The Play Ethic

Who's watching us play - and why? William Davies on networks as "big parents"

I once wrote a phrase up on my website which went something like: "play will be to the 21st century what work was to the last 300 years of industrial society - our dominant way of knowing, doing and creating value". It must have been a zinger of a meme, because it was picked up by people like Dan Pink, Jane McGonigal and many others. First we make our phrases, then we try to understand them... 

And a blogpost from the brilliant and bracing Potlatch (ie William Davies) has driven me to that task. If we increasingly know, act and confer value through play these days, then what form of governance and institutions are appropriate to that social behaviour? The Play Ethic book took some pretty utopian stabs at that question - but Davies has sharpened the question wonderfully.

Essentially, he wonders whether the next stage of post-industrial capitalism is going to be a "playground". A world where we "play" with our interactive tools, consuming, prosuming and creating; and the corporates watch over and monitor our complex online behaviour, all the better to market ever more niche and tailored products to us. The good story with this play-society is that we're all perpetual inventors, pro-ams and tinkerers - "user-led innovation" as the new spirit of public life. The bad story is that, if we use the online tools of the corporations to do this innovating (Google/You Tube, Facebook, and now Phorm), we could be all just "lab-rats" in a vast marketing exercise.

Davies proposes this half-way house:

This is where the metaphor of the playground comes in: the user as child. We are neither scientists nor rats, but children, playing creatively, producing something, but with an audience of adults who we choose, mostly, to ignore. We are lost in our world of play, but we are still being watched. It's not a performance, yet it is being seen and evaluated.

I've also used the idea of a 'ground of play', in the Politics chapter of the Play Ethic, to talk about those collective structures that might enable a society of players. Yet my notion was that a strong, capacious welfare/wellbeing state would be the "parental" institution that would both oversee and enable the free flourishing of citizen-players - that range of social-democratic, market-constraining measures (progressive reduction in working week, basic income, parental and self-development sabbaticals) well known to most of the European left (some of it even traceable back to Tom Paine). 

I'm sure William is well aware of the evolutionary and psychological determinants of play. That mammalian scenario where the cubs gambol and frolic in their playspace, often risking injury to themselves yet developing their faculties, while watchful parents protect them from predators. So I think he asks the right question about our current software platforms, relentlessly harvesting commercial data from our creative unfoldings. Are they "parents" with an interest in our development, or are they ultimately ''predators/exploiters" - with company slogans like "do no evil" as their camouflage? 

But I've also wrestled with the infantilising implications of a play-society that cleaves too closely to the mammalian model of play. I don't think we should become perpetual kidults, frolicking in a well-fashioned collective playground. I do think that if we want to be full players, we have to encompass within our identities the parent as well as the child. 

In the book, I tried to explore the links between the rights of play and the responsibilities of care - and how the fragility and precarity that underlies both might help generate a mature attitude towards helping the dependent and broken, not despising them. As a musician/artist, I know how easy the slide is from power to powerlessness. From my experience of precarity, I can intuitively support a "safety trampoline" that captures people as they fall, and gives them the resiliency and resources to get back onto the wire. Is there an 'artistic' mentality here that could be translated to others, to help them live the turbulent player's life with more grace and equanimity?

I'd distance myself from a kidult escapism in another way. For me, the adult player has to be ready to take real risks and make real leaps of purpose, not endlessly rehearse the possibility of risk in a series of imaginative or virtual distractions. Thus I'm constantly attentive to the way that "play" and performativity operates as a deep metaphor in politics and business. I'm respectful of the way that play becomes a positive value for socio-technical communities like hackers. 

I think there's even an argument that the Obama victory partly tapped into an aspiration for grown-up play - the agonism of "engagement", "getting involved", and "taking back the country". "Yes we can" and "be the change (you wish to see)" are direct requests to turn imagination and aspiration into embodied actions and practical projects. And the way the interactive platforms were used in that campaign - purposively rather than diversively, collectively rather than fragmentarily - is perhaps a step-change in how the Net sits in the daily lives of Western citizens: that possibility of 'collective action' that Clay Shirky saw as the most elusive goal for social media. 

