PLAY JOURNAL

New Site for PlayJournal

network@theplayethic.com — Wed, 7 Jan 04 15:59:00 UT

Edited by Pat Kane (email)

Hi everyone!

Not by any means a farewell note, but certainly a "bookmark" note...

I took some time over the Xmas holidays to adapt my new Typepad blogging account, and the results have been excellent. So if you want a daily update on matters play-ethical, please go to the same URL's as before - Playjournal.org, or Playjournal.net. If you're very up to speed with social software, there is an XML feed on the site.

At some point, when the promotion for the book hots up, I might need some extra bloggers to keep the site hot. (Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs site is the model). If any of you are interested in becoming a PlayJournal blogger - I only have social capital to offer, I'm afraid - please let me know.

The entry categories of the new site have also been organised according to the chapter topics of the forthcoming Play Ethic book, out in June of this year on Macmillan (see Amazon.co.uk to pre-order!).

This is the start of a build-up to the book's launch that will involve public and media events, initially in the UK but hopefully throughout the world - or at least to those places and people, from Vancouver to Sydney to Helsinki to New York - that have responded to these ideas over the last four years. I'm presuming I can include you all in a monthly mail-out of a new and revamped Play Ethic Network newsletter.

This site will still remain active, as an archive for existing columns at least, until I can find someone willing to translate its entries into my new Typepad archives (me probably, on a very rainy Sunday.

I hope you can all join me in the new blog - this is going to be some year!

best wishes to all

PAT KANE

Join...

December Compendium

network@theplayethic.com — Fri, 19 Dec 03 23:02:00 UT

Edited by Pat Kane (email)

Thanks everyone for staying on the list...The Play Ethic book is out in June, so I'm hoping to relaunch everything here in about Feburary, site and blog. Happy holidays, next Journal in mid-January. - PK.

:: State of Play ::

The Ludic Intelligentsia comes together, conference by pamphlet by blog entry...

NYU's State of Play: Conference Papers
Looks like a seminal event in the players calendar - amazing papers from Edward Castronova, Douglas Rushkoff, Eric Zimmerman and others, outline nothing less (in my view) than the rudiments of a players' political economy. It's like Adam Smith consorting with the Glasgow merchants, one Enlightenment ago...

Creating Emotion in Games : The Craft and Art of Emotioneering
Remember Imagineering? This is the computer game equivalent. And here's Gonzalo Frasca letting us in on a computer game critical dispute that sounds like the kind of film school debates they use to have in the 20th century.

Wilson Center Hosts First Annual DC Serious Games Day
Simulation as policy. Does it surprise you that it happens in Washington?

Jordan Peterson's Maps of Meaning
The ludologists' thinker de jour - who seems to allow them to enjoy playing war games on their consoles, but feel they're not entirely martial themeselves... hmm.

:: Pop Aesthetics ::

Will Downloads Kill the Album?
It could do. Or it might raise some artists' games. Outkast's Speakerboxx at the moment shows how musicians might as well use the length of CD's to create an entire world, than pull together a prissy little career-pumping 12 track with three "singles" and the rest filler.

60 Seconds With Adam Schlesinger
Not sure this is the solution though... a pop album about cubicle dividers, flipcharts and team ethics? Though I've done my share of that...

:: Electronic Agon ::

The Howard Dean Connection
Could it be that this shrill, triangulating centrist is the first guy who benefits from the democratic power of the Net?

Why don't Americans text?
Some technical reasons, some social reasons, it seems. They might not be able to work their mobiles... but they can digitally mobilise.

:: So you wanna change the world... ::

UN adopts Net "constitution"
Another global dream raised by the United Nations. Let's not hold our breath for delivery (said more in sorrow than anger).

Arthur C Clarke: Humanity will survive information deluge?
"The information age has been driven and dominated by technopreneurs a small army of geeks who have reshaped our world faster than any political leader has ever done. And that was the easy part. We now have to apply these technologies in saving lives, improving livelihoods and lifting millions of people out of squalor, misery and suffering. In other words, our focus must now move from the geeks to the meek."

Webs of Trust
A fascinating paper from Forum for the Future on the culture of mutuality that the web generates. Another argument for the common 'grounds of play'.

Libre Society Manifesto
The Soulitarian pamphleteers keep putting it out in the public sphere. Who know what will catch fire these days?

The Transcommercial Enterprise
And some smart soulitarian business theory from the congenital optimists at WorldChanging.com.

The Revolution of Everyday Life
Favorite old players' manifesto from 60's situationist. Bit tediously class-war, but the joyous bits are good.

:: And your Powerpoint is...? ::

Powerpoint is evil
Was NASA's safety failures in the last Shuttle disaster due to the lobotomising effects of Powerpoint displays?

Turning Heads With PowerPoint
And can David Byrne redeem the benighted technology? God, I'd love a more dynamic alternative... but when you're in a hurry... Open Source Presentation Software: where is it?

:: Consciousness Razing ::

'Twin Peaks' Director Urges $1 Billion for Meditation
David Lynch (and he should know) arguing for a quietening of brain activity to stop violence and war...

Dodgy frontal lobes, y'dig?
...while Richard Dawkins says 16 year olds can't vote, because their brains haven't developed enough yet. Too much mental determinism, spiritual or Darwnist! Give me Zack Smith's Neurosociety anytime.

:: I'll be Cloned for Christmas ::

Eye toy tires kids out
The Playstation II camera that puts you in the action is the cutting edge of a new generation of haptic games. I'd be happier that they're jumping up and down in front of a screen than doing...

DNA Play for Kids
Become your own Dr. Moreau! Something heavenly, or infernal, or both will be kickstarted by these things. Toys 'R' Us, indeed.

:: Playing with the Kids ::

A Happy Family Christmas
Statement of the post-nuclear obvious from the Henley Centre

Playing games with nurseries
Yes, we need decent childcare. But my suspicion about these ex-Marxists is that they want universal childcare so that people can chuck themselves into the productive fray with ever more vigour. Not the full aspiration, in my view.

:: So that's what a playshop looks like ::

Out of the Blue: comedy improvisation for better business
This is what we have The Office for. Visions of forced laughter echoing round conference hotels forever, and ever...

Practical Moral Philosophy for Lawyers: Imagining What We Do Is a Game
Almost no comment required here...

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November Compendium

network@theplayethic.com — Sun, 30 Nov 03 22:21:00 UT

Edited by Pat Kane (email)

Hi everyone, many apologies for long silence. Engaged fully these days - and my software doesn't allow for easy, intuitive, and truly mobile blogging. (That's getting fixed). In any case, here's a very eclectic list from November, all of which radiates out from the Play Ethic, one way or another. (I'll decorate with pics soon).

best, PK

:: Pop'n'Politics ::

Moby, Soros launch contests for anti-Bush commercial
A holy alliance...

Howard Zinn and Radiohead's Thom Yorke in conversation
...and another one

Of grunge and government
Kris Novoselic of Nirvana wants to be a pol

Rocking the Hip-Hop Vote
The playas become players in time for the next round of US elections

:: Signs of Islam and Araby ::

Agonistic Islam
Play's ancient rhetoric (contestation and the agon) as a way of understanding Islamic politics. The beginning of a long conversation...

Baghdad, city of grafitti
The politics of satire - an inescapable human form of play

Umberto Eco on the future of books
His speech at the opening of the new library of Alexandria

:: A Message for you, Doctor Strangelove ::

Play Go, not Chess to understand the world
John Arquilla, Rand specialist, on the new gamimg metaphor for geopolitics

Gen. Franks Doubts Constitution Will Survive WMD Attack
Even to make this thinkable is deeply worrying

:: Ludicism and Literacy ::

Swaraj: Play in Education
Fascinating Indian think-tank - based on the Ghandian notion of Swaraj, or self-determination - looking at the power of play in education. (Thanks to Zaid Hassan).

Harvard Gazette: Kurt Cobain vs. Master P: Multiple approaches to education
Pop as a route to pedagogy

Are we over-programming our children?
Challenging piece on the opposition between free play and digital play

George Lakoff: Simple Framing
Becoming aware of the metaphors we're ruled by

Lawrence Lessig on Free Culture
The Paul Revere of the Information Age makes his usual painstaking case for the commons

:: Business Competitions ::

Beyond Globophobia
Defending globalisation from the left...

In defense of globalization: why cultural exchange is still an overwhelming force for good
...and from the libertarian right

The 'Thing' Economy and the 'Care' Economy
Fascinating paper which confirms the pertinence of the Play Ethic's new social continuum - between play and care.

What Strategists Can Learn from Sartre
GBN's James Ogilvy (who wrote a player's catechism once called Living without a Goal) brings existentialism to business

Unreason in Economics
It takes a Nobel Prize winner to tell us

:: The Generation Fractal (Not Gap) ::

Misreading Millennials
What does Generation Z want?

Luxury Fever and Affluenza
Desire and materialism in fond embrace

35 Heroes of Freedom
Who has made the world groovier

The Soulitariat Stirs

Does Digital Politics Still Matter
When - pace Howard Dean - did it ever stop?

Playground evolution
Someone's written the Cahiers Du Cinema for computer games

Rodney King stole my picture phone
We like to watch... especially when counter-surveillance comes in such an easy form

Transhumanism and Democracy
Is that a big enough idea? No?

