The Play Ethic

The Play Ethic in Paperback and Academia

A busy few months ahead for the Play Ethic - our mass paperback version of the book (with new cover, to the left) will be out on September 30th in the UK (buyable here on Amazon.co.uk). I've already done a few radio spots, and am hoping to place articles around the media over the next few weeks (see this interview in Ode magazine).

What's interesting is the increasing amount of academic interest in the Play Ethic. On extended post below is a review in a journal called Organisations and People - which happily describes the book as a 'modern classic' - and downloadable here (pdf) is a very in-depth treatment of 'Play at Work: questions of historical interpretation'. I'm digesting it slowly, but excitedly - and I'm most thrilled by their conclusion:

the new mixture of play and work is an epiphany of ethical inarticulacy which manifests itself at macro and micro-cultural levels. The way in which Kane, Carse and Csikszentmihalyi, for example, propose play as an infinite possibility of being and suggest that all life experiences should be turned into ‘infinite games’ is a cultural expression of this search for a way of leaving behind the 'space of experience' of finitude and reaching new horizons of ‘infinity’. In fact, it is this idea of a world in which ‘everything might be possible’ and in which everybody is entitled to endless enjoyment (what Bruckner calls ‘the utopia of fun’), in which youth is prolonged, and in which life itself will be delivered from suffering and even mortality (and why not? what else is the current investment of hope in the promises of genetic elucidation of man's biological being?) that Taylor suggests is the essence of what he terms ‘ethics of inarticulacy’.

Well, they get that right: the play ethic is, on one level, an attempt to help us cope with our increasing ability to control and 'play with' the fundamentals of our lives - social, material, technological and biological - by developing an ethic for these burgeoning powers.

The Slacker Ethic at the ICA

Come along to the ICA tomorrow night, 7pm, Nash Room - I'll be on the panel at the following event:

The Slacker Ethic

The relentless wave of cost cutting in the corporate world in the last couple of decades has taken its toll on the protestant work ethic.  But if the work ethic has taken a battering amongst young people, what is there to replace it? Should we take our revenge on the world of work by ‘downshifting’ or ‘protiring’, by idling or becoming a player, or simply staying put and slacking on the job? Can the vacuum created by the absence of work ever be filled? An international panel of rebels against the work ethic considers the alternatives.

Speakers: Corinne Maier, author of Hello Laziness (Bonjour Paresse); Pat Kane, writer and author of The Play Ethic; Tom Hodgkinson, editor of The Idler and author of How to be Idle.

Scholarship vs. Rock

Some interesting pieces appearing recently around the Play Ethic - one a review by Catholic educational thinker Bob Davis in the Journal of Philosophy of Education (download word doc here) and my own proposal for a 'Play Foundation' (download word doc here) in the current issue of the Idler, 'War on Work' (in which I recommend a wonderful interview with Raoul Vanegiem, bon vivant soixante-huitard).

And for those of you with an appetite for agonised post-punk-pop-star narcissism, here's a piece I wrote in the Sunday Herald today about the coming week... Epistemology meets bad dancing (but hopefully, a solid tenor voice will mediate).

The UK's first 'Thinker in Residence' is...

I've just been appointed Britain's first 'thinker in residence' at Bristol's new Festival of Ideas, 16-20th May. It's an exciting prospect. I'll be staying in Bristol for five days, attending all the public events. I'm licensed to be a 'constructive heckler' - identifying broad themes that emerge from the discussions, making connections between realms of knowledge. (For any of you who've read The Play Ethic, you'll realise what an ideal gig this is for me...) I'll also be blogging the event everyday, posting right here, and writing up a report/article after.

In between events, I'll be doing learning journeys into the city of Bristol itself - talking about the power of play, bringing reports from the festival to everyone from teachers to technologists to entrepreneurs, being a 'contrarian catalyst'.  Bristol's creative and innovative credentials are second to none - from Brunel to Allen Lane (founder of Penguin) to Massive Attack. I'm happy with my press release quote:

Ideas are the lifeblood of cities – the faster and richer they flow, the healthier and more robust urban life becomes. I'm delighted and honoured to be appointed the first thinker-in-residence at Bristol Festival of Ideas. The luxury of following one's intellectual and creative instincts, in the company of such an exciting roster of thinkers and writers, is something I'm going to exploit to the full. Ideas should always be festive – as David Hume once said, true enlightenment is a "disagreement between friends". If we attain that ideal, we'll all have a wonderful week!

