Thursday, August 23, 2007

Ephemera: 'Dialoguing Play'

Logo Things move passing slow in academic life ... but the estimable Steven Linstead has just sent me the final printed results of my 2005 York University Management Department seminar on the Play Ethic and Organisations, which has turned up in official and edited form (PDF) in the wildest academic journal of organisation studies I know of, Ephemera. I'm thrilled to see that my exchange sits right above an interview with Bruno Latour, one of the most challenging social theorists around. This is not a read for the theoretically and lexically light-hearted, so apologies in advance.

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

The Play Ethic @ Lego's Playground

Lsp_mlm278a_walk_in_the_castle_park A interesting outcome of my keynote speech at Lego's anniversary conference in Billund early this year is this article for Playground, the newsletter of Lego's organisational consultancy arm, Serious Play. I thought I'd print my attempt to wrestle the 'seven rhetorics of play' into a pro-business discourse.

The kinds of play you might not want at work

From a traditional business perspective, play is often understood in only two of its possible modes: play-as-personal-freedom and  play-as-triviality.

1) Play-as-personal-freedom, within the workplace, can often seem a negative phenomenon – it highlights issues like absenteeism, slacking, or people becoming alienated from their job roles.

2) Play-as-triviality stretches from (often ineffective) attempts by management to make the workplace 'fun' to darker phenomena like pranks and black humor.

These are the kinds of play that the Protestant work ethic can relate to most easily - either as something disruptive to be effectively clamped down on, or unimportant and thus easy to ignore.

More significant types of play

Play is more than just egoism and wackiness. It is also a way for people to come together to achieve a result, to sharpen their capacities and performance, even to attain some wisdom and patience about the direction of their working lives. In short, a way of developing their 'response abilities' regarding the challenges of business and society.

3) Play-as-identity is recognized by most smart companies as an effective tendency. This includes those common rituals, festivals and celebrations that make people feel good about being part of the 'community' within the organization.

4) Play-as-power-and-contest is another effective category, which has to do with what you do with your healthy company identity when you're in the marketplace. Play-as-power can be affected by play-as-identity – too much internal competitiveness and the organization flies apart, too little and complacency results.

Forms of play you may not relate to your business – but should

There are three other 'rhetorics', or values, of play which high-performing businesses should be aware of.

5) Play-as-imagination, the creative and experimental use of the mind and talents, often comes under the categories of 'R&D', 'brainstoming,' or even the suggestion box.

6) Play-as-development is the function that play has in the evolution and progress of our talents, not just as children but as adults also. Play is how we start out 'adapting' to our environment, and it keeps us adaptable throughout our lives.

Companies that attend to the well-being of their employees, through training, mentorship and support services, are giving them the best platform upon which to become the dynamic players of the previous rhetorics.

7) Play-as-fate-and-chaos is the final rhetoric. As old as religion and gambling, and as new as a market derivative – it brings with it a more philosophical perspective. This is an awareness that there will always be unpredictability in our lives, a fundamental openness to chance that we cannot rule out. But one that can bring positive as well as negative opportunities for business, if we can remain essentially 'response-able' as players.

Saturday, August 11, 2007

Anthony Wilson, R.I.P (Recently Immaterialised Punk)

Leader_of_the_fac_tony_wilson_450 Tony Wilson, founder of Factory Records and the Hacienda, and Northern England's cultural magus, has just died of cancer. What a terrible, thoroughly premature loss.

I once spent a brilliant, careening day with Tony in Manchester in the late eighties, when Hue and Cry were being featured on one of his crazed late night music-and-culture shows, called The Other Side of Midnight. Hell, I think he even gome to present one of them, pairing me up with Shere Hite, the Titian-curled feminist (who I remember being as flirtatious as all hell, but that could be tricks of the memory..)

What a complete force of nature Tony was - obviously supremely intelligent and informed, but with a genuine punk energy inside him that didn't just seek confrontation and dialectic, he loved it, embraced it. Everything - from politics to pop, history to theory - was love or shove it, essential or detritus... I tried to match him 'tude-for-'tude, as a brash young Scottish post-punk, but of course I couldn't keep up.