Minimum Utopia: Ten Theses
Well try this one for size

:: Toying with the Heart ::

Can girls really play with boys?
Good question

The Man about the house
More signs that the 'PlayMan' (rather than PlayBoy) is coming to light

Love in the Time of No Time
Is internet dating about flexibility and individuality, or is it the desperate response to the oppressions of an overwork culture? Discuss/disgust

We need to pull ourselves together
Anti-play psychology

How to be happy
Pro-play psychology

:: Europe in Play ::

Habermas and Derrida on the fate of Europe
Philosophy's greatest systematiser, and greatest player, come together in a new geopolitical vision for the continent, post-Iraq and 9/11

Richard Rorty comments on H&D

As does Paul Kennedy

...And the Habermasian Spy
Jurgen's acolyte as a South Korean subversive

:: Play Times ::

Mandela's favourite African folk tales
Beautiful reference in this article to the spider's web of Anansie - "its stories may yet ensnare the world". It'd have to negotiate with Indra's Postmodern Net first...

Interesting optical illusion
You always gotta have one

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Fighting Thoughts, Happy Theories / I Link, Therefore We Are

network@theplayethic.com — Wed, 12 Nov 03 11:31:00 UT

Edited by Pat Kane (email)

:: Sociology gets physical (and fierce) ::

I always knew sociology would get hip again...No one making it more so that Loic Wacquant, who wrote a two-volume study on the social effects of boxing on poor American communities by doing some intensive field work... ie becoming a boxer himself. He got pretty good too - achieving a Golden Gloves regional final. He calls this a new kind of discipline - "carnal sociology" or "ethnography by immersion." From the New York Times:

The goal, he says, is to convey his subjects' world by experiencing it firsthand in the case of his boxers, from the point of view of their sweaty, pummeled bodies. It's an ambition, he insists, that represents a radical departure from what passes as ethnography today

"Either people are portrayed as maximizing computing machines pursuing their interests, or they're portrayed as symbolic animals that manipulate language and obey norms because they're members of a group," Mr. Wacquant said at a cafe near the campus here, throwing up his hands in dismay. "What's missing is that people are first and foremost embodied, carnal beings of blood and flesh who relate to the world in a passionate way."

He has a visceral understanding of what draws poor black men to the sport...It's not the money, not the fame or the possibility of occupational mobility," none of which are likely to be forthcoming, he said. "What binds boxers to their gym is just how gripping it is. It's the sheer sensuous, aesthetic and moral experience of being embedded in that universe."

I suppose that logic makes Kevin Warwick the only man who can theorise properly about cyborgs...I'd like to put Loic and the Beck Futures finalists Inventory in a ring, and see what their Fierce Sociology's left hook is like.

:: Happiness Studies ::

Yet another major tome wondering about the "Paradox of Progress" - ie, why we in the developed West are less happy than you'd predict, from our levels of prosperity - written by US critic Gregg Easterbrook. I'm always interested in the solutions proposed in these arguments - there's been quite a few recently - which always tend towards liberal-left policies.

Easterbook's list of unhappiness triggers - envy, lack of sleep, future-shock, "bad news" media - might be remedied, he suggests, by a raised minimum wage, universal health care, restraints on gargantuan CEOs, and more foreign aid. Richard Reeves has waged an admirable essay campaign to get the UK government to accept that, after a point of prosperity, collective well-being becomes more important than individual prosperity.

Is the notion of a "creative commons" becoming more than a buzz-phrase or a cute IP contract? Might it begin to describe a prosperous society's guarantees of security and enablement (citizen's wage, shorter working week, free media, etc), which then allows for the exploration of personal meaning, fulfilment, happiness (which I'd call a "players' agenda")?

:: Flow into that Scrum! ::

Of course, maybe you need to explore your consciousness a little, before you could make the best of a creative commons - otherwise the Gordon Brown charge of "sitting around all day, watching television, doing nothing" might kick in... Very happy to see Maynard Keynes' representative on earth, Will Hutton, advocating exactly that kind of deep self-connection
in the Observer this week, by talking about the great Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow. The World Cup rugby gives him the excuse:

Flow doesn't come from accenting the muscularity of rugby - desire, hurt, destroy, and dominate are the watchwords of the English coaches - but from helping each player to reach into himself to control his consciousness and then subsume himself in the service of the team. It's a language of concentration, focus and, ultimately, of pleasure.

Apparently, the French team has it in spades.

:: If the Kidults are United -- ::

I'm quoted in a Scotsman piece examining the kidult phenomenon:

"I think we have a players generation," Kane says. "Having lived through the end of Communism, the internet and mobile revolutions, CGI movies, the flexible workplace and at least three video-game wars with Afghanistan and Gulf wars I and II, the 17-40 age group just expects the world to be a simulation and a performance, their lives lived as games or scripts. Reality for them/us is unstable and unpredictable, requiring skill and wit and sharpness to navigate, but which can always be rebooted and started again...This generation is now coming to cultural and social leadership."

Kane disagrees with the idea that playing, whether with video games or not, is a way for adultescents to avoid real life. Instead, he argues that play should not be the prerogative of the young but that it is a vital way for everyone to better understand the world. It is too important to be written off as kids stuff.

"Play can be about power, contest, facing uncertainty and risk bravely, the difficulties of playing along with others in a community and so on," he says. "Adult play is the experimentalism and optimism of child play maintained into adulthood and augmented by experience, knowledge and skills...So I think there are some continuities between childhood and adulthood, in terms of play, which should be maintained, not broken."

:: - Then The Kids Will Never Be Defeated*::

Non-sequitur piece by Dave Hill in the Guardian, as to whether kids are being colonised by merchandising. His crucial caveat: haven't they always? Haven't little girls always raided their mum's wardrobes? Haven't little boys always been obsessive collectors of moulded plastic forms? Em, yes.

Elsewhere in the same paper - one cannot accuse Farringdon road of not being a player's paradise - Maggie Brown cites an extensive study of kids attitudes to television And guess what? They know perfectly well that everything before them is a venal construction of meaning, aimed at distorting their attention span and channelling their desires. And what is the most frightening judgement for marketeers that a modern screenage can make? "It's fake, man". Should we be trusting our children more for their critical instincts?

* - apologies to all old punks for Sham 69 reference. Talking of which, see what punk can do for sectarian division...

:: Play Times ::

Me++ "I am part of the networks and the networks are part of me. I am visible to Google. I link, therefore I am" (William Mitchell). If so, then you're the kind of person who will rejoice that they've found something sociable to do with their Bluetooth'd mobile phones. Hello, "blue-jacking".

Computer Games as Literacy It's creeping up on a curriculum and workplace training program near you... Evidence that it makes for better workers. And a new category for games that intend to do more than jab your thrill centres: Water Cooler Games.

If you're going to give out promotional crap in the workplace... choose wisely. For the only choices are: Successories. Or to your left, Despair, Inc. The dangers of too much 'flow' - and too little?

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Style, Substance and Search Engines

network@theplayethic.com — Fri, 31 Oct 03 11:21:00 UT

Edited by Pat Kane (email)

Again, apologies for the fortnightly frequency - finishing a batch of writing, so weekly service will resume soon. In the meantime...

:: What Did Arthur C. Clarke Say About Technology Again?::

...That any sufficiently advanced technology seems like magic. Well, it gets damn near magical with Amazon.com's new "Search Inside" facility. They've scanned all the pages of their stock of books, and you can now keyword search them. I agree with all the awestruck commentary about it from personal experience.

For example: How do you find out about recent literary representations of social workers (part of a consultancy with the Scottish Executive I've been doing)? Unless you lucked onto a Ph.D paper in the recesses of a Google search, not easily. But put "fiction" and "social worker" in Amazon's Search Inside, and you at least have some leads. Of course, one looks up one's own meme, and is delighted to find some positive citations...

It's not perfect by any means - but it is heartening that the kind of database richness previously only available through costly subscriptions to Lexis-Nexis, or access to academic resources, is now being parcelled out to the general consumer. From Brewster Kahle to the BBC's Creative Archive, there's a gathering recognition that we need to defend what Lawrence Lessig has called the "innovation commons" of the internet - precisely to support a culture of innovation, by putting some resources beyond commodification. What I call in the forthcoming Play Ethic book the "grounds of play". Exciting times!

:: More 'Substance of Style' ::

More coverage of Postrel's new Substance of Style book at Washington Post and Christianity Today, which is by far the most interesting review - noting Postrel's demolition of Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, who thought aesthetics is what we do when we're freed from necessity. As she reminds us from the paleontology record, humans have been decorating surplus to requirements since their beginning. Virginia and I both agree on the ontology, the deep reality, of playfulness - though not on its institutional or political consequences. However, I'm reading a fascinating young anthropologist Postrel cites, called Grant McCracken, who has constructed a whole new theory of "plenitude".

Can a US libertarian, and this UK social democrat, can find a way to play together? Be nice to find out...

:: Lifestyle Militants ::

The Play Ethic isn't all about tech and style. The genderquake in families and relationships is also changing the meaning of play - now a justification for radical changes in the way that people work in organisations. This report from Scotland tells of many more fathers staying at home, while their wives enjoy their new prominence in the work place. Is playing with the kids more attractive than playing office politics? On the other side, those who are "playing adults" - singletons without children - are demanding products and services that fit their lifestyles, says the CS Monitor.

:: Open Source, Funky Commons ::

Back to playing on the commons... Wired this month has a very cute title, "Leader of the Free World", with Linux originator Linus Torvalds on the front, looking like Scandinavian hacker-cool personified. There's an important piece on how open-source values - encapsulated as "Share the Goal, Share the Work, Share the Result" - are spreading to law, design, education and biotech.

