The Play Ethic

"Reality's broken/Games aren't/Let games help fix reality": Jane McGonigal

Jane McGonigal is an extraordinary evangelist for games (computer or otherwise) as learning and activist tools, based at the Institute for the Future in California. She's quoted the Play Ethic in many of her presentations so it's nice to be able to return the favour.

Her ludic thang (first signalled by her 'I Love Bees' marketing campaign for Halo 2 in 2004) is 'alternatve reality games'  - where the boundary between game and life is seamless for the players, and involves running around the real world as much as it does a virtual one, with signs and signals in each realm leading you to greater depths in the other.

In her current futurist guise, Jane is (in her own words):

explores how games are changing the way we conduct and influence real business, real health care, real scientific research, and our real social lives. She focuses on ways that alternate reality games in particular could lead to a higher quality of life in both Western and developing nations, and how they could produce more engaging and thriving democracies worldwide... She also develops massively multiplayer forecasting games.

An exciting agenda. But there's a phrase that been creeping into my vocabulary recently - "that's a real time-suck". Which, apart from being grotesquely ugly, points up a little road-block in Jane's inexorable progress. To the degree that we get that 'cognitive surplus' which Clay Shirky talks about from not being enslaved to the tv, we might well have the social and personal time to invest in games that bring us the same civic motivations and humanist satisfactions as novels, movies, periodicals, music... cooking, attending meetings, caring for elders and children...

You get the point. I'm wondering simply what room there is left in a modern, over-worked life - even if we're becoming less entranced with the tv spectacle - to get "immersed" in "massively multiplayer games". (Although I keep coming back to my European-welfarist answer to the question of whether we have enough time our lives for play).

Jane has a fascinating, progressive answer to this. If we are increasingly interested in the "politics of happiness" in Western societies, then we should be looking to the games sector for inspiration and wisdom. As she says, "games designers have spent twenty years trying to optimise happiness". So maybe we should be prioritising games as a literacy and an experience (the cutting edges of e-education has been doing this for a while), vis a vis other cultural forms. As long as it's something accumulative and generative like Spore or The Movies, and not linear and destructive like most of the rest of the console games I steer my 11-year-old daughter away from, then I'll go with that.

Her recent slogan is "reality is broken - games aren't - so let our game experience help us fix reality". McGonigal wants to take those feelings of meaning, pleasure and community that a well-fashioned game provides, and reconnect them to citizenship - by creating games whose worlds contain recognisable crises and challenges. Her projects like A World Without Oil ("play it before you live it") and Superstruct (a multiplayer forecasting game - which came up with some great projects) attempted this last year. (I was signed up for the latter - but did I have the time, between playing with music, playing with words and playing with children? Nope...)

The new McGonigal project, discovered this morning, is The Signtific Lab (yes, that's the spelling, and here's the blog) - which seems to be an attempt to create a playful space in which future trends in science, technology and society can be collaboratively posted, sifted through, highlighted and then acted upon (here's their first experiment). I promise to get involved in this one - but Jane's energy and commitment will doubtless keep evolving play and games as a necessary social literacy well into the future. She's about as play-ethical as it gets.

A good childhood, in a complex world

The Children's Society report, A Good Childhood, has sent a few extremely sulphurous memes spinning through the media in the last few days. Our children are the most depressed and distrustful in Europe, goes the headlines, because modern British parents are "extreme individualists". We put career and personal life-trajectory ahead of our families, which we break up (through separation and divorce) much too easily and readily. The children in these situations, says the report, tend to do significantly less well in life on a whole range of indicators, including school performance and mental health. The report's author, Richard Layard, cut to the chase in a Guardian article:

In our report we offer an array of specific proposals to improve the lives of children. For example, we advocate the banning of advertising aimed at children, and the abolition of school league tables. We suggest free parenting classes around childbirth, covering relationships as well as childcare, and the training of more psychological therapists for disturbed children. We urge the elimination of child poverty. But we doubt whether much of this will happen without a fundamental change of values in our society - and indeed whether a set of specific changes would be enough. The change we most need is one that puts harmonious social relationships rather than the pursuit of private success at the centre of our value system. We do not want a society where children are taught above all to look after number one, since we know from psychological research that a life which is devoted to more than yourself is intrinsically more satisfying.