But how you design 'good governance' for this interactive and playful citizenry is still an acute question - particularly as they use their software networks. Lawrence Lessig's last few books (Code 2.0 and Remix, both of which I've reviewed) have been urging us to be less passive, more aware of how we manage our info-identities online. In Code 2.0, he even suggests a kind of digital passport that we use each time we log-on to the web, which would control what kind of data we reveal to the world. 

Yet I'm entirely with Davies when he notes that the ghastly UK government plans to put up the location of every criminal offender online are the perverse outcome of informational idealism - where "all knowledge wants to be free" (and freely used to facilitate local witch-hunting). In the face of all this, I can't see any other alternative strategy than to use the tools of the Net to keep the Net constitutionally robust (the recent Facebook usage-rights protest as an example). 

Of course we should do some old-fashioned critical analysis of the network institutions that we're signing up to. I did enjoy the fact that Davies' example of an enterprise that was fully exploiting the idea of "children-at-play-watched-over-by-digital-adults" was Find Your Tribe - which turns out (going by his commentors) not to be an evil corporate marketing campaign, but a creative initiative from that public service broadcaster, Channel Four. What do we demand of our public institutions? Make their information public, or at least publicly usable.

But all that is an expression of my kind of civic play - from the Situationists (Vanegeim's "full play of subjectivity"), from Sartre ("As man apprehends himself as free and wishes to use his freedom, then his activity is to play"), from Schiller ("Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays"). This Romantic and modernist tradition says we can be fully conscious and critical adults when we play. 

Indeed, as Richard Sennett says in The Craftsman, we find our first experience of citizenship in play (developing our comprehension of the material nature of the world, submitting voluntarily to "good rules of the game", which we change when change is necessary). And we often lose it when work ensues. 

But Davies is right. We have to be vigilant about who is composing and constructing our grounds of play, and according to what principles, ethos and outcome. When we do that, we're not kids anymore. 

'Driving is not a game': when criminology met the Play Ethic

One of the enjoyable things about forging a meme (maybe it's a strange attractor?) like the Play Ethic is the stuff that comes to you, from expertises and disciplines you'd never even thought about. So it's been a knotty delight to read through Nic Groombridge's paper, Playing Around with Crime and Criminology in Videogames. The original document Nic sent me was actually titled 'iPlod', which is a much funnier title. (PC Plod is a British slang term for 'policeman').

As Groombridge tartly notes, the ambition of most criminologists would seem to be either "doing research for the Home Office or speaking out on behalf of the criminalized". He tries to steer round the obvious point of intersection between games and criminology - the debate about whether computer games are a factor in teen violence. (Beware of immersive, isolating personal media platforms that can often engage its user in a set of extreme and dastardly scenarios... Yes, ban the book! And whatever we do, don't put Raskolnikov into a computer game). But he doesn't quite manage, as we'll see later on.

There is indeed a lot of 'cybercrime' around - but defintions are crucial. To help us sort through it, he quotes David Wall's very useful distinction (in his book Cybercrime) between three generations of cybercriminality:

Gen 1: 'crimes using computers' - recognisable crimes that just use computers as tools. Payrolls have always been diddled, drug dealers dealers have always needed secretive communication, terrorists have always needed to find a way to produce bomb guides. Now they have better means - and the law will try to get them for activities they're still familiar with.

Gen 2: 'hybrid crimes' - old crimes for which computers and networks provide new opportunities. Like internet auction fraud, or cracking/hacking (in the malevolent sense), or paedophile porn networks, or mass identity theft, or information on how to crack digital decoders or make synthetic drugs. This crime would also happen anyway, but not on this global scale, and with not as much virulence.

