... It's an idea, a meme, a concept
The Play Ethic first came to me as a phrase in the early nineties, in the midst of a rehearsal with my neo-jazz band, in a moment when our drummer re-described his own 'work ethic'. (A few minutes' activity with AltaVista - an early search engine - would confirm that the phrase was hardly original). But as soon as I heard it, I realised that it had enough capacity in it to serve as a headline bringing together a wide range of interests of mine - cultural, technological and political.
Certainly as the Nineties progressed, the idea that computers and networks were making our societies more open, our institutions more transparent, and our civic and creative voices more prominent, began to increasingly excite me. Guided by magazines like Wired and Mondo 2000, and academics like Manuel Castells, I began to explore the nascent Web – exulting both in the diversity of the voices on there, and the increasing possibilities for self-expression.
My 80's experience as a musician, using digital technolgies like samplers and synths, had gotten me used to the idea of information as infinitely malleable, produceable and "playable-with". With the Net, these informational powers promised to spread beyond the artist's enclave, into workplaces, schools and the home.
But how did the heady mass empowerment of the Net sit with the constraints, hierarchies and routines of most life within organisations? Not well, it seemed to me (I had spent a lot of the Nineties in broadcast and press environments, chafing against such limits). The sociologist Daniel Bell has often talked about the "cultural contradictions of capitalism": where industry demands both a docile producer, and a hedonistic consumer, and is perplexed when the desirousness of the second identity saps the duteousness of the first.
I was interested in the cultural contradictions of informationalism. If imagination, mental agility, empathy and passion are the crucial elements that distinguishes one product or service from another these days - and if the Net is the process that coordinates this - then how does that sit with top-down managements which are happiest when demarcating job roles, and counting keystrokes? The reported rates of absenteeism and disillusion among UK workers seemed to indicate the problem – that the "Protestant work ethic", already made shaky by consumerism, was being entirely unravelled by computers and networks.
So for me, "the play ethic" (explored in this early 1997 article) came to seem like a pointer towards how these contradictions might be resolved. What would organisations be like which encouraged creativity, open-ended learning and experiment – the essence of play - as preferred characteristics for their employees or colleagues? What kinds of products, services and actions would these "players" generate? In the late nineties and early oughties, I began to gather and note examples of these players' enterprises – and as I wasn't finding too many of them (as least not this far away from California or Helsinki), I began to reach back into history, and into other disciplines. Which led to the next event…
... It's a book, a website and a research project
In mid-summer of 2000, I left my position as a section
editor at the Sunday Herald (of which I was a founding editor), and began work
on a web-site and long essay (eventually published as a front-cover piece in
the Observer's Life magazine, 22nd Oct 2000) which explored and developed the Play Ethic as a concept. The coverline was
"why believe in work, when work doesn't believe in you?" The essence
of the argument is captured in this extract:
Welcome to
the play ethic. First of all, don't take 'play' to mean anything idle, wasteful
or frivolous. The trivialisation of play was the work ethic's most lasting, and
most regrettable achievement. This is 'play' as the great philosophers
understood it: the experience of being an active, creative and fully autonomous
person.
The play
ethic is about having the confidence to be spontaneous, creative and empathetic
across every area of you life - in relationships, in the community, in your
cultural life, as well as paid employment. It's about placing yourself, your
passions and enthusiasms at the centre of your world.
By clearing
space for activities that are pleasurable, voluntary and imaginative - that is,
for play - you'll have better memory, sharper reasoning and more optimism about
the future. As Brian Sutton-Smith, the dean of Play Studies at the University
of Pennsylvania, says, 'The opposite of play isn't work. It's depression. To
play is to act out and be wilful, exultant and committed, as if one is assured
of one's prospects.'
So to call
yourself a 'player', rather than a 'worker', is to immediately widen your
conception of who you are and what you might be capable of doing. It is to
dedicate yourself to realising your full human potential; to be active, not
passive.
The play
ethic is what happens when the values of play become the foundation of a whole
way of life. It turns us into more militant producers and more discriminating
consumers. It causes us to re-prioritise the affairs of our hearts, to upgrade
the quality of our emotional and social relationships. It makes us more
activist in our politics, but less traditional in their expression. And most of
all, the play ethic forces us to think deeply about how we should pursue our
pleasures - and how we reconcile that with our social duties.
So, just
like the work ethic, the play ethic is a set of feelings and principles. But
the difference between the two is huge. Work is always (to coin a phrase) the
involuntary sector - the realm of necessity, where men and women have to do
what they have to do. But as Sartre says, play is what you do when you feel at
your most free, your most voluntary. When every positive decision you make
about your life carries both a risk, and a promise, of something new and
challenging taking place. This is why the play ethic isn't 'the leisure ethic':
the last thing it involves is slumped relaxation...
I attached a website (original version) and was overwhelmed by the reader and media response to the article - from the BBC and other news outlets, advertising agencies, government departments, arts institutions, universities, and many others. (See the Play Consultancy + Services page for a detailed history of these, and current engagements).
But my main ambition was to leverage coverage from the article into a book deal, so that I could explore, develop and substantiate the ideas behind the Play Ethic. I secured that with Pan Macmillan in 2002. I wrote the book while maintaining a number of blogs (here and here), writing journalism around play and associated topics (notably for the Guardian), and consulting to a variety of organisations and clients. The Play Ethic: A Manifesto For a Different Way of Living was published on September 2004. (See the Play Ethic book page on this site for more information, reviews and purchase links).
