Play Journal

Play and Craft: review of Richard Sennett's 'The Craftsman'

I was delighted to be asked to review the social thinker Richard Sennett's new book The Craftsman for the Scottish Review of Books. I have devoured his last four books - Corrosion of Character, Respect, The Culture of the New Capitalism - because I share his concern with the subjective and social effects of new technology and new business models. Though we come to ultimately different conclusions. Sennett believes we can revive an ethos of 'good work', even in the age of flexible occupations and networked capitalism. I believe that the same conditions push us forward to forge a new ethos of productivity and creativity, one that accepts - even embraces - a degree of open chaos and emergence in our lives: a 'play ethos'.

What is fascinating about The Craftsman is that Sennett is now directly engaging with play, and our essentially playful natures. He believe that the 'universality' of our early play experiences - our relentless experimentation with material stuff, our commitment both to the rules of games, and the bending of them - is the basis for his belief that we can all be potentially craftsmen (and craftswomen). Our childhood show we can easily be deeply invested in our activities, incrementally improving our mastery of the world. In a beautiful phrase - invoking the Jeffersonian ideal that democratic competence resides in the skills we exercise to change our material conditions - Sennett suggests that "good citizenship found in play, is lost at work".

I post the entire review below - which has a personal dimension for me, as various parents and grandparents of mine have had a complex, even troubled relationship to an ideal of 'craft' - and invite your responses.

The Play Ethic and the Toy Industry

A fascinating morning recently, delivering a keynote speech to the Toy Industries of Europe 'Toy Safety' conference in Brussels. The toy industry has had its troubles to bear in 2007 - many safety recalls of toys from major manufacturers, largely located in their Chinese factories (80% of all toys in Europe are made in China, 95% in the US). As I said to the audience at the conference, with books like Eric Clark's The Real Toy Story being published (which tries to do for the toy industry what Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation does for convienience food), they are an industry which risks a lot by not lining up their ethical business practice, with the trust that parents put in them to provide safe, ethically and sustainably created products. But if they extend 'play ethics' throughout their business - from labour conditions in China to the nature of the toys they produce - the opportunities for their business (exemplified by the turnaround in Lego, whose CEO Jorgen Knudstorp delivered the other keynote) are major, given the general shift of social values in a 'play-friendly' direction.

NOTE: I'm using the embedding function of Slideshare for the first time here - if you go through to the actual link, you can download the PPT of the presentation with extra notes.

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Independent Review: 'On the Road to Wikitopia'

My review in the Independent of two excellent (the second of them groundbreaking) books on web culture - We-Think by Charles Leadbeater, and Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. An extract:

No one could object to sprawling processes of "mass innovation" creating public encyclopedias and seed banks for developing countries, turning cities into giant learning spaces and citizens into journalists. Leadbeater's mantra "we are what we share" could conceivably become "an economy's motive force", particularly if consumerism begins to hit the limits of ecological sustainability hard. A vision of living as an active, creative player-with-others has inspired this particular reviewer for many years.

But, as he reminds us, some areas – such as care services – won't be affected by We-Think: "you cannot change a wet nappy with a text message". Nor harvest food, nor extract minerals, nor generate energy. Although the participatory structure of the web was founded by a singular mix of values ("the academic, the hippie, the peasant and the geek"), there's no guarantee that happy ethos will guide all behaviour within its halls.

Rules of the Brain - Keep It In Play

Been alerted by an American publicist to a very well-produced website for a book called Brain Rules, written by an enthusiastic scientist called John Medina. The interesting bit is 'Rule One - Exercise', where the claim is that our sedentary, physically static school-and-work lives are the least amenable environments for learning and productivity. This reminds us of our other American play-associate Frank Forencich, and his 'Exuberant Animal' fitness consultancy, which is similarly rooted in a background of evolutionary psychology and biology. Tied in with the NYT piece below, clearly a lot of interest in the physically and mentally restorative dimensions of play in the US at the moment.

New York Times... gets play big time

The New York Times recently published what looks like a front-cover Magazine article on play, covering all the significant scholarly figures in the filed (Stuart Brown, Brian Sutton-Smith), and focussing very much on the biological-psychological dimensions. A classic quote here from Sutton-Smith:

Why would such an enriching activity as play also be a source of so much anarchy and fear? Sutton- Smith found one possible answer by reading Stephen Jay Gould, the author and evolutionary biologist. The most highly adaptive organisms, Gould wrote, are those that embody both the positive and the negative, organisms that ‘‘possess an opposite set of attributes usually devalued in our culture: sloppiness, broad potential, quirkiness, unpredictability and, above all, massive redundancy.’’ Finely tuned specific adaptations can lead to blind alleys and extinction, he wrote; ‘‘the key is flexibility.’’