Gen 3: 'distributed and automated crimes' - crimes which couldn't happen without the internet. For example, spambots which relentlessly attack your computer. Or the 'misappropriation of intellectual property' - which can cover everything, in Wall's definition, from teenage downloaders flouting copyright laws, to vandalism and rape in virtual worlds. (There is a 'fourth generation' to come, apparently, as 'ambient' technologies like wifi and bluetooth bring connectedness into the streets).

Clearly in this third generation of cybercrime, all the ambiguities of play - unleashed in the synthetic worlds of the net - come rushing up to meet the criminologist. But what kind of criminologist? One contracted to the Home Office, gathering statistics on anti-social behaviour - or one seeking to defend and understand the criminalised? It seems to depend what kind of political state you practice your criminology in.

Groombridge quotes Edward Castronova on South Korea's National Police Agency, who recorded 40,000 computer crimes in 2003 - with 22,000 of them being online related. If you've stolen 60 quadrillion pieces from a virtual game-world, the Korean police will eagerly get you for property crime - no hesitation.

Shift, however, to the US, and the phenomenon of "griefers" - where teams of spoilsports go around trashing virtual worlds with stunts and hacks. They thrive in that legal gap between real-life and virtual-life actions that most game-world hosts loudly proclaim. As Julian Dibbell says in his brilliant piece of reportage in Wired, the griefers aim is to point out that "nothing on the Internet is so serious it can't be laughed at, and that nothing is so laughable as people who think otherwise". Sheer anticness: the primordial rumble of play. Not much that the law can do about that.

A good childhood, in a complex world

The Children's Society report, A Good Childhood, has sent a few extremely sulphurous memes spinning through the media in the last few days. Our children are the most depressed and distrustful in Europe, goes the headlines, because modern British parents are "extreme individualists". We put career and personal life-trajectory ahead of our families, which we break up (through separation and divorce) much too easily and readily. The children in these situations, says the report, tend to do significantly less well in life on a whole range of indicators, including school performance and mental health. The report's author, Richard Layard, cut to the chase in a Guardian article:

In our report we offer an array of specific proposals to improve the lives of children. For example, we advocate the banning of advertising aimed at children, and the abolition of school league tables. We suggest free parenting classes around childbirth, covering relationships as well as childcare, and the training of more psychological therapists for disturbed children. We urge the elimination of child poverty. But we doubt whether much of this will happen without a fundamental change of values in our society - and indeed whether a set of specific changes would be enough. The change we most need is one that puts harmonious social relationships rather than the pursuit of private success at the centre of our value system. We do not want a society where children are taught above all to look after number one, since we know from psychological research that a life which is devoted to more than yourself is intrinsically more satisfying.

There's been so much impassioned commentary about this - quite a bit of it picking up on the fact that the Children's Society is in fact The Church of England Children's Society, and wondering whether a context of Christian piety guided the report towards certain outcomes (while not denying the veracity of its findings). Also some interesting commentary on how such recommendations feed into a general tendency to 'psychotherapise' problems in social life; how they seek to 'over-protect' children from the necessary struggles of growing up (including the developmental risks of play); and how the emphasis on social harmony can slip into communal intolerance, and blind us to our cosmopolitan advances.

But I'm divided along several intellectual (and personal) lines here. I've objected to Layard's work in the past as an attempt to marshall a whole range of psychological and social sciences to justify a new 'paternalism' in government. (There's no surprise that he was one of the architects of New Labour's welfare-to-work schemes). He's leaned particularly on behavioural economics (also beloved of the New Tories), with its Homer-Simpson-esque view of humanity as always knowing less than it thinks it knows, and thus needing wise rulers to steer it away from irrational behaviour. Thus governed, we'll be happy - or at least, in a situation of "harmonious social relationships".

Yet there's something weird going on here. In his happiness studies Layard wants us to accept that, in the face of our own psychological self-subversions, we have to be guidable children vis-a-vis the state and governance. But in this report he urges parents to be "properly authoritative", knowing exactly when to set limits on behaviour for children. And if they can't manage that - well of course, they can go to parenting classes and learn it, classes devised by Layard and his mandarins. 