Since the publication of the book in 2004, which explored in greater depth some of the multidisciplinary scholarship around play (as well as containing reportage and autobiography), I have become much more interested in play at a theoretical and research level - partly in response to the range of academic interest I have received (scroll down the 'Scholarship | Journalism | Commissioned Research" page for a full history of this). I agree with scholars like Brian Sutton-Smith and Gwen Gordon that the function of play in adult lives is under-examined - and when it is examined, often misdescribed (as 'trivial', 'kidult', or pure recreation).
Sutton-Smith's evolutionary account of play as "adaptive potentiation" - the capacity of the advanced mammal to energetically test and experiment with various survival and flourishing strategies - is for me a very powerful basis for examining the forms and phenomena of play at all stages in the human life-cycle, and at all levels in human society. There are indeed other framings of the power of play from the natural sciences - particularly that of complex adaptive systems thinking, as advocated by Stuart Kauffman and Brian Goodwin - which strike me as equally powerful and profound, in recognising the centrality of play to the development of all organisms, not just human.
... It's a consultancy, a speaking service, a journalistic practice
Laying out such a wide vista on play means I have attracted an extremely diverse range of requests for information, consultation, and thought-starting. The full history of these, along with opportunities for further engagement, is on the "Play Consultancy" page. But it's perhaps worth dwelling on my experience of this, as a way of illuminating how the Play Ethic is faring as an idea in society.
Certainly in terms of my early agenda for the Play Ethic as a new logic for organizations, enterprises and governance in the information age, my record on the practical application of this is fascinating, yet uneven. There has been a consistent interest over the last four years from national and local government in play as an input into high-level strategic policy perspectives. My presentation to Geoff Mulgan's Strategy Unit at the Cabinet Office in 2005 generated departmental discussion about the importance of sport, and of free-time, as elements of a strategy that respects the well-being of citizens, as well as their economic productivity.
My engagement (as a partner in New Integrity) with the Scottish Government in 2005-2006 on 'Reimagining Social Work' aimed to change occupational, media and political understandings of the 'pariah profession'. In particular, we sought to argue that autonomy, creativity and "response-ability" is a crucial element in the social worker's effectiveness, even amidst the fraught environments they often encounter.
Another strong theme has been engagements and presentations to the education sector, at all levels - primary, secondary, tertiary and university. (Perhaps no surprise, given educators' enduring interest in human development and flourishing). The most interesting engagements have come from those who seek to fashion a pedagogy relevant to the information age. How can there be a teaching that resonates with the playful techno-culture of their students, whose literacy in games and social media outstrips that of their teachers by some leagues?
With the Victoria Schools Innovation Commission in Melbourne in 2005, Channel Four's In The Wild session in London and Glasgow during 2006, and Glasgow's Urban Learning Space in 2006 and 2008, I made presentations and conducted workshops - all of which suggested that a 'play ethic' was the obvious narrative to motivate teachers and pupils in the future environment of education.
I have also been sought out by some germane commercial constituencies - the advertising industry, the games, web-tech and consumer electronics sector, and the toy industry. Since early 2001, agencies such as Lowe Lintas, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, and Red Brick Road have asked me to consult on pitches and campaigns for companies like Lego, Microsoft X-Box and Gala Bingo - industries with an obvious and self-conscious interest in being literate about play, in order to improve their products and services to the players who use them.
All of these clients, both public sector and private sector, are clearly trying to respond to the growing societal prevalence of play - both as an explicit value for their potential consumers/users ('I am a player/I am at play'), and as a conceptual space that helps them enrich their own 'survival strategies' as organisations and enterprises.
What has been an instructive failure, compared with the original aspirations of the Play Ethic, is the lack of appetite from medium-to-large organisations to adopt or explore it as a guideline for structural change. This is the notion that 'a play ethic' might reshape the way management and staff interrelate, and provide the basis for a new spirit of creative collaboration in traditional companies. (I explored a few of these issues in my role as Visiting Lecturer at the School of Management at York University, and at the University of Leicester). I now think I might have been looking in the wrong place, and too early in any case. Organisational innovation, as the web academic Clay Shirky says, is coming from the direction of social media - which is lowering the costs of organising any collective endeavour, civic or commercial, and thereby bringing new actors into the field of enterprises.
The 'play ethic' might be more applicable to radical new "net organisations" like Linux, Wikipedia or the School of Everything, who exemplify what Yochai Benkler has called the "sharing" economy of networks. But my own guess is that this new networked 'ground of play' will extend itself, and challenge the conventional managerial wisdom of existing businesses (as my reviews of Wikinomics, Shirky/Leadbeater, and Lawrence Lessig's books indicate it will). At that point, I'm hopeful that a 'play ethos' comes to seem obvious and logical for many large organisations. As the new media consultant Joanne Jacobs says, the social play of the 'Net Generation' should compel companies to measure different outcomes - such as community, enthusiasm, and creative input from consumers - than simply the financial bottom line.
Mentioning those reviews brings me finally to a few delightful outcomes from the Play Ethic as a literary adventure. Firstly, an increased demand for my services as a commentator and writer from traditional media. The full record of this is available on the Scholarship | Journalism | Commissioned Research page - but worth noting in particularly is my long-standing relationship with the Independent as a books reviewer, commissioned by literary editor Boyd Tonkin - a relationship which has continually enriched my thoughts about play, technology and creativity. And which will, no doubt, generate another book in due time...
If you need to contact me about any of this, or to discuss any consultancy or service opportunities, please contact me at [email protected], I'd be delighted to hear from you.
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