But I'm particularly happy that pop music, and in some cases pop musicians, are in the forefront on figuring out what a techno-commons will be like. I've already linked to the Brazilian latin-megastar-turned-minister-of-culture Gilberto Gil - here's another great profile, parts one and two - who sees open source as a way for Brazil to compete with the North (and the Wall Street Journal sees the danger). Here's another visionary piece piece by Ray Kurzweil - who deserves my undying respect for introducting Stevie Wonder to synthesizers in the early seventies - which imagines what "the future of music in the age of spiritual machines" might be. Not only has music downloading settled into a sensible business model - but musicians will start to fuse their intelligences with "intelligent" instruments. The first cyborg will be a musician? Tell that to Kraftwerk, playing in Scotland this week.

:: PK OK ::

Been scrivening for various journals recently, both pieces interesting in terms of this agenda...

Training the Masses My frustration with train travel as a wireless opportunity wasted (from the Guardian Online). Also dependent on better batteries, of course...

It's MTV's World - We Just Live In it My musings on MTV, on the eve of its European Awards in Edinburgh. Is it Meta-TV, Mainstream-TV or Matrix-TV these days?

:: Play Times ::

Sony and Qualia No, not a philosophy paper, but what seems to be a major strategic reorientation. At least, I think it is... anyway they do make lovely robots

The New Great Game That's geopolitics in the Caspian, not the latest from Playstation. Though I'm sure the two can be immanently connected...

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Management Games / A Spectre Haunts the Bandwidth...

network@theplayethic.com — Tue, 14 Oct 03 15:57:00 UT

Edited by Pat Kane (email)

Sorry for delay - some business intervened... Normal service resumed in a few weeks -- PK

:: Business is Sport by Other Means ::

Fascinating new US blog (if you understand base-ball, which I do barely) called Management by Baseball. "Some management lessons from baseball", says the blogger, "are subtle. Sometimes though, they clang you over the head like they were Juan Marichal and you were John Roseboro." If only I knew who these people were.. could we substitute Arsene and Alex? And here's more reverse-inspiration for business from Micheal Lewis: how an underfunded team can compete with the biggies. Sounds not dissimilar to what my beloved Martin O'Neill is doing with Celtic...

:: So What Are We Wired For? ::

For living in authoritative communities (shiver)...

Or inveterate gambling?

You maps your neural pathways, and you takes your choice. Stay with Zack Lynch's Brainwaves, if you want to be kept up with the latest innovations in mind science from a players'-friendly perspective.

:: Philo-Matrix ::

I know, I know, it's very Summer 2003... But when one of my great inspirers to playful theory, the philosopher Richard Rorty, decides to write about The Matrix, I'm linking:

Maybe life is a dream. Maybe reality is utterly different from what it appears to be. Maybe human language is inadequate to represent that reality. Maybe our minds simply cannot grasp what is going on. Maybe we are just brains in vats, fed electrical impulses that alter our brain-states, thereby creating pseudo-experiences of an imaginary world.

This string of skeptical "maybes" is our heritage from Ren Descartes, an undeservedly influential 17th-century philosopher who suggested that what goes on in our minds might have nothing to do with what goes on outside them. One reason movies like "The Matrix" are popular is that people find it stimulating to work through some of the paradoxical consequences of this suggestion.

And never mind the SF-losophy...here's what some real SF writers think of a real post-human hallucination: Aah-nee in office.

:: Social Theory Plays Around ::

One can feel a new social theory emerging. I'd call it a "Second Enlightenment" moment: ie, Adam Smith and David Hume theorised as they watched the merchants and industrialists sputter into life in the 18th century. And now a rag-bag of intellectuals (almost as coffee-driven as those two) are forging equally big concepts in the face of our networked, globally reciprocating world.

I'm betting on a fusion of game theory and network theory myself:

GT: The Law of Win-Win, according to ace blogger Dave Winer; and game theory explains our scepticism about executive bonuses, from the New Yorker: "For an economy to be healthy, people have to believe the game isnt rigged".

NT: Emergence, Schmemergence - a bright lad from I-Society lays it down on how self-organisation is over-rated as a political paradigm. Meanwhile over in Nerdistan, someone is playing with old, old tropes: "A specter is haunting spectrum policy the specter of commons. (Apologies to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Actually, unlike communism, the commons position is neither anti-property nor anti-markets)"...

:: Play Times ::

John Thackera: down with the Creative Classes "We are in a transition to a post-spectacular, post-massified culture. It's for this reason that it would be foolish to hand over our cities to the "creative class". They just don't get it. More to the point, their business model drives them on. Our cities are over-designed because the creative classes get paid for designing things. 'Creatives' don't get paid for leaving well alone.That's a conundrum we'll need to resolve." And in the meantime, we got Massclusivity. Designers with too many patrons...

Africa's new class of power players Fascinating use of the "agonistic" rhetoric of play. And who could but support their moment of agency?

A Lester Bangsulator So you wanna fake being an indie rock fan? It's easy. Better still: why not experience playing an entirely new instrument, with the imprimatur of a big city US conductor? (He should get in touch with Dizzee Rascal...)

Playa's Ethic, part 2 The male pill - more like, the male three-monthly injection - is out, safe and effective. Could you trust your squeeze? And if you didn't remember to take your jag, you could always spill it in a moment of cyber-confession. 'Bless me, Matrix, for I have sinned...'

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Democrazy Goes Wireless / Funky Lula

network@theplayethic.com — Mon, 29 Sep 03 23:28:00 UT

Edited by Pat Kane (email)

:: How Will "Smart Mobs" Play Out? ::

That's what Business Week asked Howard Rheingold this week, the genial prime-guru of cyberculture for the last twenty years. One can only be jealous of his timing - writing a book about the idea that mobile wireless tech will create a new society, and then seeing the "flash mobs" phenomenon take off. (Though the whole phenom has deeper roots than we think).

But in terms of The Play Ethic, smart mobs are a perfect exemplar of the kind of social players that info-tech can generate. That's exactly the kind of agency and action that a liberation from work culture - which means a liberation into a different relationship between passion and technology - can bring.

Here's Howard, mixing the hard-nosed and the civic-utopian with ease:

A:What can you do when you've got a billion people walking around with computing devices connected at high speeds? I don't think we really have a clue to that. But there's huge technology potential and huge entrepreneurial potential...

The most extraordinary potential is that the people who couldn't have afforded PCs or the Internet are walking around barefoot talking on cell phones, sending text messages -- finding out about the spot labor market in their African village or which port is paying a better price for fish today. That's under the radar of the enterprises whose business is to sell to the middle classes of the world.

Q: So will the U.S. necessarily be the place where new enterprises based on this trend take root, or is it really lagging?

A: The assumption that it's going to come from Silicon Valley, or even America, may be looking in the wrong direction. This time, we may be seeing things come out of China or Brazil....If a 15-year-old in São Paolo can't invent tomorrow's Google, we will all be impoverished because of it.

:: Democrazy ::

Fascinating to muse on what politics means in the age of the smart mob and the social player. What does the polis become, when social space becomes alive with information and interactivity? My e-pal Douglas Rushkoff (cartoon) is launching a publication at the ICA on networked democracy (I will be there).

It's bound to be a great event, and a stimulating booklet. Douglas believes that the nerds, geeks and gamers have a vision of reality that puts everything "into play" - and that thus allows for a new, grass-roots, yet innovative politics to emerge. As he writes in an early version of the book:

Yes, political structures do need to be changed. But we may have to let their replacements emerge from the myriad of new relationships that begin to spawn once people are acting and communicating in the present, and on a realistic scale, instead of talking about a fictional future.
The underlying premise is still dependent on the notion of progress. Indeed, things must get better or theres no point to any of it. But our understanding of progress must be disengaged from the false goal of growth or the even more dangerous ideal of salvation, and reconnected with the very basic metric of social justice: how many people are able to participate?

And to add to the Rheingold piece, Rushkoff also writes elsewhere how this might also help out some beleaguered telecom giants - by turning them away from content, and towards contact. Typical show-stopping quote:

It's time for the wireless industry to come to grips with the fact that no matter how sleek the phones or colorful the pictures on their little screens, nobody wants to have sex with either. They want to have sex with each other. Either help them, or get out of the way.

:: Play Times ::

The State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds Conference that does what it says on the tin. And in New York too.

Brazil's different drum Nice piece on Lula, Brazil's new president, as a "radical pragmatist...Real improvisation, in music or politics, should not be mistaken for aimless noodling, and it takes great discipline and planning to be pulled off well."

Junkyard Sports The great player Bernie De Koven's bid for a new sports movement.

Yes Logo It was bound to happen: people now seen to defend their big brands against contamination by history, world, change. Displaying their gullibility - or asserting their semiotic rights?(See Virginia Postrel's latest on this).

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You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Player / Dali, Disney and Dizzee

network@theplayethic.com — Wed, 17 Sep 03 20:26:00 UT

Edited by Pat Kane (email)

:: This Ain't No Discord ::

Part of the enduring power of play comes from its strong sourcing in biology and nature. Play is the form of communication, creativity and expression that unites us with other animals - not just other complex mammals, but birds too - rather than language, which separates us.