Can they make their mind up? Are we autonomous, capable adults, or aren't we? Or is there a new sliding scale of human autonomy on offer here - fragile kids at the bottom, deluded-but-trainable citizen-parents in the middle, and effortlessly capable policy czars on the snowy peaks? 

Play in a quiet voice: Major Fun visits Israel

One of our play correspondants has found himself in one of the least playful places in the world at the moment - Jerusalem. Bernie DeKoven, guru of the New Games movement in the seventies and an indefatigable innovator with social games, has been giving "laughter" seminars to a range of Israeli teachers and therapists (including some excellent cross-partisan organisations like Hand In Hand). 

Bernie's certainly not political in any way, but I'm moved by his latest post (and others), and delighted by the citation:

As for the Gaza thing: if you're Jewish or Palestinian, it was a violence that was done to you, even if the violence was not your doing - a deep, shocking, deafening violence that was so thunderous you can't hear much of anything else - your family, maybe, your neighbors, your friends. You certainly can't hear anything that comes from the "other side." Not love, not grief, not caring, not explanation, not apology, not words of peace. And most definitely not play.

Play is one of those words that can only be spoken in a "still, small voice," that in times like these can be only be heard over the din of war by children and puppies. The rest of us have to wait for quiet, inside and out. Even clowns can't make themselves loud enough. Even people like the Israeli group called "Pharsh - the official military of the silly revolution" (thanks for the link, Pat Kane), or the "laughter therapists" you nevertheless might find doing their work in the bomb sheters in S'deroth; can't be silly enough to change anything - not right now...

...Teaching laughter, fun, games, play - it's a funny kind of work, a funny kind of gift we have to bring. Not anything that you might call a "cause." Not anything that you might think of as revolutionary. And yet, something having very much to do with peace, after all.

As I wrote in a recent post, there is some precedent in games and play as a force for social cohesion in Israel. One can only hope that the diplomatic "game" about to be conducted by America in the region can display as much grace, poise, imagination and sympathy as Bernie does in his workshops. 

The Three-Day Week: more rest, less work, more play...and better?

Signs that our economic crisis are compelling politicians to think the unthinkable. There are several reports today that UK ministers are considering imposing a three-day working week on large areas of British industry and services. With the general tightening of finance and credit, the suggestion from both business and government is that it would be better to have people working three days out of five at 70-80% of wages, with the gap covered by a government subsidy, than have the businesses collapse and risk the far greater social expense of millions more on unemployment benefit.

For those of us who have been advocating regulations towards a shorter working week, for a whole range of different reasons - to benefit from the productive gains of technology, to address our deep disatisfactions with our parenting or community lives, to expand opportunities for self-development and mental health - this suggestion seems more like an opportunity, than the "dark threat" the Independent renders it as. 

As Jonathan Gershuny and Madeleine Bunting reminded us several years ago, the original 'three-day week' in the UK of the early seventies - instituted as a response to energy shortages caused by industrial dispute - had a very small negative effect on general productivity levels, way smaller than the 40% drop you might have expected. (I found a discussion on Channel Four's community website which backs this up anecdotally). 

There's a classic unreconstructed quote in one of the Independent pieces, covering JCB's decision to adopt this policy: "All the wives have given their men lists of things to do since the hours disappeared," says a foreman varnishing his door. But again, those of us who are interested in the power of play have to ask: is this a true picture? Do people, when given more free time from work, simply turn to leisure-and-recreation? ("Gardening leave", they call it in the newspaper industry, when a writer or editor who had been poached by another paper was being paid not to work - ie, add value and quality - for his new organisation). 

One would hope that things have changed since the seventies, and that there might be a significant amount of workers - in these 'quality-of-life' conscious times - who would welcome and embrace this de-centering of work (and to a degree consumption) in their lives. There are so many social indications - from the rise in demand for literary festivals, allotments and personal training, to the attractions of social media (now becoming real utilities like The School of Everything, Gumtree and Freecycle), to the incessant anxieties over parenting - that we want more time and space away from the workplace. 