There's been so much impassioned commentary about this - quite a bit of it picking up on the fact that the Children's Society is in fact The Church of England Children's Society, and wondering whether a context of Christian piety guided the report towards certain outcomes (while not denying the veracity of its findings). Also some interesting commentary on how such recommendations feed into a general tendency to 'psychotherapise' problems in social life; how they seek to 'over-protect' children from the necessary struggles of growing up (including the developmental risks of play); and how the emphasis on social harmony can slip into communal intolerance, and blind us to our cosmopolitan advances.

But I'm divided along several intellectual (and personal) lines here. I've objected to Layard's work in the past as an attempt to marshall a whole range of psychological and social sciences to justify a new 'paternalism' in government. (There's no surprise that he was one of the architects of New Labour's welfare-to-work schemes). He's leaned particularly on behavioural economics (also beloved of the New Tories), with its Homer-Simpson-esque view of humanity as always knowing less than it thinks it knows, and thus needing wise rulers to steer it away from irrational behaviour. Thus governed, we'll be happy - or at least, in a situation of "harmonious social relationships".

Yet there's something weird going on here. In his happiness studies Layard wants us to accept that, in the face of our own psychological self-subversions, we have to be guidable children vis-a-vis the state and governance. But in this report he urges parents to be "properly authoritative", knowing exactly when to set limits on behaviour for children. And if they can't manage that - well of course, they can go to parenting classes and learn it, classes devised by Layard and his mandarins. 

Can they make their mind up? Are we autonomous, capable adults, or aren't we? Or is there a new sliding scale of human autonomy on offer here - fragile kids at the bottom, deluded-but-trainable citizen-parents in the middle, and effortlessly capable policy czars on the snowy peaks? 

Worker bees, playful cubs and human be(com)ings

We take philosophical journeys on this blog more than occasionally (the nature of the topic demands it). And it's been a quiet train-journey pleasure to read a paper from Steven Overell of the Work Foundation, titled 'Work and the human claim to uniqueness: A contribution to the philosophy of work'. His aim is to explore "what exactly is it that separates the work of human beings from the ‘work-like behaviour’ of many animals such as birds building nests or bees building hives". 

Overell's argument is careful, well-referenced and clear. But reading him from a play-centric perspective highlights some interesting gaps.

Overell wants to claim that what distinguishes "human" work from "animal" work is intentionality - our "work" is "'exertion for a purpose’ with the caveat that the exertion has to involve significant, goal-oriented effort and the purpose ought to be related to a clear ‘product’ or ‘outcome’." Worker bees or nest-building birds aren't "purposefully" building their constructions: their intricate activities are driven by evolutionary adaptation, nothing more. 

Yet it strikes me that there's a much longer and deeper natural continuity between human and non-human work, than there is between human and non-human play. Particularly if we think of work, in Stuart Kauffman's defintion, as something an organism does to transform external material into energy or internal reproduction and survival. We all "work", in that sense, simply to maintain our existence. 

But as many scientists are beginning to note, the emergence of play - if we define play as the simulation and testing-out of strategies for survival - is often tied to a very specific set of evolutionary conditions. Essentially, play happens if you have a complex brain that can enjoy processing options; if you have a high metabolism that compels you to burn off excess energy; and if you have parents that tend to feed and protect their offspring, which gives their children the spare time to use their bodies and brains. 

Play is evident in birds, some octopuses, and obviously in all us highly strung mammalian descendents of that original 100-million-year-old rat-creature. Yet it seems to me that a capacity for play might be a better indicator of the growing autonomy, sophistication and consciousness (ending up in self-consciousness) of an organism than a capacity for work might be. 