The biologist Brian Goodwin, my friend and colleague in the IFF, often talks about play as a concept that brings us closer to the creativity of the natural world, and thus to nature itself:

Play is a crucial way in which the possibility of emergent new order is created in living beingsand it is interesting to connect this notion of play in the natural world with the playful postmodern pastiche of different styles, the invitation to the carnival. Play is by nature spontaneous and purposeless; it is simply for its own sake; it is dangerous in not attending to the harsh realities of existence; yet it is helpful to living creatures because it contains the possibility of novelty.

The biology of play is a fascinating subject for amateur pop-science fans like myself: the best I can do is to keep an eye on the field, and watch the form of the most interesting scientific horses. One lithe new contender is the Norwegian Bjorn Grinde, who has written a popular best-seller in his native country, Darwinian Happiness: Evolution As a Guide for Living and Understanding Human Behavior. His book focuses on the "mismatch hypothesis" - the notion that much of our contemporary unhappiness stems from the "Discords" between our hi-tech, flexible lifestyles and our evolved natures. Yet as his reviewer notes, many of these have playful solutions:

Discords may be encountered throughout the lifespan and in all areas of life. Inadequate parenting is a Discord that can have tragic consequences for development and psychopathology. So is the punishment and psychiatric labeling of boys who express a strong drive for playing when their culture (mis)values sitting quietly and obediently...Oppressive sexual mores can be Discords that stifle and distort natural impulses for kindness, intimacy, and sexual joy...Grinde offers dozens of sound and practical remedies for the Discords of our time. Among other strategies, he recommends more play, more exercise, more learning, more touching, and more kindness and altruism.

That's a great last line - and, incidentally, maps on several of my rhetorics of play.

:: Hi-Tech/Hi-Touch ::

"More touching", indeed. Who could complain? Indeed, there's a challenging essay in the Jewish ideas journal Tikkun which argues that we need to recover our creaturely sensuality in general. Here's my favourite point from the piece, a caution to digital obsessives like myself:

There is, of course, nothing wrong with the computer, nor with the many realms now so rapidly being opened for us by the astonishing capability of our computersas long as we bring to these new realms the sensorial curiosity, creativity, restraint and ethical savvy that can only grow out of our full-bodied encounter with others in the thick of the earthly sensuous. But if we plug our kids into the computer as soon as they are able to walk, we short-circuit the very process by which they could acquire such creativity and such restraint.

A little too Luddite for my taste, but beautifully written. Sample with John Naisbitt's High Tech, High Touch for a slightly less organic viewpoint.

:: America as an ethical player? ::

I always keep an eye on the writings of Robert Wright, the most articulate populariser of game theory as a explanation of social progress. Out of all the American commentators on 9/11, his position has been the most intriguing - arguing that America's role should have been to recognise that their cultural power is much more important than their military power, in a media-drenched globalised world. This piece in the New York Times ties his analysis to game theory explicitly:

Globalization dates back to prehistory, when the technologically driven expansion of commerce began. Early advances in transportation roads, wheels, boats were used to do deals (when they weren't used to fight wars). So too with information technology. Writing seems to have evolved in Mesopotamia as a recorder of debts. Later, in the form of contracts, it would lubricate long-distance trade.

All this is grounded in human nature. People instinctively play nonzero-sum games games, like economic exchange, in which both players can win. And technological advance lets them play more complex games over longer distances. Hence globalization.

What makes globalization precarious is that nonzero-sum relationships typically have a downside: both players can lose as well as win. Their fortunes are correlated, their fates partly shared, for better or worse. As a web of commerce expands and thickens, this interdependence deepens.

But does this justify Wright's call to Americans to lead "a moral revolution", based on the need to reduce antipathy to their power? Not sure. In the meantime, remember to celebrate Sept 12th next year...Interdependence Day.

:: Play Times ::

A Dali-ance with Disney In a great season for animation, surely the one worth waiting for: the completion of 'Destino', Dali's planned cartoon with Disney.

"Hourly, In Play..." Incomprehensible casino capitalism. "Today's point gainers list is dominated by tobacco (MO +4.60, RJR +4.28) and retailers (TLB +1.76, URBN +1.54, ANN +1.53), as well as: GPRO +5.18..." Urrgh.

"I come from the Playstation Generation" says Dizzee Rascal, winner of this year's Mercury music prize. "We make music and beats on anything we can...creating beats, messing about with flows..." The boy's a social portent, and sounds like this.

Are You TIRED? And do you want to "pro-tire"? I'm sure you're both...TIRED standing for Thirty-something Independent Radical Educated Dropout, and "protiring" meaning an alternative to retiring - mid-life downshifters, eager to explore more leisurely or creative pursuits outside of work. Nice puns, neat research...but I think the word they're looking for is, "player"...

Join...

Sim Politics and Code Angels

network@theplayethic.com — Wed, 10 Sep 03 22:30:00 UT

Edited by Pat Kane (email)

:: Sim Politics and Mirror Worlds ::

A play company so perfect one couldn't invent it.Ludicorp is a privately held company based in Vancouver, British Columbia, whose mission is "to create new possibilities for creative expression through play". To that end, they've been testing a new kind of simulated online community called The Game Neverending, which has been getting rave reviews. Steven Johnson (a fellow player) described what they're about with great lucidity in one of his recent Discovercolumns:

Game Neverending is a delightfully open-ended virtual space that encourages new sociopolitical structures: Where SimCity lets you build a neighborhood, Game Neverending promises to let you create a new form of grassroots alliance, or even a cult. The designers are hoping to get away from the traditional game interface, which involves sitting focused exclusively on the computer screen. The idea is to create new ways for information to flow from real space into virtual space.

"I could have lieutenants in my cult who are allowed to draft new members," says cocreator Stewart Butterfield. "And one level up, there are cult members who can kick people out. Now, managing that group can take a lot of time, but the social interactions that are involved in that management can take place outside the game." You could exile an underling without actually launching the game just by sending a short text message from your cell phone. "We really want people to be able to have a 30-second or a two-minute participation that's satisfying, rather than launch a monolithic application and play with it for five hours."

Somewhere in this mix of tools and interactivity, a true mirror world is brewing. Combine the visual interfaces of SimCity, the up-to-the-minute data of My Neighborhood Statistics, the multiple inroads of Game Neverending, and you'd be able to create a true alternate universe, one that was mapped to real events. Ten years from now, a massive public planning operation like the one under way for the Ground Zero site might well be unimaginable without a mirror world. Photoshop pictures of the new skyline are nice but can't answer the important question: How will this new space actually be used once it's built? Will it be dreary, teeming, commercial, or diverse? Just create a virtual model of each proposal, download the latest economic data, populate it with users willing to participate as residents and workers, and press play.

So much to investigate here, alongside the rise of console games like Republic, in relation to what we might call a play-ethic politics. Might the computer game be a spur to new political forms, in the same way that electrification and the petrol motor shaped industrial democracy? (Or will we just find new terms for old tendencies - saying that we're more "Circle" people than "Org" people?, instead of egalitarian and hierarchical?) Perhaps testing out our social options through "Sim Politics" will allow us to truly shape the future, rather than blunder into it with our usual mix of creation and destruction?

:: If Open Source Were A Child...::

Extraordinary new ad from IBM, invoking the open-source software Linux as a child prodigy, absorbing the best wisdom that the world can bring him, from Muhammed Ali to Henry Louis Gates (as you can see, he's a cross between Haley Osment and Eminem). Although I bet everyone at Adbusters is really suspicious of this stuff, I must admit to being very excited.

The strapline - "Linux: The Future is Open" - is right in line with a players' perspective: indeed, it's the core position (even the ontology) of the Play Ethic that our social reality is much more open to intervention and action than it might usual seem.

Open Source is a living demonstration of that - an information-environment born from the imagination of a public community of hackers, rather than brewed up behind copyright in a corporate lab. Indeed, the transcript captures the playful idealism of Open Source's Hacker Ethic perfectly:

Cut to Professor Gates speaking to boy.

Mr. Gates: Collecting data is only the first step toward wisdom. But sharing data is the first step toward community.

Cut to side shot of poet speaking to boy.

Poet: Poetry. Theres not much glory in poetry, only achievement.

Cut to overhead shot of boy.

Voice: Knowledge amplification. What he learns, we all learn. What he knows, we all benefit from.

Yes, of course we need to keep an eye on their business acumen. But might IBM be onto a new business ethic here?

:: Play Times ::

The Game Theory of Nature. Words of wisdom from John Maynard Smith. "If you look at the animal signalling literature now, it's entirely based on game theory. I've just finished a book on the evolution of animal signals where we talk about religion quite a bit. You mustn't think it is confined to human beings: religion, meaning ritual behaviour functioning to create emotional commitments - there is plenty of it. You find it in a group of hunting dogs about to go out for the day, in a group of birds about to migrate, and in some very odd circumstances in chimpanzees..."

Howard Gardner on the best schools in the world Reggio Emilia - the Italian schools that validate play in all its forms as a learning tool - praised by one of the great educational thinkers. An education for players here. Gardner's speaking at an extraordinary event about 'education, music and the mind', in my home town next week.

Selling Your Soul. Literally. It's a joke. I think it's a joke. Though the rates are excellent.

Join...

When Play Meets Care / Tank Painting, McGospel Music and Lying Liars

network@theplayethic.com — Tue, 2 Sep 03 12:53:00 UT

Edited by Pat Kane (email)

:: Play and Care: the New Lifestyle Balance ::

Always a delight to see a mainstream newspaper invoke Howard Gardner's theories of multiple intelligence positively - they overlap so usefully with the "seven rhetorics of play" model (more here) that I'm developing. The point of both paradigms being that humans are productive and creative in many more diverse ways than the image of a functional "worker" can allow.