I'd urge you to download the PDF, but some of the names and topics are:

• Paul Ormerod on economics
• Colin Tudge, John Gray, Julia Neuberger, Joanna Bourke on the Moral State We're In
• John Carey on What Good is the Arts?
• Deyan Sudjic on the Edifice Complex
• Paul Martin and Tom Hodgkinson on Happiness and Idleness
• AC Grayling on Power of Ideas
• Marek Kohn on Darwinism today
• Steven Johnson on Why Popular Culture is Good For You

Fun, yes? For some reason, my appointment has caused some consternation among the punditocracy and editoriat. In Scotland (no surprise there), see the Daily Record, The Sunday Times, The Scotsman, Scotland on Sunday (reg. req. for the last two). And, surreally, in the Daily Telegraph - an op-ed piece, no less (more like burble-ed, but there we are). A little thread has started up at Demos, where I'm an associate - feel free to chip in. And Patrick Barber at the Guardian helpfully invited me to explain myself. In any case, hopefully, I'll see some of you at Bristol!

Play Ethic @ Cambridge Word Fest

A small heads-up to a public event I'm doing at the Cambridge Word Fest next month, Sunday 24th April. It's with Carl Honore, the author of the excellent quality-of-life manifesto (my, there seems to be a lot of them round here) In Praise of Slow. See you there, or you can buy tickets here.

"Touchy-feely network spiritualism" (bring it on)

Tart and salty coverage of the Play Ethic, and its umbrella consultancy New Integrity, from an excellent leftist web-magazine called Seven Oaks.

The problem with the Kanes and the Leadbeaters of this world is their zealous insistence on an online, open source technological, networked cyber-utopia which confuses familiarity with the fads of the day with serious critical enquiry. The result of which is a drunken misalliance of Chicken Soup for the Soul touchy-feely network spiritualism and the crass market genuflecting offered up in books like New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s best-selling business bible The Lexus and the Olive Tree.

It really needn’t be said that the dedicated players and Pro-Ams (“…climbing says more about who I am than my job. Journalism is my job but climbing is my passion.”) who best typify this dawning age are noticeable by their absence from the coal face of the information economy. The new media age has yet to produce the shorter working hours that Kane yearns for, nor has it produced a new generation of players: for every ad agency creative loitering at the water cooler, for every down-with-it pro-am actor slacking off from the PR company, there are too many McJob workers taking Leadbetter’s “Living on Thin Air” slogan to dangerously literal extremes.

As the precarity post below shows, I (nor my colleagues at Demos) don't underestimate the scale of the reform and activism required to build a social settlement that could cope with players and pro-ams as our mainstream identity, as meaningfully active people.

Much to respond to here, but not enough time in my play-and-care days. Let me do so obliquely by pointing you to a piece I've just had published in the Learning Teaching Scotland magazine Connected, about the relationship between ICT, Play and Education. In short, it's not just about training people for a market-future, but about composing a life-narrative of a creative society worth living in:

The challenges of techno-mobility might also be opportunities to think again about our institutional frameworks for learning. We could even profitably return to notions of the 'learning web', first proposed in the 1970s by educational radical Ivan Illich in his provocative book Deschooling Society, which saw the whole city and environment as a scene for ubiquitous learning and understanding. 'Playing around on street corners', with wireless capability, could take on a whole new dimension.

Yet the wider societal context to this is important. This new techno-literacy – which kids are assembling by themselves in their own largely unregulated time and space – is an honest response to a fundamental shift in the structures of post-modern life: the life of flows and networks, the power of culture and ideas, summed up by the 'information age'. Almost entirely autonomously, children are using play to make themselves imaginatively capable for this new world.

And a methodological note: the good player feels, and then she touches.

More Oz coverage for Play Ethic

Two great pieces about the Play Ethic book in Australia have come to me - one a review from the Melbourne Age (in extended post below), from an educational psychologist who's captured the energy of it:

For Kane, play has many forms. It is about progress, imagination and self-mastery. It is also about power (who outperforms who), identity (what I learn about myself), and fate and chaos, as in winning in chance games such as lotteries. The play of childhood features as a vehicle of pleasure and learning from Rousseau's Emile, to Shelley, Wordsworth and Byron and Maria Montessori. Then there are the contemporary players such as Trotsky, Richard Neville (playfully referred to as the "Wizard of Oz"), Frank Sinatra, Robbie Williams and Victoria Beckham to name just a few.

And the other is a feature piece from the Sydney Sun-Herald, by an energetic and sharp writer called David Astle (who's kindly sent it to me as a PDF download ). Here he gets the 'childness' - not childishness - of a play-ethical lifestyle:

Lego block by Lego block, my hallway is turning into the Lost City ofAlakazoo. I made that name up but the kids don’t care. The city is theirs – they made it, that’s enough. My children – aged nine and seven – are knocking skulls with their cousins of roughly the same age, raking the Lego bucket in search of that perfect piece. Click.