What Gould called quirkiness, Sutton-Smith called play. ‘‘Animal play has been described by many investigators as fragmentary, disorderly, unpredictable and exaggerated,’’ Sutton-Smith wrote, and ‘‘child play has been said to be improvised, vertiginous and nonsensical.’’ The adaptive advantage to a behavior that is multifaceted, then, is that pursuing it, enjoying it, needing it to get through the day, allows for a wider range in a play-loving person’s behavioral repertory, which is always handy, just in case.

Playing might serve a different evolutionary function too, he suggests: it helps us face our existential dread. The individual most likely to prevail is the one who believes in possibilities — an optimist, a creative thinker, a person who has a sense of power and control. Imaginative play, even when it involves mucking around in the phantasmagoria, creates such a person. ‘‘The adaptive advantage has often gone to those who ventured upon their possibility with cries of exultant commitment,’’ Sutton-Smith wrote. ‘‘What is adaptive about play, therefore, may be not only the skills that are a part of it but also the willful belief in acting out one’s own capacity for the future.’

Play is how we shape the world with our minds

From the World Question Center at Edge.org, Alison Gopnik on how she's re-evaluated the role of play and the imagination in human cognition:

I thought that kids' pretend play, and grown-up fiction, must be a sort of spandrel, a side-effect of some other more functional ability. I said as much in a review in Science and got floods of e-mail back from distinguished novel-reading scientists. They were all sure fiction was a Good Thing - me too, of course, - but didn't seem any closer than I was to figuring out why.

So the anomaly of pretend play has been bugging me all this time. But finally, trying to figure it out has made me change my mind about the very nature of cognition itself.

I still think that we're designed to find out about the world, but that's not our most important gift. For human beings the really important evolutionary advantage is our ability to create new worlds. Look around the room you're sitting in. Every object in that room - the right angle table, the book, the paper, the computer screen, the ceramic cup was once imaginary. Not a thing in the room existed in the pleistocene. Every one of them started out as an imaginary fantasy in someone's mind. And that's even more true of people - all the things I am, a scientist, a philosopher, an atheist, a feminist, all those kinds of people started out as imaginary ideas too.

I'm not making some relativist post-modern point here, right now the computer and the cup and the scientist and the feminist are as real as anything can be. But that's just what our human minds do best - take the imaginary and make it real. I think now that cognition is also a way we impose our minds on the world.

Via Positiva: the Play Ethic in Croatia

Ridiculously long time not blogging on the Play Journal, I agree, but have been dealing with family illness (all well now), paradigm revolution in the music business, constitutional evolution in Scotland... But with some luck, I'm back.

And to kick off, an interview conducted with the Croatian online journal Via Positiva - nothing new, but I find that answering familiar questions allows me to update the Play Ethic without too much labour...

Pat Kane Interview with Via Positiva, January 2008

1) What is the play ethic? Why do we need it? Why should we leave the work ethic behind?

The Play Ethic is what truly supersedes the Work Ethic, and is more relevant to our times than the Leisure Ethic. The Work Ethic was a story about self-discipline and self-denial that the first age of industrial capitalism needed its workers to believe in (basically to watch the clock and accept their place in the factory system). The Leisure Ethic (what we used to know as the 'leisure society') was a mid-to-late 20th century story about the benefits of affluence - that work would be reduced to a minimum by technology and automation, and that we would have to get skilled at recreation, relaxation, self-improvement. The Play Ethic comes after the internet, and globalisation, and is a story about how to live (or try and live) a coherent life in a dynamic, unstable and emergent world. We have an innate resource by which we can do this - our formative experience as players, that burst of enthusiasm and experimentation that forges the adults we become. We need to recover the power of play in our lives, to be capable for this new world.

New Labour's plan for children's play

Extremely positive announcement by the Westminster Labour government on a new "Children's Plan", in which the provision of play spaces and the validation of their exuberance and explorations is front and centre. The BBC news report quotes the relevant minister, Ed Balls (appropriately enough) as saying that "children should be both seen and heard", and is promising to:

- build play spaces for "tweenagers" (aged eight-13) with £225m to build or upgrade 3,500 community playgrounds
- put an end to "no ball games" culture - bringing importance of play into public spaces and planning
- provide £160m for positive activities for young people in sport, drama and art

"We want to move away from the 'No Ball Games' culture of the past so that public spaces in residential areas are more child friendly," says the plan. Great news for play advocates - now the question is, will they ever address the right to play for adults too...