In any case, last Sunday's Observer ran a huge article on the rise of "emotional literacy" programmes in schools, invoking Gardner's notions.

His various intelligences - such as intrapersonal (understanding your own feelings), interpersonal (understanding others), bodily-sensual (solving problems physically), musical, etc - seem to allow teachers to educate children in ways that defy the Gradgrindery of the national curriculum.

Areas like the "Friendship Stop" (where you can find people to play with if your pals have rejected you) and the "Quiet Room" (where kids can retire from the playground melee for a while) are places of emotional resource - safety-banks that kids can draw on when the demands of playground life get too much.

This demonstrates one point I'll make in the book, which is that the complement to the play ethic isn't the work ethic, but the care ethic - ie, from the work-leisure balance, to the work-life balance, to the play-care balance. (For more on this, see some of our consultancy around social work [Powerpoint] with the Scottish Executive).

In my view, there is no reason why we can't continue the exuberance and passion that the average child shows in the playground into our adult lives.
Yet we fear to do so, because we know the consequences of "falling", as an adult, are incredibly high - in terms of identity, stigma, resources. For example, can we disconnect the huge and rising levels of personal debt, from a mass desire to live messier, more experimental, less strictly utilitarian lives? A desire which our hyperconsumerist culture can clearly answer, with electronic credit making minutely tailored products and services instantly available?

But what if our adult productive lives were less of a conveyor belt between workplace and mall, and more like an ever-expanding "scholarium"? This is, strictly speaking, a place for scholars, defined in Greek philosophy as the adepts of shkole, meaning the freedom to set one's own creative and productive schedule, to be in control of one's time - which is an enabling condition of the player.

But that freedom to play can only be fully realised when there is a level of active support for failure in a society - the "trampoline" of well-being and well-becoming, rather than the "safety net" of welfare. This is what the emotionally literate school in the Observer article seems to be modelling.

What I'm calling the "care ethic" is an extension of that concern for the sustainable resources of the player (which is what the learning child is, at his or her best) to adult life. (Note: the care ethic is a big theme in feminist thinking which I'm respectfully tapping into here).

:: If We Build It, Will We Come? ::

The question, as always, is how radical the socio-economic reforms need to be, in order to reproduce a society of players - which, let's remind ourselves, is about humans at their most generative and dynamic. Such investment may not have precisely measurable "outcomes", but it will create huge energy and vibrancy in a society. And the next question (as always) is what kind of personal development is needed to fuel the demand for such reforms.

On the second question, see my recent contribution to a BBC Radio 4 discussion slot on parenting books (ram file, Real Player required). I explore the notion that the "parenting industry" (as the programme presenters rather sneeringly put it) is actually a sign that adults (particularly men) are playing around with their identities as gendered carers of others, building something out of the ruins of the patriarchal work culture. And that if they need a few self-help volumes from Waterstones or Borders to help them in that construction, this is no bad thing (and actually, no bad market, either).

On the first question - how radical should our societal restructurings be to support a civilisation of play - there's always a sprinkling of portents out there. A flurry of thoughts about how we institutionally and organisationally sustain play has burst into life in the Comments page of last week's Play Journal. Nick Currie (aka Momus, who is the rich man's Brian Eno) has pitched in on a debate about the role of failure, risk and experimentation in the public and private sector.

We mention everything from Paul Morley's new book, the creativity of failure, and the BBC's grand act of open-source television, in their announcement of the Creative Archive.

(If you find it gets too policy-wonkish, you have my permission to use the Auto-Wonker from Geist of the Zeit. Satire might well come up with better answers. Talking of which...)

:: Into the Funny Bone: Satirical Play ::

I've been so busy defending play against work-ethical charges of triviality in this project, that I'm often guilty of neglecting the primal power of play as laughter, fun, subversion, taking nothing seriously. But the ability to laugh at power, to properly see the emperor's new clothes, is fully part of the play ethic. Some links to illustrate, and a promise to establish this as a PlayJournal theme:

Al Franken on Lying Liars The follow-up leftist populist to Micheal Moore, being sued (unsuccessfully) by the right-wing Fox News for using their strapline "fair and balanced". Here's an extract, and some interesting commentary.

Vaclav Havel's Laughter in the Dark Brilliant essay from Phil Agre on Havel's anti-totalitarian satires as a means of "issue enterpreneurship" - a way to rally hearts and minds around a cause, in ways that keep them committed through absurdity and humour.

Leaders of the Free World And what can the hackers do to bare their arses at authority? If Hogarth were alive today, he'd be using Macromedia and Flash like this too. Try all the icons at the bottom: my favourite's third from the left.

:: Play Times ::

Newsgaming It had to come: real-time online multi-player simulations around the day's news.

A Love Tank What Iraqi kids do to military hardware, given half the chance
Dante's Inferno Test Take it and see. What Ring of Hell suits your personality?

Scots Invented Gospel Music! So says Willie Ruff, an Afro-American professor of music at Yale. Praise the Lord, and pass the stovies.

Jazzers Are Madder Than Anyone Else This... is news?

Join...

Sunshine Nihilism / Open Source Samba

network@theplayethic.com — Mon, 25 Aug 03 16:41:00 UT

Edited by Pat Kane (email)

:: Holiday Madness and the Leisure Cul-De-Sac ::

There's much angst in the British press at the moment about excessive hedonism in Mediterranean holiday resorts this summer.

In towns like Corfu and Faliraki, local police and authorities are cracking down on the behaviour of British party revellers (and their tour operators). Young men and women have been arrested for indecent public exposure and group sex on family beaches.

There have been some fatalities too - two in the Greek resort of Faliraki over the last few months: a young man's throat cut in a bottle fight, and a 25-year-old victim of a heart attack, believed to have been caused by cocaine use.

Much ink has been spilled about why British tourists - voted the worst in the world in a poll commissioned by the travel company Expedia last year - devote themselves to such extremes of intoxication, feuding and casual sex. Mary Riddell reminds us that the British Yob has a long history: she quotes John Dryden from the seventeenth century:

Meantime, your filthy foreigner will stare,
and utter to himself, Ha! Gens barbare.

So is this the danger of a society "at play"? Depends whether you limit your definition of play to its obvious cliches - play-as-freedom, play-as-triviality. Both are key elements of what we usually call "leisure" or "recreation" - those pumped-up, glittering zones of temporary relief from the working life.

Says one ex-tour guide: "what we were selling (tourists) was effectively a form of escapism - a break from reality they could talk about for the rest of the year". Listening to a radio discussion show on the same topic today, a party-tourist confirmed that "when you go there, it's like there's no rules at all - that's the mentality of the British tourist. We're just mad for it".

The question is: Would these fantasies of sensual anarchy be so furiously pursued, if British work culture wasn't so utterly dispiriting in its mainstream? If the "rules" of one's productive and purposeful life could be much more shaped by our own wills - that is, if we spent our waking hours playing games we want to play - then would the need to escape those "rules" be so urgent?

The glory of the BBC's The Office was that it reminded us of how boring, pointless and fake most British working environments actually are, even when they're at their most "enabling". The "break from reality" that the sex-and-booze holiday represents is as much a comment on the nature of "reality" itself: a reality which (as far as most working cultures go) lacks imaginative depth, any real engagement and standard-setting, no sense of possibility or surprise.

How could people's productive lives seem less like a iron cage to escape from, and more like a box of toys, tools or materials, in which one can be absorbed, fuflilled and inspired? An ethical player puts his or her hedonism - a necessary pole in the wide spectrum of play forms - in a proper relation to other forms of play: and these can be about self-development as much as self-indulgence, engagement with an exciting world as well as the search for a temporary utopia.

But if there is no collective social support for these wider explorations and extensions of self - that is, for a richer vision of "being a player" in the mainstream of our lives - then the holiday madness becomes a necessary let-off of psychological steam. Might there be a correlation between the world's politest tourists - the Germans, according to Expedia - also being the most socially supportive of its workers?

There's lots more about this to come in my Play Ethic book. But in the meantime, o alienated info-youth of middle Britain, go easy on the "fishbowls". And do you really want to bring holiday snaps home like this one?

:: Look and Feel ::

Virginia Postrel's latest book, The Substance of Style, is due out next month in the US. As a play thinker, I've drawn a lot of inspiration from her. Writing from a rigorous libertarian-Republican position, Postrel's "play ethic" comes from the streets and the malls, from the real contexts of people's messy lives. She's a caution to my own ambitions for a more enlightened public policy on work and play - but a welcome one.

The Substance of Style takes an obvious topic - the rising levels of design and style in the developed world economies - and subjects it to the rigours of political economy, in her trademark snappy prose. To sample her thinking, see this Q&A on her website, as well as this collection of related articles.

:: The Rules of Engagement ::

As you'd imagine, the etymology of the English word "play" is one of my favorites. Here's what it says at Bartleby.com:

ENTRY: dlegh-
DEFINITION: To engage oneself. European root found in Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, and possibly Latin. 1a. play, from Old English plegian, to exercise oneself, play; b. pledge; frankpledge, replevin, from Late Latin plevium (> Old French plevir, to pledge), pledge, guarantee; c. plight2, from Old English pliht, danger, peril, from Germanic derivative noun *plehti-. ac from Germanic *plegan, probably altered (by dissimilation) from *tlegan. 2. Zero-grade form *dgh-. indulge, from Latin indulgre, to indulge, explained by some as from prefixed and suffixed stative form *en-dgh-- (*en-, in; see en). (Pokorny dhgh- 271.)