Why might we want this? Well, to explore these highly-connected, highly-informed, highly-sensitised selves and communities that we have become, in the network society. And maybe, as a result, this free-time will give us a new perspective on the kind of products and services that we have been making and delivering. If it's a "New Green Deal"  that both the US and the UK are promoting as the ultimate kick-starter for prosperity again, then that can't be just construction jobs - it will also require some degree of innovation and entrepreneurship, about how we can live sustainable lifestyles that feel as replete and complex as the ones we've left behind. I think some more guaranteed free-time in our lives to explore different lifestyle options - and maybe open up new green markets, products and services as a result of these explorations - might be not a temporary measure, but an essential shift.

Again, I point you to Benjamin Barber's fabulous essay in The Nation, where he suggests that the financial crisis gives us a real opportunity to re-assess what we regard as 'valuable activity' in our lives - and one of those re-assessments might be that if we aim to reduce our consumption, we'll be able to work less, and invest in life more:

What if Obama committed the United States to reducing consumer spending from 70 percent of GDP to 50 percent over the next ten years, bringing it to roughly where Germany's GDP is today? The Germans have a commensurate standard of living and considerably greater equality. Imagine all the things we could do without having to shop: play and pray, create and relate, read and walk, listen and procreate--make art, make friends, make homes, make love.

Sound too soft? Too idealistic? If we are to survive the collapse of the unsustainable consumer capitalism that has possessed our body politic over the past three decades, idealism must become the new realism. For if the contest is between the material body defined by solipsistic acquisitiveness and the human spirit defined by imagination and compassion, then a purely technical economic response is what will be too soft, promising little more than a restoration of that shopaholic hell of hyper-consumerism that occasioned the current disaster.

Amen. Let's see opportunity in this crisis - the play of possibilities in what might seem the darkest of situations.

Always living 'elsewhere': the new intraviduals

The splendidly urbane On Point podcast (from Boston's WBUR) informed me this morning about a new social-issues 'talker' from America, called "Elsewhere, USA: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety" by a New York sociologist called Dalton Conley. 

For a book that's all about how much the old social opposition of work and leisure is being broken down by, amongst other things, 24-7 connectivity, I'm faintly ashamed to relate the context in which I was listening and taking notes. That is, cradling my iPhone, in an empty coffee bar at 10.00am in the business end of Glasgow, with some decaff and bacon roll by my dilatory side. Undoubtedly performing an act of 'weisure', in one of Conley's unlovelier coinages.

Though there's the suspicion that Conley is angling for Malcolm-Gladwell-guru-status in some of his pronouncements, there's also much food for thought in his spiel. Some choice quotes:

Changes in three areas — the economy, the family and technology — have combined to alter the social world and give birth to this new type of American professional. This new breed — the intravidual — has multiple selves competing for attention within his/her own mind, just as, externally, she or he is bombarded by multiple stimuli simultaneously...

Leisure? The 'good life'? What are those? Work is the central aspect of our lives. We are lucky that it is fulfilling work — work that we will probably continue to do until we are no longer capable — but it is, unlike that of my parents, all-consuming work. There is always an email to answer, a paper or memo to read, and a lecture to give or receive. Success in today's professional world doesn't mean retiring at fifty to play golf in Florida, it means working more and more hours as you move up a towering ladder of economic opportunity (and inequality). Socializing usually revolves around professional colleagues.

Sound familiar to you? The 'intradividual', flexibly responding to a demanding social world, certainly sounds like the 'self-in-and-at-play' that I've been talking about for years. (Deleuze talks about 'dividuals'in his final essays). Yet the second passage ties that player to a universe of endless leads, tasks, items of interest, possibilities of advancement - where the difference between 'friendship' and 'networking', or say 'family time' and 'surfing time', is completely elided. 