As a researcher in the Work Foundation, Overell quite understandably wants to deepen the meaning of work. Yet the specificity of work keeps escaping his analysis. In this passage he puts play in a familiar corral:

In work, there needs to be an ultimate purpose to the activity that is more essential than the activity itself, otherwise the difference between play and work would be difficult to fathom. If ever work becomes an ‘end-in-itself’ it must by its nature stop being work and become something else.

These days, it's an unsophisticated account of play that keeps it confined to a definition as "activity-without-a-definite-purpose" (though it is of course that also). What of gambling/ financial speculation, or team sports, or social celebration, or the serious games movement, or child-centered pedagogies? As Brian Sutton-Smith has helped us to see, our play is essentially a range of "adaptive potentiations" - a mimicking or mocking of social reality so we can survive and thrive better in it. And some of that play will be pointless and an 'end-in-itself' - but some of it will be very "goal-directed" and "outcome-oriented" indeed, though always occuring in its own set-apart play-space and play-time. (As many of those toiling away in the salt-mines of their multiplayer online games will tell you, there can be a lot of labour in game-play).

Overell worries at the end of his paper that we only separate ourselves off from the "work of animals" by an act of arbritrary cultural definition. We use our language and intelligence to tell ourselves stories about and add values to, the purposeful activity of our lives - and we tend to call that "work". 

Well, some of us want to argue that, in these immensely productive and technologically transformative times, we could instead call some of that purposeful activity "play", and some of it "care". Play to characterise how we extend the potentialities of our networks, our computers, our genomics, our materials and bio-science. Care to characterise how we extend the benefits of our productive play to all in the human community, recognising that fraility and dependency (not just humanity, but nature too) is what brings moral measure to our vigorous experimentation.  

Is this mere semantics? Overell almost admits, in closing, that his freighting of work with so many meanings almost dethrones its centrality for him:

The point here is not that work is directly central to human beings so much as indirectly so: what human beings need is meaning, purposive action, content for one’s life, structures for one’s time, paths to one’s goals, the accumulated habits of social interaction, and finding such things has always tended to accord a primary role to work. It is meaning that is the fundamental need, not work; but work is the vehicle through which meaning is created. Life without it is life-less. 

Really? We might not just add 'play' or 'care' to those capacities which keep life from being life-less, but also 'love', 'sex', 'education', 'inner peace' ... The paths to meaning are various and multi-levelled; they should not be streamed together into one vast, thundering highway, heading under a giant metallic archway called Work. If we choose to freight work with so much of our search for meaning, we can also choose not to. 

And if our only solution to an economic slump is to revert to the blindly-accumulative, debt-laden, passively-consumerist habits that got us here in the first place, then perhaps we need to.

The presumptuous taming of reality: John Updike

photo: micheal mundy  Enjoyed this weekend's obituaries for John Updike. Like so many novelists, he's someone I'm saving up for a later, more easeful life, after having been gripped by Rabbit, Run and wanting to know more about this Joyce of the American suburbs. But there's an Updike quote that's been barrelling through the various pieces - and it's about as eloquent a definition of playfulness as I've read in many a month. It comes from his memoir, Self-Consciousness:

So writing is my sole remaining vice. It is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable. That we age and leave behind this litter of dead, unrecoverable selves is both unbearable and the commonest thing in the world -- it happens to everybody. ... Even the barest earthly facts are unbearably heavy, weighted as they are with our personal death. Writing, in making the world light -- in codifying, distorting, prettifying, verbalizing it -- approaches blasphemy.

Substitute "playing" for "writing", and the passage still makes beautiful sense. For me, this brings something new to the classic definition of play - as outlined by Friedrich Von Schiller, Huizinga and others as "taking reality lightly". In the Ambiguity of Play, Sutton-Smith hazards his final definition of play as "the mimicking or mocking of reality", as a means of anticipating and thus surviving reality's unpredictable nature. S-S's further defintion of play as "the stylized performance of existential themes" would seem to sum up Updike's entire oeuvre!

