The Play Ethic

My Independent review of Jane McGonigal's Reality Is Broken

Here's my Independent review of Jane McGonigal's Reality Is Broken, her long-awaited opus on how computer games can motivate global change - about as pure a manifestation of The Play Ethic as it's possible to express. A short review, nowhere near adequate to the content of the book, but hopefully it'll jar you to buy it.

 

Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change The World

Jane McGonigal (Jonathan Cape)

Reviewed by Pat Kane, The Independent, 25 Feb 2011

 It has been strange to read a book which claims that reality is listless, uninspiring and broken compared to computer games as the Arab revolutions swarm across our screens. We watch real citizens defy real riot police in order to achieve real control of public space and institutions. At this moment, it's not that easy to hear Jane McGonigal tell us that immersion among the trolls and space warriors of virtual worlds is a way to recover our sense of epic idealism and heroic altruism. 

But even in the blazing context of the new Arab dawn, McGonigal might have a point. One of the cheekier posters held up by the Tunisian youth in their mass protests was "Game Over": and we know generally how much cyber-culture enabled the fall of Ben Ali.

Even though Mubarak in Egypt was sharp enough to hit the off-switch early, it didn't seem to matter anyway. Digital-era protestors were already planning to play around with the oppressive reality of Egyptian public life. Remarkably like the "alternate reality games" that McGonigal has created in the streets of major cities for corporate clients, young activists began to stage creative protests that subtly reclaimed their streets. They flash-mobbed in city centres to sing the national anthem; they dressed in black and stood silently beside the Nile.

Egyptian street tactics for the initial "day of rage" on 25 January - in the words of activist Ahmed Salah, aiming "to be multi-polar, fast-moving, and too mobile for the amin markazi [central security forces]" - sound exactly like the kind of collaborative, laterally-thinking play that McGonigal (and others, like Steven Johnson and Tom Chatfield) celebrate as the core cognitive benefit of computer games. Sociologists, here's a brief: how has interactive culture shaped a new sense of civic confidence among Arab youth?

Reality Is Broken is the most powerful justification yet for computer games as one of our central literacies - parallel to literature or movies in the way they connect our motivations and energies with the challenges of understanding and intervening in our social worlds. As with literacy in the first Enlightenment, the huge popular embrace of this medium provides a rich test-bed for new grand theories about human nature and society.

Armed with an impressive bibliography in psychology and neuroscience, McGonigal makes the claim that the huge rush towards gameplay is a kind of exodus from what Theodor Adorno called "damaged life" - work that doesn't satisfy, relationships that don't persist, societies that don't find a place for hope or ambition. She brilliantly links the growing scholarship on happiness to the gimmicks and tricks that commercial game designers devise to engage their febrile audiences. Games help us get off the "hedonic treadmill", in which our consumer choices are fated never to satisfy us, and help us build up what she calls hedonic resilience.

The tough challenges we willingly embrace in computer games generate an internal sense of satisfaction that spills over into other areas of our lives. For example, and counter-intuitively, she cites numerous studies that heavy social gamers display greater levels of community-mindedness than non-gamers.

Ambitiously, McGonigal wants to take that emerging swell of human engagement and connect it to the solution of real-world problems. She has been involved in games about peak oil and other global instabilities, where the fun comes from playing out possible futures, using comic strips, web videos and elaborate avatars.

McGonigal begins and ends her book with Herodotus's tale of the Lydians, who turned to dice games to help them get through their 18 years of famine - and then played one final, giant game, drawing lots to choose which half of the population would leave the country to seek prosperity elsewhere. Her point is that games can both raise spirits and build collective understanding, particularly at moments of extreme crisis.

As Arab activists grapple with the grown-up difficulties of a free public sphere, they may currently have a less-than-ludic take on their "broken" reality. But there was an imaginative component of these protests which took its cue from something other than the usual verities about civil rights. As McGonigal might say: watch this game-space. 

Pat Kane's 'The Play Ethic' is published by Macmillan

Carnage Not Required: questioning the commercial need for violence in video games

A very useful and extensive psychological study from the University of Rochester, claiming that "the enjoyment from playing computer games likely stems from the healthy pleasure of mastering a challenge rather than from a disturbing craving for carnage":

Video games are enjoyable, immersive, and motivating insofar as they offer opportunities for psychological need satisfaction, specifically experiences of competence and autonomy, to which violent content per se is largely unrelated.