In the middle of the day he drove me round Manchester, showing off the scientific and cultural glories of his beloved city, baiting me endlessly as a Glasgow man from a 'surely second-rate regional sub-tropolis' (or words to that effect). I remember he shoved this tape into the car deck. Kind of whiny, regional dub-funk it sounded like to me... 'You'll know all about these guys in a few years. The Happy Mondays'. Great name, I thought, and went and looked it up.  'Happy Monday's' turned out to be the medieval tradition where the workers rebelled against their work-regimes, and decided to extend their weekend for fun, love and intoxication. Of course: how Tony - cutting-edge music, yet referencing an English history of rebellion-from-below which he has always been sensitive to (particularly as a chip-shouldered Manc, and particularly from his lofty perch as the North of England's Walter Kronkite in local television).

Musically, there's no argument - one of the greatest ever A&R men. Business-wise? Well, his idealism about music meant he was never going to do anything else but dig large holes and just about fill them in again. But if you ever wanted to create a genetic fusion of Greil Marcus and Ahmet Ertegun, you'd end up almost certainly with Tony Wilson. Great taste, and a great mind, and a great big ball of energy inside to dynamise them both.

I thought he would beat the fuck out of this cancer. He had probably the most interesting rock biography ever to write, and I was sure that no metastasis of errant cells would get in his way. But as his old punk show put it, referencing Kurt Vonnegut (literate as ever), So It Goes. My condolences to his family and friends. One of the great players is off to complete the infinite game.

(PS: A classic mid-eighties interview from Tony).

Monday, August 06, 2007

Bergman: the true artist is the child

1_225380_1_9 A beautiful obituary of Ingmar Bergman from his relative (and detective novelist) Henning Mankell, with some insights into his genius that all players will recognise and glory in:

Music, I believe, was always one of his main sources. The other I understand to be his childhood. Or, rather, his childlikeness. To me this is a highly positive quality. I believe that the true artist is the child. When we grow up, before school starts reproaching us if we show too much trust in imagination and fantasy, when reality's letters and mathematical formulas must rule, we lose a lot of what we had by nature before. We lose that unfettered faith in the forces of fantasy and imagination. But not only because it could help us in building inventive wooden huts or rafts, or making pirate ships out of pieces of bark. We need fantasy and imagination to deal with the difficulty that so often comes with life.

Swedish literature is enriched with many illustrations of children who have used fantasy to avoid being swallowed up by a complicated, depraved and dangerous world of grown-ups. If, later in life, having - hopefully - made it through school, you wish to become an artist, then you must recapture what you had as a child. Humanity would not have had access to fantasy and imagination unless we needed it to survive. We are rational beings; fantasy and imagination are in our genes. I have met many significant artists in my life, and not one has denied that it is precisely in the exploits of childhood that the cornerstones for all future creation are to be found. Later in life, that becomes supported by experience, acquired knowledge and political or moralistic convictions.

Sunday, August 05, 2007

Loving the alien called David Bowie

David_bowie_by_david_pugliese_by_th Sorry, all, for tardy posting - been a bit consumed with things Scottish and musical, now establishing an equilibrium over all projects. Apropos of completely nothing - other than a search round the databases, and a wee bit of pridefulness - I post a 1997 review of a David Bowie biography that I did for the Times Literary Supplement, my only ever commission there. It's in full on extended post below, but here's an excerpt:

With the flotation of his name as a corporate entity on the New York Stock Exchange, Bowie has become even more of an abstracted "earthling" than ever before. In interviews, however, he remains as soaked in suburban affability as he ever was: the "good average" who can discuss postmodern art, and the latest laddish pleasures, with the same slightly stagey enthusiasm. It is this vaudevillian cast to David Bowie which both of these biographies, in their diligence, finally reveal. Like all great stars, Bowie has been a showman of his selves; and where the empty core behind the display has driven contemporaries to either madness or blandness, Bowie has used his fractured identity as a spin of the dice, an openness to the next cultural turn. The "coldness" remarked upon by so many of those interviewed in these books is probably the cost of this opportunistic fluidity; a matter of "loving the alien", indeed.