But what I didn't fully realize, until reading Updike's quote, is just how much the fear of death must lie behind play's endless rehearsals and experimentations - particularly for we humans, so full of "self-consciousness". And that our play (in which I'll easily include fiction-writing) - where we loosen the grip of the world in our minds, so we can grapple with it better - could be a kind of "blasphemy". A semiotic two-fingers at the inevitable finitude of our lives. 

Play is then natal, in Hannah Arendt's term, rather than mortal. Or as Bob Dylan put it, more crisply: "he not busy bein' born is busy dyin'". Thanks for the Monday-morning stimulus, Mr. Updike. Rest in process.

New regime, same game-theory? Robert Wright reconsidered

More American musings, but with a specific play-theory angle. As the new Administration has been re-orienting itself as diplomacy-and-human-rights friendly - with Guantanamo scheduled for closure, and the previously belligerent Hillary Clinton now advocating "smart" (or is that really soft?) power - I've been recalling a prescient essay from 2003 in the New York Times. 

Robert Wright is the author of Non-Zero: The Logic of Human Destiny, a book which gained some favour in the closing years of the Clinton administration. Bill's summary of it is pretty good:

There is an astonishing new book out, been out a few months, by a man named Robert Wright, called Nonzero - kind of a weird title unless you're familiar with game theory. But in game theory, a zero-sum game is one where, in order for one person to win, somebody has to lose. A non-zero-sum game is a game in which you can win and the person you're playing with can win, as well. 

And the argument of the book is that, notwithstanding all the terrible things that happened in the 20th century - the abuses of science by the Nazis, the abuses of organization by the communists, all the things that continue to be done in the name of religious or political purity - essentially, as societies grow more and more connected, and we become more interdependent, one with the other, we are forced to find more and more non-zero-sum solutions. That is, ways in which we can all win.

And that's basically the message I've been trying to preach for eight years here...We have to have an expanding idea of who is in our family. And we in the United States, because we're so blessed, have particular responsibilities to people not only within our borders who have been left behind, but beyond our borders who otherwise will never catch up if we don't do our part. Because we are all part of the same human family, and because, actually, life is more and more a non-zero-sum game, so that the better they do, the better we'll do. 

So strange to read this, in the afterglow of Obama's extended-hand-meets-unclenched-fist Inaugural speech. And to imagine that such theories of global interdependence might be picked up again, after the bloody interregnum of post 9/11 America. Wright's essay is written exactly two years after that date, with the "War on Terror" already taken to Iraq, and the sense of anticipation of another, and worse, bio- or nuclear-terrorist attack on American soil pretty high. 

Idling through the recession (and beyond)

Mark Kingwell, Canada's top pop philosopher, has written a compendium on idling (on a very long publishing delay, years after the UK's leisurely prince of idleness, Tom Hodgkinson, established his own dilatory empire). There's lots of bright wit in this puff piece in the Globe and Mail (thanks George Cairns for link), for example: 

Mark 1: ...What distinguishes idling from slacking?

Mark 2: The problem with the slacker is that he is, in the very act of resisting them, wedded to the norms of work. In avoiding work, or pretending to work, or hiding from the supervisor in the mailroom, the slacker is implicitly granting the world of work a dominant position. He gives work power as that which he should be doing even as he does not do it.

Mark 1: And idling?

Mark 2: Idling establishes an independent scale of value. It's like the difference between dozing - falling asleep from overwork - and napping, which we all know is an art form. The true idler enters the moment of not-working and takes it into a new realm of not even thinking about work, of strolling away from that collective addiction of the past 2,000 years.

All very familiar. (Will Hutton's review of my, Tom's and Carl Honore's book 'In Praise of Slow' put us all in the context of Western 'soft power' - displaying a kinder, gentler, less relentlessly acquisitive image to the rest of the world). But it was this exchange between the Mark's that really piqued my interest:

Mark 1: Suppose everyone was idle, though. How would society function?