The image on the cover of his book - with a family arranged around a table, three with laptops and the other one plugged into her iPod - certainly horrified the admirable On Point host Tom Ashcroft, who pushed Dalton to take a negative line on this networked family (he refused, calling himself a 'social describer' than critic).

Yet I'd have to be honest and confess that I saw that scene regularly over the holiday period - an 11 year-old, a 14 year-old and an 19 year-old each with respective wireless laptops (one regularly purloined from parents), sitting around an old Dutch family table. 

The delightful aspect was that the periods of silent surfing were regularly punctuated by long, giggling interludes of You Tube inspired show-and-tell ('Downfall' mash-ups, lauguhing babies, and Fonejacker were the favourites). Sometimes there would be spontaneous dancing or harmonising to a particular track; and sometimes one would shout up from their browser, having found a particularly cute exhibition or film they wanted us all to go and see. Was this any different, in essence, from a classic family pastimes scene, with the copy, paste and link of their operating systems substituting for the magazines, glue and scissors of old?

To develop Dalton's coinage, we were all intra-viduals easily flipping into being inter-viduals - the fun, laughter and mutual benefit involved in sharing the resources contained in each others' networks. And if the parents are net-friendly (as we are), then this doesn't feel like some alienated gathering of functional schizophrenics, but actually a lovely, rich, memorable time together. 

But this happened in the holiday season - those rare moments when parents and children can hover around each other, untethered from their institutions (whether school, work or portfolio). Doesn't free-time, even in the digital age, still help cement emotional bonds? In the show, Dalton addresses this directly, by noting that in America, at least, the historical fact of mothers working more has not been complemented by the phenomenon of men working less (by comparison, Scandinavian legislation compels the sexes to take equal parental leave). 

He also talks about the psychological self-subversion of current American (These-Islands, too) anxieties over work, which he reckons is impervious to recession or boom. When it's bad times, you'll over-work because you want to hang on to what you've got; when it's good times, you'll over-work because you're comparing yourself with the rapidly advancing Joneses. Either way, you're anxious about not filling every minute with some moment of career-building interactivity. This is a kind of cul-de-sac perspective on human potential (bolstered by behavioural economics - see recent post) which I don't accept. There's more to the human condition that fear of failure, or resentment of success. 

And I still think we need to listen to some real radicals (here and here) on this matter. If the economic health of society now partly depends on our collective willingness to interact, to be creative and expressive with our social tools, don't we need to nourish that "mass innovation" (as Charles Leadbeater calls it) through new types of welfare and regulation? To be an "intervidual", to be a player, is exciting but exhausting: we need a complementary politics of time and care to help us repair and restore ourselves for this active, creative life. Which means sleep, holidays, sabbaticals, shorter-working weeks... you know my litany. 

But always scanning the horizons for other suggestions...

Idling through the recession (and beyond)

Mark Kingwell, Canada's top pop philosopher, has written a compendium on idling (on a very long publishing delay, years after the UK's leisurely prince of idleness, Tom Hodgkinson, established his own dilatory empire). There's lots of bright wit in this puff piece in the Globe and Mail (thanks George Cairns for link), for example: 

Mark 1: ...What distinguishes idling from slacking?

Mark 2: The problem with the slacker is that he is, in the very act of resisting them, wedded to the norms of work. In avoiding work, or pretending to work, or hiding from the supervisor in the mailroom, the slacker is implicitly granting the world of work a dominant position. He gives work power as that which he should be doing even as he does not do it.

Mark 1: And idling?

Mark 2: Idling establishes an independent scale of value. It's like the difference between dozing - falling asleep from overwork - and napping, which we all know is an art form. The true idler enters the moment of not-working and takes it into a new realm of not even thinking about work, of strolling away from that collective addiction of the past 2,000 years.