Could the ambiguity of the ludic be better captured - play meaning both engagement and indulgence, duty and danger?

So imagine my delight to read Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland - originator of Generation X, and fastidious culture-mapper - give this impassioned statement in an interview around his new book, Hey, Nostradamus!:

I think social and moral disengagement is repugnant. In the book the opposite of labour is theft, not leisure. And that's very much how I feel but there is part of me that wants to leave everything, like now. And I kind of fight that every day. The rational part of me says no you have to stay and engage in the culture and if you don't you're a coward.

There's a little nexus of words here - "play", "labour", "engagement" - which begin to address the point I'm hammering on about in the Play Ethic: what is an adequate language for human agency, for making our mark upon the world, in a post-work age?

:: Play Times ::

Open Source and Radical Samba Tech advocacy doesn't get cooler: the mighty new Brazilian minister of culture (and Latin-pop megastar) Gilberto Gil on why his country must support free software.

The library as the city's living room? Timely and visionary report from Re:Source. What better candidate for a true public play-space?

And finally...Indebted to Matt Jones of Blackbeltjones.com for this great outcome vs process quote from Bruce Mau:

Process is more important than outcome.
When outcome drives the process we will only ever go where we've already been.
If process drives the outcome we may not know where we're going,
but we will know we want to be there...

Join...

Scotland's Dark Play / Luck, Propaganda & Powerpoint

network@theplayethic.com — Tue, 19 Aug 03 00:30:00 UT

Edited by Pat Kane (email)

:: The Devil's Game ::

As may or may not be obvious, this column is usually written from Glasgow, Scotland. And it would be fair to say that the relationship between play and Scottishness is hardly without some friction.

My main political adversary in The Play Ethic book (coming early next year) is that redoubtable Presbyterian from Fife, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (and supreme ruler of the British Economy), Gordon Brown MP. His fervid zeal to create a "new work ethic" amongst the overly semiotic and hedonistic British poor is too reminiscent of the thunderous 18th century Puritan reformers for comfort.

When Scotland loosens its stays, or suspends its self-vigilance, all manner of phantasy and simulation emerges. Yet it's usually fringed with that Calvinist sense of pre-destination: no matter how much you strive to remake yourself, your success or failure is already a matter of celestial record.

So the protean McPlayer, at some point, always hits her or his hidden limits - and hard. For example, movies like Gregory's Girl - which show a bunch of Scottish teenage dreamers drifting through life's possibilities, toying joyfully with the consequences of their actions - are extremely rare.
Scottish movies are more likely to show their characters eventually suffering for whatever pleasures they pursue: from the notorious Trainspotting, through Lynne Ramsay's Morvern Callar, to the latest "ye'll-pay-for-it" fest, Young Adam (starring Ewan McGregor).

Yet as the Edinburgh Festival proves (whirling away over the other side of the country as I write), it's not that Scots can't throw themselves into the timeless joys of carnival and artistic expression. It's just that Scottish playfulness will always partake of the darker, more ancient rhetorics of play as much as the lighter, more modern ones (see my Brainwaves entry for more on this).

And historically, this is backed up by that strangest of Scottish Enlightenment fictions, James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. As Hogg's highly acclaimed new biographer Karl Miller puts it, the Confessions is a timeless mix:

a post-modern work which is also a pre-modern work, by a man who believed, not strongly but to some extent, said his daughter Mary Garden, in ghosts and demonic possession, and who produced a book with demons in it which is not, fundamentally, a superstitious book. Its about the effects of puritanical superstition.

The post-modern bit is the fact that the story of its murder is told from the perspective of two different consciousnesses - or perhaps, the same consciousness divided. And only one of these consciousnesses believes in its bloody predestination: the other satirises the Calvinist anxiety. It's almost a struggle between play rhetorics - that of being played by the Gods (play-as-fate), or being the player of one's own life (play-as-freedom).

In an adroit review in the Telegraph, Andrew O'Hagan relates Hogg's sophisticated sense of the "performance of personality" to the hothouse atmosphere of literary Edinburgh in the early nineteeth century (Hogg was a lively hack, writing provocative pieces for Blackwood's Magazine). This quote from Miller focuses it all:

Hogg said on more than one occasion that to observe and imitate someone may be to control them. Part of him knew that this may be a devil's game which he himself was inclined to play For one writer to copy, parody, rewrite, ghost-write, even edit, another may be to take on, and so to take, that other writer's identity Parody is a function of personality, and takes part in its enigmas.

Though sometimes it's the most determinely unludic of cultures, it's good to be reminded that pursuing a "Scottish Play Ethic" might not be a historical anomaly, or even a contradiction in terms. And I haven't even mentioned Irvine Welsh's Porno...

:: Harry Potter and the Theme-Park of Brigadoon ::

Given that it's the Edinburgh Festival month, forgive me for pursuing another hot Caledonian play-topic: how does Scotland make the most of Harry Potter, the greatest ludic franchise of them all? (We're perpetually interested in The Franchise here at the Play Journal: it's a 13 year old daughter thing).

J.K. Rowling's commitment to Scotland is both residential (she lives in Edinburgh) and imaginative - the environs of Hogwarts are clearly set in a Scottish context, and much filming of the third movie has taken place in the Glencoe area.

Our lumbering tourist board is now attempting to belatedly mount the magic bandwagon, trying to leverage the same kind of global interest in the stirring mise-en-scene of Mr Potter, as New Zealand has done with The Lord of the Rings' location shots.

Surely the great target for Potterdom is the theme-park. The question is: where will it be located? There's already feverish fan-speculation that Disney have bought up the rights to the rides.

But everytime I watch that CGI tracking shot down towards Hogwarts school in its iridescent glen, it seems perfectly obvious what needs to be built: the Castle itself! I wrote a piece for the Sunday Times at the end of last year, suggesting it would be Rowling's legacy to the nation which helped her finish her first book:

Who will rustle up the billion pounds that it would take to build a exact replica of Hogwarts in the Highlands? Scotlands global theme park created at a stroke, meaning God knows how many jobs, visitors and kudos?

Though given the grief involved in building the Scottish Parliament building (however beautiful it might turn out to be), the idea of another large scale construction project in Scotland might send people running to the heathery hills. Still, my campaign continues. If we build it, they will come...

And in the meantime: it's a well-known fact that J.K. Rowling's first book was funded by the state (through her single-mother welfare payments, and a £7000 Scottish Arts Council grant). Is this an indication of just how much imagination might be liberated, if we were all removed from economic necessity? Here's quite the most visionary appropriation of a children's book you'll ever read (more background here).

:: PlaySalon - more resources ::

Just some more links to enrich the discussion at our forthcoming Play Salon in Dundee. You're more than welcome:

Spirituality and the Computer Game Only slightly censorious and generally interesting canter through ethics research from Beliefnet.
Game Makers Aren't Chasing Women "There's a lot we know about women that's simply not being used by the publishing and gaming communities" (Brenda Laurel)

:: Play Times ::

Powerpoint for Conceptual Artists David Byrne (ex-Talking Head) dignifies the Monday-morning nightmare show. Buy his work here.

How to make your own luck The always-smart Daniel Pink on how thinking lucky makes you lucky. God does play dice - and it's OK.

From Propaganda to Prop-Agenda The profoundly playful Brian Eno mints a new world for our post-Iraq age of spin. "Prop-agenda is not so much the control of what we think, but the control of what we think about".

The Virtuosity Fix Proof that biofeedback can improve musicians' skills. Steven Johnson is exploring the whole terrain of playing consciously with the mind-body continuum. How far do we (or can we) go?

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Children Seen and Heard / The 'Playas' Ethic

network@theplayethic.com — Mon, 11 Aug 03 13:30:00 UT

Edited by Pat Kane (email)

:: They Shut You Up, Your Mum and Dad ::

Confusing times in the kidult wars. Do adults fear and resent kids? Or do adults want to return to childhood as much as possible?

A report last week from the UK's Children's Society claimed that "children are being prevented from playing outdoors by intolerant adults who claim they cause a noise or a nuisance". Amid the usual barrage of sample study statistics, some great and grumpy details:

One plan in Oxfordshire to set up a netball hoop on a village green was blocked because residents did not want to attract children...
There are 115 "No ball games" signs on one housing estate in Stockport, Greater Manchester...
[The report] also cited the case of an eight-year-old girl in west Somerset who was stopped from cycling down her street because a neighbour complained the wheels squeaked.
In another case, it said an irate neighbour burst a ball belonging to a three-year-old boy every time it bounced over her hedge.

The Guardian editorial notes that government policy is already aiming to build a multitude of new public parks, and hopes their success will set a standard for others.

But the play-ethical question is surely more than infrastructural: as the recent Demos report put it, it's about a culture that welcomes children in all their complexity and energy, rather than always seeking to control or pathologize them.

If adults in power developed (in the words of Rebecca Abrams) a profound "childness" (as distinct from childishness) - meaning an openness to the new, a willingness to experiment, a faith in progress - could this be a significant motivation to reform, in our education, organisations and communities?

There are signs that younger parents are beginning to forge new spaces where they can be "in play and at play" with their children, amongst their peers - see this article, 'Chill out: take the kids clubbing' in the Telegraph (not yet perfect, as the details in the article show).