Continue reading "Loving the alien called David Bowie" »

Monday, July 09, 2007

Review of 'Second Lives'

Secondlifemandragon_2 My Independent review of Second Lives, Tim Guest's journalistic account of a year spent in the Second Life virtual commuity. The book puts reportorial flesh on Edward Castronova's more analytical account of Synthetic Worlds, also reviewed in this blog. An extract:

Even though many millions now have enough resource and leisure to lose ourselves in virtual worlds, we do not seem, by Guest's account, to be particularly developed as players. All the scams, routines and even work-ethics that might compel someone to become a digital escapee get lazily reproduced in Second Life. Mafias extort and coerce, dodgy traders find ways to counterfeit goods, and people labour away at their houses, or trades, or roles, in ways that often seem indistinguishable from "first life".

Guest's honest and intelligent account makes comprehensible a phenomenon which seems, at first glance, like science fiction made reality. But one awaits a "third life" that might become more – more politicised, more rigorous, even more daringly utopian, than the mildly restorative therapy that Second Life has become.

Friday, June 22, 2007

New school based on computer gameplay

Logo Startling news from a Play Ethic friend, Eric Zimmerman of GameLab, that they're getting over a million dollars to start up a new school in New York which uses "gaming and design" as its primary teaching methodology. The full press release is in extended post, and they've also included a piece on NPR by Heather Chaplin (another PE friend, and a co-author of the videogame history Smart Bomb.) Here's an exciting chunk of ludological pedagogy for ya:

“We are conceiving the school as a dynamic learning system that takes its cues from the way games are designed, shared and played,” said Katie Salen,Executive Director of the Gamelab Institute of Play. “All players in the school – teachers, students,parents and administrators – will be empowered to innovate using 21st century literacies that are native to games and design. This means learning to think about the   world as a set of in interconnected systems that can be affected or changed through action and choice, the ability to navigate complex information networks, the power to build worlds and tell stories, to see collaboration in competition, and communicate across diverse social spaces. It means that students and teachers will engage in their own learning in powerful ways.”

Continue reading "New school based on computer gameplay" »

Saturday, June 02, 2007

Harry Potter World: Scotland, not Orlando

Harrypottertrain Not entirely serious article from me in Comment is free, about the sheer inappropriateness of the proposed Harry Potter theme park going to Orlando, Florida, rather than what I regard as the book's spiritual home, Scotland. Most of the subsequent commentary seems to revolve around my use of the term "flourescent fanny-pack", which I now only half regret. It's also an example of my revived 'constitutional patriotism', in the aftermath of the Scottish elections which saw a social-democratic party committed to independence (SNP) take power in the Parliament. My enthusiasms are expressed in my contributions to the progressive weblog, Scottish Futures.

Sunday, May 27, 2007

Gwen Gordon: Play Magus

Home_gwenstanding It's a delight to bring Gwen Gordon's new site to your attention. Gwen is a play advocate, life-trainer and scholar operating out of the Bay Area in California. Gwen has a fascinating history - she started out designing and building Muppets for Sesame Street! She branched out from there and has established a practice that does personal, group and organisational consultancy, using all the dimensions of play to revivify lives and enterprises.

I deeply admire both her practicality, and her searching, spirituality-meets-science approach. Some of the academic papers she has recently published on definitions of play (What is Play? Toward a universal definition, Integral Play, and Are We Having Fun Yet?, all PDF's) are ground-breaking, in my view. She's beginning to point towards the idea of developmental levels of adult play - play that gets more capacious, more complex, more ethical - which I've begun to talk about in some recent presentations, particularly at the BBC Digital Futures event at the beginning of the year.