Mark 2: Think of it this way. Any market economy is a failed attempt to distribute goods and services exactly where they are needed or desired, as and when they are needed and desired. That's all markets are, despite the pathological excrescences that nowadays attach to them: derivatives funds, advertising, shopping as leisure. If we had a perfect market, idling would be the norm, not the exception, because distribution would be frictionless. Most work is the result of inefficiency, not genuine need. In other words, idling is consistent with capitalism's own internal logic, which of course implies, even if it never realizes, the end of capitalism.

Now, I guess this is some reference to a pure theory of the market of which I'm unaware. But it certainly sounds like elements of the internet - where distribution is fictionless (hey! another iPhone/Android app!), where the long-tail delivers exactly what you want (maybe not when you want, but in a few days anyway). And who can deny that, when we have a consistent experience of getting what we want from a network-enabled screen, our behaviour tends towards the intrinsic self-satisfaction of the idler? 

The other reference this sparks off is that of distributed manufacturing and local fabrication (which we're beginning to get a hint of with things like print-on-demand books in bookshops). This is the great wet-dream of the post-scarcity prophets - a state of material plenitude that would destroy economics as the management of scarcity, and indeed allow universal, beauteous idling (hello, Iain Banks' Culture). 

I was delighted to see the Star Trek end of this - "make me a milkshake in the Universal Fabricator, Deanna!" - get a run-out in Ed Regis's contribution to the World Question Centre this year. Problem is, 'molecular manufacturing' might not be possible, says Regis, due to "insurmountable technical difficulties at the chemical bonding level". Well, they said the same about Trek's communicator and the teleport machine... 

DeKoven on Games Community Vs. Play Community

Bernie DeKoven, one of the most indefatigable advocates of the power and potential of play, writes here about the difference between a 'games community' and a 'play community'. (I picked up this link from his "tweet" on Twitter, which at least shows that I'm beginning to understand the damn thing). Here's the main spiel:

Most informal games - street games, pick-up games, playground games – are played by a play community. Most formal games, like Little League and Lawn Bowling, are played by a game community.

Commercial and historical forces tend to embrace game communities, and vice versa. Little League and Lawn Bowling are not just games, they are cultural events, they are sports.

Ultimately, the majority of people aren’t good enough to participate in the kinds of games played by game communities, especially when compared to the skills of the masters and grandmasters of the game.

Ultimately in the play community, everyone is good enough. Because it’s not any particular game that people have come together to play. Because the reason they have come together is to play, not necessarily to win, or even to keep score, but to play together, and be part of an event in which anyone can play, in which everyone is a master.

In the play community it’s mystery, not mastery that draws people together – it’s the mystery of shared imagination, of spontaneity and synergy, of generalized laughter and much mutual admiration, of shared fun.

When children are young, they first form play communities, and usually, if they can avoid formal intervention, they’ll continue expanding and diversifying the play communities they support and that support them well into adulthood.

It is no coincidence that the Internet, though it serves both kinds of community (play and game), is so easily characterized as a play community, dependent on openness and trust shared by its players, succeeding to the degree in which it can respond to their constantly evolving, individual and collective interests.

Most often, game communities share characteristics with play communities, and vice versa. In both, members show mutual respect for play - for supporting fantasy, keeping rules, observing boundaries…

This is very similar to James Carse's distinction between finite and infinite games - games you play to win, games you play to keep enriching and expanding the game. Also to Robert Wright's distinction between zero-sum and non-zero-sum games as drivers of social evolution - the first ends up in the war of all against all, the second in the global interdependency of the internet. (Luckily for us, Wright thinks the second kind of game is a Darwinian inevitability.) 

It's a beautiful, hopeful distinction - probably the easiest kind of 'play ethic' to grasp and apply.  