Yet when enlightenment fundamentalists like the people around Spiked and the Institute of Ideas berate the playful softening of adult authority as "infantilsation" - exemplified by this piece, 'The Children Who Won't Grow Up' from Frank Furedi - then it's clear that we need a mature, multi-accented vision of what play means, both for adults and children, more than ever (see my recent columns for the San Franscican blog Brainwaves). Otherwise we'll be caught up in the same old dualities.

Might not "unruly" children, and "kidult" adults, have a better conversation than this - based on their mutual interest in play forms? And aren't there the best of psychological reasons for doing so?

:: Playa Ethics ::

Promised for a while that I'll engage with the significance of play in hip hop and African-American culture (and its powerful critique of the work ethic). But it's such a huge and interesting topic that I'm content to amass the links through the journals, and make sure I'll grapple with it properly at some future date.

How Hip-Hop Holds Blacks Back - John McWhorter "Anyone who insists that hip-hop is an urgent critique of a society that produces the need for the thug persona(Professor Eric Dyson) step back and ask himself just where, exactly, the civil rightsera blacks might have gone wrong in lacking a hip-hop revolution. They created the world of equality, striving, and success I live and thrive in. Hip-hop creates nothing." Though Nobel prize winner in economics Gary Becker suggests that 'levelling the economic playing field' for young black males may involve drugs decriminalisation.

Where You're At: Notes from the Frontline of a Hip-Hop Planet - Patrick Neate "Worldwide, the gap between rich and poor, powerful and powerless... is widening by the day, and hip-hop is one of the few cultural forms that successfully bridges that gap on a global stage." More reviews here. Though does this exuberant young fan improve or disprove the thesis? (wmv file) Some lyrical insight into his predicament.

:: Ludology News ::

The computer-games intelligentsia continues to grow...and we're doing our bit. Come to our 'Playsalon' at Dundee Contemporary Arts on September 11th (ominous and appropriate date), titled 'More than a Game: The Ethics of Play'. With guests from the Beck's Futures 2003 finalists Inventory, and Vis Games (creators of 'State of Emergency').

And in the meantime, some ludology: Penetrating new books about digital play and simulation and learning... Conferences like 'The State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds' at New York University Law School, or 'Power Up: Computer Games, Ideology and Play' in Bristol... Ambitious first-principles papers on such topics as an anatomy of games, and maturity and play... All this as the new Microsoft X-Box campaign takes an even more play-ethical turn than before: new slogan - 'It's Good To Play Together'... And has the most intellectual computer game ever just come out - 'Republic: The Revolution'?

:: Play Times ::

Bumper Summer 'Profound Fun' Issue!

(with thanks to Bernie DeKoven at DeepFun)

Mind Sports Olympiad, 16th August Manchester Play everything from Abalone to Twixt.
Sorting People, from PBS How the "racial profiling" game is often misleading

Taprats Computer-generated Islamic star patterns
You Can't Touch This (But We Already Have): Illegal Art Art playing fast and loose with commercial brands. Could Todd Haynes make his Barbie-led Karen Carpenter epic Superstar these days?

High-stakes poker Now everybody wants their geopolitical card games
The Tricycle: Reloaded Try the 'Trikke', and burn way more calories than a Segway.

The Terminator Terminated "Californians will not be trifled with!"
Fun is Good Friend of the Play Ethic Douglas Rushkoff explores his own theories of ethical play

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Extending the Brand of Peace / A Players' Education

network@theplayethic.com — Mon, 21 Jul 03 21:22:00 UT

Edited by Pat Kane (email)

NOTE: Play Journal will be taking a short summer break - we'll be back to regular weekly frequency on 31st July. But check out my guest blogging on Zack Lynch's Brainwaves column on Corante.com, from July 28th to August 1st. Best wishes, get some sand in your toes. - PK

:: The Maker's Mark ::

How might the Play Ethic - understood as a collective belief in the values of openness, experiment, and engagement - relate to the culture of branding?

My own attempts at informing a play-ethical commercial brand - in particular, some consulting to BBH's UK campaign for Microsoft's X-Box - have been...instructive.

One X-Box television ad showed life in Britain as a scream of pain and fear from birth to death, from womb to tomb: the other imagined a pre-lapsarian world before the work ethic, where humans and animals were both "good musicians", moving in harmony to a neolithic rave beat. The first noted that "life is short" (literally), the second that we should "work less": the solution for both is that we should "Play More".

All this pop surrealism, in order to encourage young men from 16-30 to shift their gaming to a slightly different moulding of circuits and plastic. (Though, praise Proteus, hackers are starting to fool around with their X-Boxes - presuming Microsoft can bear it).

In No Logo, Naomi Klein broadly frames the imagery of play in Western brands - all the agency, passion and imagination evoked by Nike's Just Do It athleticism, the Gap's hip sociability, Starbucks' shopping-mall bohemia - as an outright mystification.

Behind each product - shoe, snood, or snack-with-coffee - lay a parlous record of labour relations in some far-off corner of the globalised economy. So far, so Marxist: and much of Klein's success was in bringing the insights of the Great Bearded One's critiques - particularly his ideas about the commodity-as-fetish - to a new audience, unused to such 19th century intellectual rigours.

Since Klein's first appearance in 1999, the debate about the ethical risibility of Western brands has only intensified - and in the current post-September 11th, post-Iraq climate of neo-militarism, it's almost reaching crisis point.

Newsweek and the Independent cites a report from the marketing agency RoperASW that, for the first time, major American brands like Microsoft and MTV (not just the usual Nike and McDonald's) are registering a substantial decline in world approval ratings.

It's been backed up by figures as esteemed as the dean of the Harvard Business School, the perfectly named John Quelch:

Never before have global concerns about American foreign policy so threatened to change consumer behaviour... We are not speaking here of the frivolous grandstanding associated with temporary boycotts by a student minority. We are witnessing the emergence of a consumer lifestyle with broad international appeal that is grounded in a rejection of American capitalism, American foreign policy and Brand America.

Quoted in the same article, the ad agency McCann-Erikson also recently advised its clients not to "wrap their brands" in the American flag. The US "war on terrorism" risked "tarnishing the reputation of American culture and the mythic 'American Dream', which has long drawn consumers round the world to the United States to live, work or visit".

So ethically speaking, it seems that we are polarised about brand capitalism. Do you either follow the activist path of Naomi Klein, critiquing neo-liberalism and its commercial cultures, but stay deliberately open about possible alternatives?

Or do you keep your corporate head down ("underplaying your American-British origins", as the Independent writer suggests) and wait for a more ameliorative Presidency/Prime Ministership?

Either the righteous hairshirt, or the dissembling mask, is a limited wardrobe of options for both these global players.

Can we think of a position that transcends and includes them both? Micheal Wilmott's Citizen Brands (on Amazon.co.uk) was a respectable recent attempt to suggest a range of strategies for companies and governments to establish (or improve) their ethical credibility, faced with this new lifestyle militancy.

But Wilmott's recommendations for companies was very simple: if you don't really mean it, don't do it - because in the age of total information awareness (which now goes both ways), any shortfall between declared values and actual practices will be quickly noted and proclaimed. This justifies one part of the Economist's case against Naomi Klein - that brand capitalism could actually help keep business ethical, because it is so acutely sensitive to these new citizen-consumers' whims and demands (on these, see Shoshana Zuboff's new book).

:: All We Are Saying...Is Give Peace A Brand? ::

Yet the notion of "greenwash" is a caution to anyone who thinks that aligning corporations and citizens along shared progressive values is easily do-able.

For example, I'm part of a new network called PeacePlus (here's an opening blog and some contacts), which is trying to explore new strategies and contexts for the peace movement.

Within this broad agenda, I'm particularly fascinated by the prospect of a kind of "pacific consultancy" to organisations and businesses, along the lines of the "environmental consultancy" represented by SustainAbility or Forum For the Future.

Many entries in our blog point to the same questions: what are the energetic and creative (rather than defensive and resistant) cultures of peace that individuals and organisations could aspire to? (There would also be some "peace basics" that one would have to adhere to, before the positive agenda could be explored - eg, see the investment guidelines on military components for the Norwegian Government Petroleum Fund).

In terms of an ethic of play, this is the most global perspective of all. How is it possible to keep our games of culture, commerce and technology tending towards the infinite and ever-more-reciprocally-connected, rather than the finite and falsely victorious?

Might there be an active interest in the promotion of peaceful values, by exactly those worried business thinkers and marketeers quoted earlier - for whom a reduction in the richness of human global reciprocation directly hits their bottom line? And whose consumers are now actively taking to protest -even in peacetime?

There's obviously a danger of "PeaceWash", too - where corporations and organisation appropriate the symbolisms and gestalt of peace movements, but don't fully contribute to a pacific world culture. And Naomi K has already tried to outline how incompatible traditional branding is with democratic self-determination. (Always remember the sizzle of the iron on cattle flesh when you think of the word: a useful and cautionary synaesthesia).

But is there no conversation to be had about peace with enterprises and organisations - many of whom might at least prefer a world dominated by soft power rather than hard power? What do you think?

:: Screenagers! Typical! ::

Play and education are long and historic partners: Jean-Jacques Rousseau first asserted the child's right to play, as a way of understanding the world, in his ground-breaking Romantic text, Emile.

But add computers and networks, and education becomes a key site for play ethics. Exactly what literacies - or "multiliteracies" are appropriate for players rather than workers? And who has the definitive expertise in the information age - adults or children?