For those of you Enlightenment, neo-Calvinist Brits who can't quite cope with Californian optimism, suspend your scepticism, and dive in. As Martin Buber says on the cover: "Play is the exultation of the possible".

Friday, May 18, 2007

Sachs, Gore and 'networked democracy'

Banner Update 18 May: Just seen two links that back up my question to Jeffrey Sachs at the BBC Reith Lecture (see extended post below) on whether we're defending the open structure of the internet as robustly as we should be

First, Al Gore on 'networked democracy' and its potential to revitalise the American republic:

The Internet has the potential to revitalize the role played by the people in our constitutional framework. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. It's a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It's a platform, in other words, for reason.

But the Internet must be developed and protected, in the same way we develop and protect markets—through the establishment of fair rules of engagement and the exercise of the rule of law. The same ferocity that our Founders devoted to protect the freedom and independence of the press is now appropriate for our defense of the freedom of the Internet.

The stakes are the same: the survival of our Republic. We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it, because of the threat of corporate consolidation and control over the Internet marketplace of ideas.

And secondly, the BBC on how 'global net censorship is growing'

The study of thousands of websites across 120 Internet Service Providers found 25 of 41 countries surveyed showed evidence of content filtering. Websites and services such as Skype and Google Maps were blocked, it said.

Such "state-mandated net filtering" was only being carried out in "a couple" of states in 2002, one researcher said. "In five years we have gone from a couple of states doing state-mandated net filtering to 25," said John Palfrey, at Harvard Law School.

Continue reading "Sachs, Gore and 'networked democracy'" »

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Wil Wright demonstrates Spore

070514_wright_p233A video clip from the New Yorker 2012 futures conference, with Will Wright lecturing on Spore. What can I say? Essential viewing (and the whole conference is wonderful fare).

Sunday, May 13, 2007

Rachel O'Connell from Bebo, at Channel Four's In the Wild conference

            Taken from the trusty NokiaN70 in the gallery, but a really interesting speech from Rachel O'Connell, Bebo's Safety Officer at Channel Four's In the Wild Conference on 10th May (in which I spoke, on the topic of informal learning - more on that later). She outlines their new service Bebo Be One, providing civic, activist, enterprise and well-being services for their users. We spoke after her talk, and she really "got" the Play Ethic perspective.
          

Sunday, May 06, 2007

Dancing in the Streets

080505723401_sclzzzzzzz_ss500_My review of Barbara Ehrenreich's Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy has finally appeared in the Independent (the unedited version is in extended post below). It feels great to encounter so much post-Puritan, post-work-ethic scholarship these days. And though I think Barbara's a little too optimistic about the power of collective joy, especially in the face of the incredibly sophisticated strategies of the leisure corporations - see my Joga Bonita post a few months back - the book is overall a great back-up to the Play Ethic, and in particularly the theme of 'play as identity' it picks up from Brian Sutton-Smith.

Continue reading "Dancing in the Streets" »

Friday, May 04, 2007

A New Blog - Scottish Futures

Just to let any Play Ethic aficionados know who might be interested, I'm starting a new blog/ideas forum called Scottish Futures (www.scottishfutures.net), which will take very specifically the topic of visions, policies and strategies aimed at the realisation of Scottish independence. It's my own small answer to the question I posed in the Guardian blog below. This will enable me to keep the Play Ethic blog clear for purely play-oriented material. Please visit, tell me what you think.

Monday, April 30, 2007

Think Your Way to a New Scotland

Saltirel I've written a column for the Guardian's Comment is Free on whether the advance of the SNP, and the political agenda of Scottish independence, has a rich enough policy culture to support it. Anyone who's interested in the intellectual debate around the 'Scottish question' is invited to explore the many hotlinks embedded below. And anyone who knows of active Scottish bloggers or ideas networks that could be added to my own list, please don't hesitate to post them in the comments page.