Patterns emerge but that’s an adult talking. This is play, after all, not Urban Design 101. Let Alakazoo sprawl where it will. If the city’s rocket depot is pink, let it be pink. In play, there are no rules from above. The make-believe city develops ad hoc.

Game theorists would call it engagement, a style of play given to interaction rather than outcome. Kids are brilliant at it – they mix as equals. They co-operate, experiment, adapt. They improvise and imagine. They allow the game to shape itself. And, ideally, they pack up before dinnertime.

As adults, we lose sight of play in so many ways. Maybe you nurse an Xbox vice or go for a spot of pub trivia on a Wednesday night but the days of spontaneous play seem to evaporate after 25. Travel might be seen as one big hide-and-seek across three continents but once the backpack is stowed, it’s work and mortgage for so many Australians.

We narrow our lives along fixed paths and neglect the art of fun, of freely engaging with each other. In short, we play less. And guess who loses out?

This is not a story about throwing a Frisbee at lunchtime or face-painting with the kids. It’s deeper than that. Play is more a state of mind, a joyous state of readiness, an appetite for new challenges. Think of play not as the opposite of work but the opposite of depression and inaction.

Players or Dole Bludgers?

An intriguing Australian review of the Play Ethic book, picked up from Google Alert, from a slick website called Sydney Anglicans - a portal for, well, Anglicans in Sydney. I'm fascinated by this paragraph:

Kane makes the case that we have denigrated play for far to long in Western culture such that we have limited the potential for human creativity and enjoyment. For us, work is the serious business. Serious people work hard; and it is morally good to embrace hard work. Both Labor and Coalition politicians appealed to the ethic of hard work in Australia’s recent election. A dole bludger is one of the most shameful people in our culture. Think of the way we speak of “wasting time” as if it is morally wrong.

When I was in Australia in 2002, doing some consultancy for educationalists, I remember this term 'dole bludger' coming up regularly in conversations - usually with people shaking their heads at the prospect of playful values having any purchase in Howard-era Australian society. Strange, in that aboriginal culture is surely one of the most profoundly playful - meaning mobile and imaginative - lifestyles imaginable. Yet this nexus of issues - how Australians cope with aboriginality, combined with their residual Britishness, and the immigrant multicutlure of its big cities - means that I'm always fascinated to see how my own little idea-virus might survive and thrive there.

Any Oz correspondants, I'd like to hear from you. How does play survive the spectre of the dole-bludger?

The Play Ethic in Adbusters & Guardian Online

Some excellent coverage of the Play Ethic book, both coming from the key-tapping of one man - Jim McClellan, who I remember as the Beard/McLellan duo that used to enrich style mags like the Face, Arena and ID with their feelthy French theorising.

Jim's now writing for the Guardian Online, where he's filed a TalkTime interview piece with me about the PE - delighted to be able to take to the soulitariat directly. But he's also a correspondant with Adbusters, no less - the world-renowned anti-corporate mag - and used the interview to file a typically concise piece titled 'Life As Play' for their new 'Big Ideas 2005' issue. 

The Play Ethic in Oz

To herald the launch of the Play Ethic in Australia (buy it here), I was delighted to speak with James Hall of the Australian Business Review the other day, who writes on management and organisational matters for that paper (it's like the FT, only more...southern). James is articulate and interested in what lies beyond the work-life balance - see this archive of his work - and asked some great questions about the relevance of the Play Ethic to business:

When Kane talks about ‘play’ in The Play Ethic (Macmillan 2004), and he does so at length, he doesn't mean sports and games. He means that society needs to reconsider how clinging to an industrial-age work ethic limits innovation and creativity in knowledge-driven economies.

“People are realising they're in irrelevant and faulty organisational structures", Kane says. “[The work ethic] needs to be unearthed as a cultural and ideological mind-set which at the very least is not necessary. There are other ways to presume humans can add value.”

Kane believes business is the ideal testing ground for his ideas. Moreover, he says business leaders must act to keep in step with the desires, hopes and lifestyles of disengaged workers.

It's about helping staff reconcile the personal with the professional and play is a major motivator.

When we play, we explore the world around us, make mistakes and learn. Play is never wasted.

Kane believes that this can be translated to the way we work through allowing workers more freedom in the way they express themselves, communicate with others and perform tasks. “A profound attitude towards play keeps a company adaptive and healthy”, he says.

The full review is reproduced in the extended post below. More of this to come, I hope...