World Question Center 2009 - just out (to blow your mind)

The Net has now established its own seasonal festivals - and Edge.org annual World Question Center usually heralds the proper beginning of my new year. It's the closest multidisciplinary enquiry gets to the state and condition of a giant box of dark chocolate liquers (ok, that's a personal preference here). The question this year is: What game-changing scientific developments do you expect to live to see? Or, more pithily: What changes everything? 

I haven't even really started to dive in, but here's some immediate highlights:

Kevin Kelly: A New Kind of Mind."It is hard to imagine anything that would 'change everything' as much as a cheap, powerful, ubiquitous artificial intelligence—the kind of synthetic mind that learns and improves itself. A very small amount of real intelligence embedded into an existing process would boost its effectiveness to another level. We could apply mindfulness wherever we now apply electricity."

Stuart Kauffman: The Open Universe. "John Brockman's question is dramatic: What will change everything? Of course, no one knows. But the fact that no one knows may be the feature of our lives and the universe that does change everything. Reductionism has reigned as our dominant world view for 350 years in Western society. Physicist Steven Weinberg states that when the science shall have been done, all the explanatory arrows will point downward, from societies to people, to organs, to cells, to biochemistry, to chemistry and ultimately to physics and the final theory. I think he is wrong: the evolution of the biosphere, the economy, our human culture and perhaps aspects of the abiotic world, stand partially free of physical law and are not entailed by fundamental physics. The universe is open."

Ian McEwan: The Full Flourishing of Solar Technology. "I hope I live to see the full flourishing of solar technology—photovoltaics or concentrated solar power to superheat steam, or a combination of the two in concentrated photovoltaics. The technologies are unrolling at an exhilarating pace, with input from nanotechnology and artificial photosynthesis. Electric mobility and electricity storage are also part of this new quest. My hope is that architects will be drawn to designing gorgeous arrays and solar towers in the desert—as expressive of our aspirations as Medieval cathedrals once were."

And much, much more...

Play and Craft: review of Richard Sennett's 'The Craftsman'

I was delighted to be asked to review the social thinker Richard Sennett's new book The Craftsman for the Scottish Review of Books. I have devoured his last four books - Corrosion of Character, Respect, The Culture of the New Capitalism - because I share his concern with the subjective and social effects of new technology and new business models. Though we come to ultimately different conclusions. Sennett believes we can revive an ethos of 'good work', even in the age of flexible occupations and networked capitalism. I believe that the same conditions push us forward to forge a new ethos of productivity and creativity, one that accepts - even embraces - a degree of open chaos and emergence in our lives: a 'play ethos'.

What is fascinating about The Craftsman is that Sennett is now directly engaging with play, and our essentially playful natures. He believe that the 'universality' of our early play experiences - our relentless experimentation with material stuff, our commitment both to the rules of games, and the bending of them - is the basis for his belief that we can all be potentially craftsmen (and craftswomen). Our childhood show we can easily be deeply invested in our activities, incrementally improving our mastery of the world. In a beautiful phrase - invoking the Jeffersonian ideal that democratic competence resides in the skills we exercise to change our material conditions - Sennett suggests that "good citizenship found in play, is lost at work".

I post the entire review below - which has a personal dimension for me, as various parents and grandparents of mine have had a complex, even troubled relationship to an ideal of 'craft' - and invite your responses.

Rules of the Brain - Keep It In Play

Been alerted by an American publicist to a very well-produced website for a book called Brain Rules, written by an enthusiastic scientist called John Medina. The interesting bit is 'Rule One - Exercise', where the claim is that our sedentary, physically static school-and-work lives are the least amenable environments for learning and productivity. This reminds us of our other American play-associate Frank Forencich, and his 'Exuberant Animal' fitness consultancy, which is similarly rooted in a background of evolutionary psychology and biology. Tied in with the NYT piece below, clearly a lot of interest in the physically and mentally restorative dimensions of play in the US at the moment.