Tim Gill, the commentator and children's advocate, made this necessary point in his Guardian blog:

there is tension between the positive vision of children's competences the plan implies, and some of the excessively risk-averse measures brought forward by government in recent years... Its policies on both antisocial behaviour and safeguarding urgently need to be rethought. If not they will undermine the goal of creating a society where young and old are more at ease with each other.

From 'playerish' to playing in the dark: Wenger and Monroe

Not often one can get a Premier League football manager, and the 20th century's greatest sexual icon, into one week's post about play... But here we go...

Firstly, Arsene Wenger, the manager of Arsenal F.C., exulting over the performance of his team in their recent victory over Spurs, and inventing a new word in the process:

It was a performance worthy of adding a new word to the footballing vocabulary. "I'm very excited with this team because - I don't know if the word exists - they are 'playerish'," said Wenger."They love to play and that is something that you feel from the outside. They love to play. Even at 2-1 they don't go to the corner flag, they continue to try to score."

And secondly, the Guardian's reprint of an interview with Marilyn Monroe in 1962, contains this unbearably poignant passage:

When I was five I think, that's when I started wanting to be an actress. I loved to play. I didn't like the world around me because it was kind of grim, but I loved to play house. It was like you could make your own boundaries. It goes beyond house; you could make your own situations and you could pretend, and even if the other kids were a little slow on the imagining part, you could say, "Hey, what about if you were such and such, and I were such and such, wouldn't that be fun?" And they'd say, "Oh, yes," and then I'd say, "Well, that will be a horse and this will be ..."

It was play, playfulness. When I heard that this was acting, I said that's what I want to be. You can play. But then you grow up and find out about playing, that they make playing very difficult for you. Some of my foster families used to send me to the movies to get me out of the house and there I'd sit all day and way into the night. Up in front, there with the screen so big, a little kid all alone, and I loved it. I loved anything that moved up there and I didn't miss anything that happened and there was no popcorn either.

Getting a little ragged at 'In the Wild'

Very much enjoyed my time at Channel Four's latest incarnation of In The Wild, their forum series exploring wellbeing, kids education and Web 2.0 - this time as a sideshow to the Scottish Learning Festival in Glasgow. I have to say I enjoyed it mostly for sparring with Carol Craig, the head of the Centre for Confidence and Wellbeing - whose speech clarified a lot of my problems with the hidden normativity, and neo-Puritanism, of the 'happiness' debates. I'm perhaps not the most objective person to report on this, so let me point you to a very useful account of our debate from an edublogger (a new category of blogger, of which Ewan Macintosh is the pertest possible exemplar) called Alan Coady.

Wikinomics review

Here's a review I wrote for the Independent on Don Tapscott's and Anthony Williams' Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Not very favourable, I have to say. An extract:

There's a weird blindness at the heart of this book, with its gushing celebrations of how corporate collaboration might produce the next Boeing airliner, or a new kitchen wipe. As the peer-to-peer visionary Micheal Bauwens has written, the problem is that we regard what is truly plentiful as scarce (information), and what is truly scarce as plentiful (our finite natural world). There is virtually zero consciousness in Wikinomics of the limits to global corporate activity that our environmental crisis must impose. Indeed, with an award-winning cheesiness, the book opens with an anecdote about a goldmine – revived, of course, through wikinomical means.

As Jeffery Sachs noted in his BBC Reith Lectures this year, mass collaboration through informed networks will be one of the key tools whereby we might heal the planet, environmentally and geopolitically. You would hardly learn of that grand ambition from this comically opportunistic book. The spectre of consultantism hangs over it more oppressively than anything else.

An excellent discussion of my review took place on the mailing list, iDC (Institute of Distributed Creativity), available here.

Ephemera: 'Dialoguing Play'

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.

The Play Ethic @ Lego's Playground

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.

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

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).

Bergman: the true artist is the child

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.

Loving the alien called David Bowie

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.

Review of 'Second Lives'

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.

New school based on computer gameplay

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.”

Harry Potter World: Scotland, not Orlando

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.

Gwen Gordon: Play Magus

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".