Initially, many games are perceived as being fun. Much of our work is focused on understanding when games reach to deeper levels of satisfaction that often sustain engagement over time, and to identify both the healthy and unhealthy aspects of that play.

The research (free abstract and absurdly expensive paper) also quotes Scott Rigby, president of Immersyve and a co-investigator in the study:

Much of the debate about game violence has pitted the assumed commercial value of violence against social concern about the harm it may cause. Our study shows that the violence may not be the real value component, freeing developers to design away from violence while at the same time broadening their market.

And three cheers for that. I've had too many conversations with game-makers (particularly from my Scottish locus) who, when presented with a range of possible game motivations and scenarios that don't involve spectacular male violence in urban settings, shake their heads and say, "just don't see the game in that, Pat. You gotta see the game." I've always suspected that this was male geek laziness on the industry's part. Incidentally, this report is based on a sample set that was 85% male.

Immersyve have developed a psychometric methodology called PENS (Players' Experience of Need Satisfaction) - be good to hear from some core games researchers whether they rate this. In any case, this is a much needed research distinction for games makers (and those who agonise about games' impact): the "competence and autonomy" that players get out of their game-play does not necessitate conflict or war contexts. (Many thanks to International Hobo for the link).

Wars, Boys, SEALS and Toys: a blast of Ralph Osterhout

The last thing we are around here is blithe or starry-eyed about the power of play - it's an often dark and dangerous principle of possibility in the human condition. To 'take reality lightly', as the essential philosophical definition has it, does not necessarily imply (though it doesn't exclude) taking reality ethically. (Thus my quest for a 'play ethic': how do we monitor and direct our elemental playfulness, without drying it up at source?)

A case in point is the eternal relationship between play, toys and war (I've explored this previously in this Guardian article, this blog category and this Delicious tag). A wander round the iTunes videoblog section yesterday turned up this startling character - Ralph Osterhaut (interviews here and here) He's been presenting at an entertainment conference, with the title 'Toys That Find Their Way Into Combat'. 

It's hard to know how to begin to respond to this guy. As the interviews above reveal, Osterhout is a driven, possibly damaged character, who seeks a certain psychological refuge in engineering stuff that can give you extended powers - of vision, subterfuge, detection of enemies. (Wired tells us he even pretended to live the Riviera life of Fleming-era James Bond as a young man, keeping strange guns under his seat). The tough-guy military talk ("he'd jump on that quicker than a tramp on a muffin", "these Navy Seals guys are superfit, near-enough triathletes, you just wouldn't believe") protests just a little too much - though it surely gives the male toy execs he usually deals with a thrill. 

And since 9/11, Osterhout has clearly been hanging around the military-digital complex a lot. He presents himself as a transmission belt between the toy manufacturers and the military contractors - miniaturising and computerising in each domain, and gleefully transferring best-practice to the other. 

But it's the gusto with which he throws himself at the problems of American hi-tech ground-warfare in the Middle East that shows the scary end of play culture. You can't deny Osterhout's identity as a creative engineer, his cognitive capacity for playing with materials and structural possibilities. But ally that to the 'Cowboys and Indians' play impulse - what Sutton-Smith calls contestive and collective forms of play - and Osterhout becomes a man-child playing with the "real" men that seemed to be absent from his abusive early childhood. With lethal consequences.

It may be no surprise that Osterhout's geopolitics are an equally childish bluster - "terrorism is here to stay, my friends", "Abdul is using our equipment to fix his tv", "most sniper killings are inter-ethnic fire between Sunnis and Shias" (as if the steamrollering of Iraq by American shock-and-awe, and their absence of a nation-building plan afterwards, had nothing to do with unleashing that kind of emnity in the first place). 

Osterhout does try to forge some ploughshares out of his cybernetic swords at the end - little helicopters that can video disaster areas, techno-glasses that can restore sight to the sight-impaired. But as our soulful President takes his office, soaring on thermals of warm rhetoric, it's useful to listen to this voice from the other side of American power - where prodigious invention can harness itself to an impoverished military world-view. 