All very familiar. (Will Hutton's review of my, Tom's and Carl Honore's book 'In Praise of Slow' put us all in the context of Western 'soft power' - displaying a kinder, gentler, less relentlessly acquisitive image to the rest of the world). But it was this exchange between the Mark's that really piqued my interest:

Mark 1: Suppose everyone was idle, though. How would society function?

Mark 2: Think of it this way. Any market economy is a failed attempt to distribute goods and services exactly where they are needed or desired, as and when they are needed and desired. That's all markets are, despite the pathological excrescences that nowadays attach to them: derivatives funds, advertising, shopping as leisure. If we had a perfect market, idling would be the norm, not the exception, because distribution would be frictionless. Most work is the result of inefficiency, not genuine need. In other words, idling is consistent with capitalism's own internal logic, which of course implies, even if it never realizes, the end of capitalism.

Now, I guess this is some reference to a pure theory of the market of which I'm unaware. But it certainly sounds like elements of the internet - where distribution is fictionless (hey! another iPhone/Android app!), where the long-tail delivers exactly what you want (maybe not when you want, but in a few days anyway). And who can deny that, when we have a consistent experience of getting what we want from a network-enabled screen, our behaviour tends towards the intrinsic self-satisfaction of the idler? 

The other reference this sparks off is that of distributed manufacturing and local fabrication (which we're beginning to get a hint of with things like print-on-demand books in bookshops). This is the great wet-dream of the post-scarcity prophets - a state of material plenitude that would destroy economics as the management of scarcity, and indeed allow universal, beauteous idling (hello, Iain Banks' Culture). 

I was delighted to see the Star Trek end of this - "make me a milkshake in the Universal Fabricator, Deanna!" - get a run-out in Ed Regis's contribution to the World Question Centre this year. Problem is, 'molecular manufacturing' might not be possible, says Regis, due to "insurmountable technical difficulties at the chemical bonding level". Well, they said the same about Trek's communicator and the teleport machine... 

DeKoven on Games Community Vs. Play Community

Bernie DeKoven, one of the most indefatigable advocates of the power and potential of play, writes here about the difference between a 'games community' and a 'play community'. (I picked up this link from his "tweet" on Twitter, which at least shows that I'm beginning to understand the damn thing). Here's the main spiel:

Most informal games - street games, pick-up games, playground games – are played by a play community. Most formal games, like Little League and Lawn Bowling, are played by a game community.

Commercial and historical forces tend to embrace game communities, and vice versa. Little League and Lawn Bowling are not just games, they are cultural events, they are sports.

Ultimately, the majority of people aren’t good enough to participate in the kinds of games played by game communities, especially when compared to the skills of the masters and grandmasters of the game.

Ultimately in the play community, everyone is good enough. Because it’s not any particular game that people have come together to play. Because the reason they have come together is to play, not necessarily to win, or even to keep score, but to play together, and be part of an event in which anyone can play, in which everyone is a master.

In the play community it’s mystery, not mastery that draws people together – it’s the mystery of shared imagination, of spontaneity and synergy, of generalized laughter and much mutual admiration, of shared fun.

When children are young, they first form play communities, and usually, if they can avoid formal intervention, they’ll continue expanding and diversifying the play communities they support and that support them well into adulthood.

It is no coincidence that the Internet, though it serves both kinds of community (play and game), is so easily characterized as a play community, dependent on openness and trust shared by its players, succeeding to the degree in which it can respond to their constantly evolving, individual and collective interests.

Most often, game communities share characteristics with play communities, and vice versa. In both, members show mutual respect for play - for supporting fantasy, keeping rules, observing boundaries…

This is very similar to James Carse's distinction between finite and infinite games - games you play to win, games you play to keep enriching and expanding the game. Also to Robert Wright's distinction between zero-sum and non-zero-sum games as drivers of social evolution - the first ends up in the war of all against all, the second in the global interdependency of the internet. (Luckily for us, Wright thinks the second kind of game is a Darwinian inevitability.) 

It's a beautiful, hopeful distinction - probably the easiest kind of 'play ethic' to grasp and apply.  

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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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.