Two stories which illustrate why the values of play should always be the prime factor in techno-literacy. In the Independent's education section, a plea from the recently retired UK education minister Estelle Morris to make sure that "all schoolchildren have access to a portable computer by 2006".

Her motives are impeccable: to reduce the "digital divide" in British society, which means that upper-income families are five times more likely to own a computer than lower income families.

The teachers quoted are divided. One says that because teenagers are "amazingly adaptable", the important thing is to get decent equipment out there (some schools quoted in the piece are already going wireless). Another is more gloomy, and more eloquent: "pledging to give every child a laptop is like giving them all a Shakespeare play - all very well, but the important thing is how you make use of it".

Yet this wonderful story from the Times should encourage the liberals: let the kids' play with the machines. Easiest just to quote the beginning:

GO TO a slum district of Delhi, put a computer with an internet connection into a public wall and leave it on. Wait and watch through a remote video camera rigged up on a nearby tree. Children who cannot read or write, with no English but blazing with curiosity, come along and start fiddling with the weird contraption that has surfaced out of nowhere.

Eight minutes later, children who do not know what a computer is are navigating the web. By evening more than 70 are surfing the net. Days later they are playing games, creating folders, cutting and pasting, creating short cuts.

A fluke? That is what Dr Sugata Mitra, who conducted the experiment three years ago, thought, too. So he repeated it. Even in remote wildernesses, where the only mouse that desperately deprived children knew was the furry kind, Mitra kept seeing the same extraordinary results: children learning basic computer literacy on their own, with no instruction.

Thrillingly, the Delhi kids have devised their own vocabulary for the icons on the screen - which of course have their ludic overtones: "the cursor is 'sui' (Hindi for needle) and the hourglass is the 'damru', after the hourglass drum that the Hindu god Shiva plays".

We're only at the beginning of a discussion about a new education system for the information age - how we can collectively resource our children's own passionate enthusiam for literacy and articulacy, through new media. But globalized stories like this give me great hope that, at least from the small ones upwards, there will be no shortage of invention and commitment. And that kids' master skill - play - will be at the heart of it.

:: Play Times ::

Kids' dominion: Appropriately enough, the youth are running their rule over everything this week...

Guilty by association (FT, pay-per-view) Never mind anti-Americanism as a threat to brand values - what about South-London criminality? When brands become the province of the "wrong" kind of players/playas ... And the integrity of kids' education - this time around health and obesity - opens up another front for brand activists.

Fabarooney The normal dyspeptic Guardian columnist Catherine Bennett on the joys of CBeebies, the BBC's "popular and sublimely non-vulgar children's channel". This Journal is particularly fond of those wobbly ameobas that link the programmes. As if our 21st century kids needed to be told they were protean and fun-loving...

Abusing the infrastructure Glasgow and Dundee kids are doing what American kidshave done for years: uncapping the fire hydrants, to relieve blazing heat. The safety call is fair enough: but the poietic dexterity of these scheme kids is something to see... Meanwhile, another juvenile delinquency - graffiti - gets the full art-house treatment: a feature on the elusive London street defacer, Banksy.

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Kidults of Gloom and the Not-Good-Enough Life

network@theplayethic.com — Fri, 11 Jul 03 09:22:00 UT

Edited by Pat Kane (email)

:: Harry Potter and the Kidults of Gloom ::

Most parents will have their tales to tell about their children reading the latest Harry Potter book. Im wondering whether my own 13-year-old daughters reaction is just her own, or symptomatic of something much wider and deeper. For most of her reading of Harry Potter and The Order of the Pheonix, she was in a state of fevered exultation - literally breaking off to have a lie down, and ponder the latest plot twists.

But when she got to the end of the book, she was actually tearful genuinely distraught that one of her favourite characters, Harrys godfather Sirius, had to die. Last time I asked her, she wasnt re-reading the book, which shed done furiously with all the others. Im too traumatised, she said, heading for her RnB CD collection.

The Potter books give us all a chance to examine what our relationship with childhood and our children actually is these days. The Play Ethic is interested in kidult media whether Disney theme-parks, or cross-generational toys, or Graystation computer games because they represent a zone within Western family life which is historically unprecedented: parents and children as conscious participants in self-definition, using games and stories and playful objects.

Theres a lot of anguished talk about the kidult, mostly on the side of those who have a vested interest in the restoration of a certain hyper-rationalist version of adult authority (which is usually part of a recoil from a whole range of other social and cultural complexities). For what its worth, I think its a promising field for change particularly for men. Many might be willing to embrace a more ludic and playful identity whether as singletons or as fathers - as a positive and creative option, rather than something second-best to work culture.

So Im reading the new Potter, and I can understand why my daughter is so upset with the book. Harry is grumpy, hormonal and adolescent, suffering slights to his reputation and filled with a sense of foreboding, troubled by moral ambiguities (the news of his fathers bullying tendencies, his deep connection with Voldemort). Potter, in short, is growing up and so is the kidult world that Rowling has brilliantly created over the previous four books.

A.S.Byatts usefully dissenting (and controversial) review (free, but registration req'd) doesnt give Rowling enough credit for really beginning the dissolution of the Potter spell: that magical kidult space where the idealism of children and the realism of adults had been suspended together, in a story which mingled wizards spells and office politics, demonic monsters and tabloid culture, mythic heroism and peer-group pressure.

These cultural forms (movies like The Lord of the Rings, books like Pullmans His Dark Materials trilogy) are still marvellous spaces within which adults and children can find a true play-moment - adopting the rules of a virtual world so that they can more profoundly address the limits and potentials of their actual worlds.

So in a historical period fraught with anxiety, it seems appropriate that Harry should be discomfited, his scar throbbing with pain, his friends becoming strange to him. The balance between childs play and power play that marked the books is now tilting decisively towards the latter. From a book series begun at the height of the go-go decade in 1997, and coming to its conclusion in the homeland security era of the oughties, Potters gradual darkening is a moment of truth for us all.

:: The Not-Quite-Good-Enough Life ::

Interestingly playful noises are coming from the ideas-sector of the current Labour government. Richard Reeves (whose aim to coin a new word, "workful", was noted in an earlier column) writes in the Guardian that we should be attending to John Maynard Keynes' predictions, in his 1930's essay, "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren". Once affluence had been achieved, then only "those peoples who can keep alive and cultivate the art of life.. will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes".

One could argue that, in the developed West at least, this affluence has now arrived. For Reeves, this means (among other positions), defying the utilitarianism of the latest education minister - who sees "schools and universities as training camps for UK employers" - and making subjects like philsophy, music, politics and creative writing "compulsory to the age of sixteen".

All of this joyous rhetoric is partly incited by the vogue of "happiness" research (see "Play Times" in this previous PlayJournal). As Reeves glosses it, "we know from the research literature that friendship, good family relations and learning and now more associated with life-satisfaction than money" in the affluent countries. Yet what's interesting is the role that Reeves outlines for policy makers:

There is a clear role for public policy in helping to manage the transition from the pursuit of economic goals which have served us so well in the past to the arts of life which will do so in the future.

Many of my discussions with politicians and policy-makers (including Richard) have been on exactly that theme - a play ethic as a new public narrative for a mass creative society, in a post-scarcity age. So I'm happy that the theme is finally emerging, and in strategically crucial places.

But one caveat (as much to myself as anyone else): isn't there an element to the "arts of life" which must make people fundamentally ungovernable? We'd like it to be the case that, as Keynes put it, "freedom from pressing economic cares" would make us live "wisely and agreeably and well".

Yet as Keynes' own history in the Bloomsbury set makes clear, that freedom also must allow for lives conducted unwisely, disagreeably and with considerable difficulty. Bohemianism, in short, is as much an option in the age of affluence as a bucolic, convivial "good life": the ars de vivre, vigorously pursued, often involve the kinds of lifestyle experimentation (drugs are the classic example, but free downloading of music might be another) which politicians often find it difficult to turn a blind eye to. (I explored this in my Strategy Unit seminar last year).

None of which is intended to cavil at a welcome change in the otherwise schizophrenic work-play culture of the New Labour project (which, as Angela McRobbie reminds us, seems to have forgotten its intellectual roots). But we'll see just how diverse the visions of the good life promoted by these new philosopher-kings are allowed to be. The players' imperative - dynamic autonomy in an open, responsive world - will out.

:: Play Times ::

To The Graystation Should we be happy at the end of ageism in the workplace - or should the "new old" be allowed to escape from the workplace early, with its "ceaseless round of jostling competitiveness and desperate flirtations"? (Terence Blacker, paid-for-article)? Perhaps this 3D video-gaming granny is a ludic portent...

French Artists Are Revolting Fascinating insight into French unemployment regulations: their artists can do a week's show, claim a week of benefit, and then work again. Now it's been extended to the entire freelance economy, the politicians are tightening up, and the artists are withdrawing their creative labour - threatening France's arts festival season. While in the UK, Presbyter Brown threatens benefit withdrawal to those who don't want to practice the skills that the labour market offers (he should watch Ken Loach's Sweet Sixteen). Is it so difficult to find ways to collectively sustain human aspiration?

Hitting Bard Times The Royal Shakespeare Company is pulling out of management consultancy. Do "dramatic solutions" have their limits?

I-Yam-An-Aerobicisst-A! Punk rock pogo-ing is the newest fitness craze (also see this Google search). Can Bez's Monkey Dancing Classes be far behind?

Browser Angel Great backgrounder on the man who put up the fake 404 error page "These Weapons of Mass Destruction cannot be displayed".

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