And for play advocates, too, characters like Osterhout are just as cautionary. He makes the need to build a kind of psychological development spiral for play extremely acute (see Gwen Gordon's studies). For wherever this guy's playfulness comes from, we need to be very careful about where it's going. 

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

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

Opium in the livingroom

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

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

Playtime! @ London Games Festival

I spoke at a great event about a fortnight ago, a fringe conference at the London Games Festival called Playtime!, organised by an old friend from the mid-nineties, Tim Wright. I was slowly meandering towards writing up the non-scripted presentation I gave there - but I recieved a welcome e-mail this morning from Mark McGuinness (a poet and creative-industries coach), who blogged my presentation, and then pointed me towards two other write-ups (here and here).

One outcome I'm tickled by is a new blog inspired by my presentation, called Spirituality of Play, started by the factual editor for digital at Channel Four. As this blog has itemised over the years - see this thread - there's a lot to say about the subject. I pass on Gwen Gordon's essay on Play: The Movement of Love which is a great (and contentious) starting point to this area. 

Incidentally, the picture at the top is of Tim in his spacesuit at Playtime! , beginning his new web-literature project Playing Golf on The Moon With David Bowie. Like his moving project on the loss of his home town (and the death of his father) In Search of Oldton, it's a fully-playful example of Web 2.0 at its most humane and intriguing.

A resonant and memorable day.

Update: I've just been sent my Flickr picture from the event. Indeed I am, as my correspondant suggests, as happy as a sandboy.

Empire De-Lux

Very pleased that Pankaj Mishra has responded to Martin Amis's appallingly snooty assault on Islam in the Observer this week. Read it all the way through, but I want to quote this paragraph, because it ties in with something I've been noting about the 'dark play' of American empire in the post below:

We have no choice but to find new forms of co-existence in an interdependent and highly politicised world, where it is no longer possible to enjoy the imperial luxury of remaking reality, and in which the many enemies created - and united - by these blundering attempts can also unleash devastating forms of violence.

The 'imperial luxury of remaking reality' is exactly what I've been referring to, well put.

The dangers of 'game-changing'

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

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

Deathball

Extraordinary new promotional video from Medecins San Frontiers on the Aids crisis in Africa, and the issue of access to medicines. (Thanks to Hunicke for the heads up.) Not only does it look like the missing link between Pixar animation and computer game machinima, but it's clearly inspired by the video game Katamari Damacy, where a little prince rebuilds his father's world by rolling a 'Katamari' round the landscape, which picks up every kind of object. Except in the MSF video, the ball starts with one African villager getting struck down by Aids, which rolls around picking up others... I'll let you watch the clip to experience the full impact.

In any case, with reference to my posts on the military-ludological complex below, this is at least an example of digital counter-culture at its best.

Toy Soldiers: Guardian article

Welcome to those of you linking through from my article in the Guardian IT supplement, on the relationship between the computer games industry and the US military. This blog entry features my unedited article in the 'extended post' section below. It's  not radically different, just longer, and embedded with hyperlinked back-up sources.

The topic has been a growing interest of mine for about a year now - ever since I came across the fact that J.C.Herz, the hip nineties cybercommentator, was now a project leader for DARPA (the US Defense Advance Research Projects Agency). I contacted J.C. about this, and never heard back from her - but it lead into a fistful of del.icio.us links on the topic, a few compelling e-mail and phone conversations, and eventually news of a new investigative history of US computer games, which had a major chapter on the military-entertainment-gaming complex.

I could easily write double or triple the amount of words I've already expended on this subject. (And I have a number of day and night jobs I have to return to, so this is probably as far as I'm going). But suffice to say, this is an example of the kind of critique required by my concept of a 'play ethic' - ie, how do we harness our powers of imagination, simulation and experimentation towards the building of a creative, reciprocal and sustainable society.

To say the least, the 'militarisation' of one of our most powerful contemporary play-forms is a challenge to these very ethics. I've only touched on the problem, and I invite others to take it up and extend it further.

All comments, corrections - and new leads - are more than welcome. Please input on the 'comments' link below.

[Note: Below this post is another 'War Games' post, with extra material on the issue of the US Army's data-capture of subscribers' gameplay, in the America's Army online game, and how this is used in recruitment. This isn't in the Guardian piece, because it's a more complex subject, but still worth exploring].