Continue reading "Think Your Way to a New Scotland" »

Saturday, April 21, 2007

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

Crop21 Here's a piece that was commissioned from me only a few days ago from my old paper, the Sunday Herald, an essay on the Virginia campus killings.  It's a ghastly event, and I feel for all the parents of students involved - my own daughter is about to go to an American college - but it does raise some contrarian thoughts in my head about how we can respond to certain kinds of violence in our societies. Not usual play-ethic territory, though careful readers will see the playful society hovering on the borders of the piece. But I hope it makes some sense. The unedited version is below, and I'll hotlink the references over the next few days.

Continue reading "Virginia Massacre: Losing the Battle of Who-Could-Care-Less" »

Friday, April 20, 2007

Legotopia

Lego_logo Spent a stimulating few days in Billund, Denmark last week, delivering a keynote [powerpoint file] to Lego's 'Play to Learn' conference at their Innovation Centre (which is right next to Legoland, pleasantly enough). I got the opportunity to program a dog made out of their Lego Mindstorms technology (tried to get it to do synchronised dancing to 'Who Let the Dogs Out'. Failed). And to talk to the CEO Jorgen Vig Knudstorp, who's interviewed here. Met Stuart Nolan and other Lego Serious Play advocates too. I'm also going to put up a little montage of clips taken with my battered Nokia N70 of the experience, including the coolness of Billund airport, the wackiness of the Legoland Hotel, and a few minutes of ludology from Mitch Resnick of MIT.

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Throwing the Net round global poverty

Cif_header_2 The BBC's Reith Lectures started this morning, with development economist Jeffrey Sachs describing a world 'bursting at the seams'. I was privileged to be asked to be a lead questioner in the last lecture, at Edinburgh. I've written a Guardian Comment is Free column this morning, with my reactions to the lecture, and some further thoughts on how Sachs' anti-poverty agenda could be made more persuasive to Western audiences. I close with an appeal to developers and moguls in the Web 2.0 era: what are the 'life-saving' apps (rather than 'killer' apps) they could devise that would make participation and commitment to Sachs' (and others') world-healing agenda a natural part of our 'play with networks'?

Any ideas yourself, folks? (There have already been a few useful exchanges on the CiF comment pages). As a minor addendum, I really like Becky Hogge's column in Open Democracy today, which asks whether we need to solidify the value-base that underlies the open-source and participatory web:

What most agree on, though, is that the evidence in support of open standards and a generative, bottom-up internet - one that is the expression of the creative powers of the global community - is justification enough for a struggle for internet freedom. Yet...some underlying values would certainly not go amiss. As the validity of this new way of doing things asserts itself, I feel for the first time that the absence of an obvious, shared set of values might be a barrier to progress.

Monday, April 09, 2007

Don DeLillo on Today

Don Had to share this little Real Audio ram clip from the BBC Radio Four flagship news program, Today, interviewing Don DeLillo, my favourite modern American novelist. The occasion is the elevation of Underworld, his epic novel of 20th century American sport, politics and art, to the status of a Penguin Classic (which of course just gives me the opportunity to read it all over again, while I'm brewing up my own novel at the moment). Opening line: "I was driving a Lexus through a rustling wind..."

Sunday, April 08, 2007

Play Ethics @ Channel Four

L15029591073659934 Heads up for an interesting event I'm appearing at next month, called In The Wild: Well being, the Web and the future of Education, on 10 May 2007, organised by Channel Four Education. Here's the blurb:

... A unique event which brings together young people , educators, policy makers, and representatives from the digital and broadcast media worlds into a conversation about the challenges and dilemmas facing those growing up in the UK today. In the Wild will explore some of the defining issues facing young people as make the transition to adulthood.

Featuring a mix of presentations and provocations from some leading edge thinkers and practitioners, panel discussions and facilitated conversations this event will explore among other topics:

Get Happy! - responding to the UNICEF report on children’s well being   

In the Wild – remagicalising the world through informal learning;

Living Online – work, rest and play with the Web generation

Alive and Kicking! – How schools are responding to the challenges of the ‘innovation century’


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