beware of immersive, isolating personal media platforms that can often engage its user in a set of extreme and dastardly scenarios... Yes, ban the book! And whatever we do, don't put Raskolnikov into a computer game). But he doesn't quite manage, as we'll see later on.

There is indeed a lot of 'cybercrime' around - but defintions are crucial. To help us sort through it, he quotes David Wall's very useful distinction (in his book Cybercrime) between three generations of cybercriminality:

Gen 1: 'crimes using computers' - recognisable crimes that just use computers as tools. Payrolls have always been diddled, drug dealers dealers have always needed secretive communication, terrorists have always needed to find a way to produce bomb guides. Now they have better means - and the law will try to get them for activities they're still familiar with.

Gen 2: 'hybrid crimes' - old crimes for which computers and networks provide new opportunities. Like internet auction fraud, or cracking/hacking (in the malevolent sense), or paedophile porn networks, or mass identity theft, or information on how to crack digital decoders or make synthetic drugs. This crime would also happen anyway, but not on this global scale, and with not as much virulence.

Gen 3: 'distributed and automated crimes' - crimes which couldn't happen without the internet. For example, spambots which relentlessly attack your computer. Or the 'misappropriation of intellectual property' - which can cover everything, in Wall's definition, from teenage downloaders flouting copyright laws, to vandalism and rape in virtual worlds. (There is a 'fourth generation' to come, apparently, as 'ambient' technologies like wifi and bluetooth bring connectedness into the streets).

Clearly in this third generation of cybercrime, all the ambiguities of play - unleashed in the synthetic worlds of the net - come rushing up to meet the criminologist. But what kind of criminologist? One contracted to the Home Office, gathering statistics on anti-social behaviour - or one seeking to defend and understand the criminalised? It seems to depend what kind of political state you practice your criminology in.

Groombridge quotes Edward Castronova on South Korea's National Police Agency, who recorded 40,000 computer crimes in 2003 - with 22,000 of them being online related. If you've stolen 60 quadrillion pieces from a virtual game-world, the Korean police will eagerly get you for property crime - no hesitation.

Shift, however, to the US, and the phenomenon of "griefers" - where teams of spoilsports go around trashing virtual worlds with stunts and hacks. They thrive in that legal gap between real-life and virtual-life actions that most game-world hosts loudly proclaim. As Julian Dibbell says in his brilliant piece of reportage in Wired, the griefers aim is to point out that "nothing on the Internet is so serious it can't be laughed at, and that nothing is so laughable as people who think otherwise". Sheer anticness: the primordial rumble of play. Not much that the law can do about that.