The Play Ethic

Doctoring the Corporation

I don't want to necessarily add to the fan-boy torrent that will undoubtedly follow the return of the quixotic Brit SF series Doctor Who to UK tv screens... but let me briefly say that it was utterly fabulous. You couldn't wish for a better mix of the charm of the old series - an unhinged hero, the tawdryness of British everyday life, preposterous alien threats - with the benefits of New TV. Which means more-than-half-decent CGI effects, post-modern wit and irony, and an attempt to bring a throb of sex into what was previously a very chaste relationship between the Doctor and his assistant. Robin McKie, watching it with his daughter, puts it very well:

His assistant Rose (Billie Piper) lives on a housing estate, has flunked her A-levels, is stuck with a dodgy, compensation-seeking mum, possesses a fine estuary accent and has a black boyfriend. The fact that the latter is subsequently eaten by a wheelie-bin - only to survive and then be dumped by Rose - merely adds spice to the proceedings.

However, it's not the contemporary values that make the show. It is its clever imitation of US hits such as Buffy and Angel : a mixture of smart, ironic humour and creepy horror. 'That won't last,' says the Doctor, peering at a couple posing for the pages of Heat . 'He's gay and she's an alien.' And Rose has some equally sassy gags. Told that an Evil Intelligence is going to bring all the world's plastic to life, she gasps: 'What, even breast implants?'

Christopher Eccleston says he's playing the Doctor "like my own gawky boyhood adolescence" - ie, a kidult (who else?) as master of time and space . And need I say that, on every one of the available rhetorics and forms of play, Doctor Who scores incredibly highly.  What  would you expect from the new series' writer, Russell T.Davies, who's written Queer as Folk and The Second Coming before this - and executive produced Casanova for BBC3?

I've had a hunch for a while that the BBC might be turning into the play-ethical institution par excellence - ie, justifying its state-protected existence in an age of interactivity and mulitiplicity by setting itself up as a 'ground of play', a common facilitator of British creativity. And doing so by providing both artistic benchmarks, and expressive infrastructures (its online, outreach and archive activities) - "here's the best it can be, now try it yourself".  Now that they have a decade long protection-order to not follow commercial norms, it's almost giddying to think what the Corporation (now there's a wobbly term) could get up to. Doctor Who is a great sign that a classic era of public media could be upon us.

Chimeras and Humanzees

Jeremy Rifkin is writing in the Guardian about the dangers of playing god with species boundaries. You may have heard about the mouse that will have human brain cells. But have you heard about the humanzee?

Some researchers are speculating about human-chimpanzee chimeras - creating a humanzee. This would be the ideal laboratory research animal because chimpanzees are so closely related to us. Chimps share 98% of the human genome, and a fully mature chimp has the equivalent mental abilities and consciousness of a four-year-old human.

Fusing a human and chimpanzee embryo - which researchers say is feasible - could produce a creature so human that questions regarding its moral and legal status would throw 4,000 years of ethics into chaos. Would such a creature enjoy human rights? Would it have to pass some kind of "humanness" test to win its freedom? Would it be forced into doing menial labour or be used to perform dangerous activities?

Wasn't this the Planet of the Apes scenario? (That's the classic closing shot above.) And do I share Rifkin's horror? Not sure. His own take on a play ethos was cosily communitarian - play as the healthy mutual activity of the liberated, post-scarcity society. Yet we can't get away from play also being about the human propensity to see the static world as amenable to transforming thought and feeling. The ethics of this are not 'do/don't do this', but 'how best? why not?' Transgenics, like any other science, seeks to put materiality into play.

I've blogged before on objections to the 'genetic overclass' - and the point Sandel makes (that planning perfection, or eradicating imperfection, robs us of that solidarity that we get from considering how flawed our natural selves are) is still valid here. (David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas has a wonderful story strand on this).

Yet I sincerely don't think we can stop this curiosity, it's ancient: our mythologies have been exploring hybrids of humans with other animals obsessively for thousands of years. And writers like Margaret Atwood and Grant Morrison are beginning to do the necessary 'unacknowledged legislation' for us to think with real ethical acuity about how we use this power.

This is the problem with play - its semantics take you into the strangest places...

Dark side of the game

Great story from the Observer, about ludic serfdom in Romania, new to me:

Bogdan Ghirda is paid £70 a month to do what most bosses would fire him for. From the moment he arrives at work he plays computer games on the internet.

With only a few short breaks Ghirda, 20, goes on playing furiously for 10 hours in the backroom of a run-down apartment block in Caracal, Romania. The moment he leaves his desk a member of an evening shift takes over the computer and continues the same game with equal determination. Between them, the company's 11 employees keep a dozen or so computers running 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

AlthoughGhirda works in Romania, the computers and the internet connection he uses are paid for by a company in northern California. Gamersloot.net is one of a growing number of firms taking advantage of a boom in online computer games by opening 'virtual sweatshops', using the low pay in poor countries to provide services for wealthy western players.

Older computer games pit a single player against computerised opponents, but the new ones allow players to join forces with others anywhere in the world. There are now an estimated 350 such games, the most popular of which have more than 300,000 subscribers, each paying a monthly fee to keep their place.

There's something elementally unplay-ethical about this.  What kind of gamer would fake their kudos and skills so blatantly in a game? Like the local kid who beats everyone because of his hi-tech racket. I suppose what this takes us back to is the kind of martial aristocratic dis-play that Huizinga talks about in Homo Ludens - elaborate battles between noblemen, supported by teams of indentured assistants. It also reminds me of the 'play' of Formula One racing - the driver as a pulse of agency, inside a hugely complex matrix of technology and labour.

Does my disdain make me a play romantic - 'play up! play up! and play the game'? Seems so...

Though I love the way that games, by their embrace of the dark side, can compel ethical behavour. Take Narc for example - the game that slows you down, and even lines you up for addiction, if you take too many of its virtual drugs. In fact, responsible drug use is the optimal strategy for victory. As the Got Game academics say: who would play a game if they didn't want to be an effective hero of the action?

Play Ethic @ Cambridge Word Fest

A small heads-up to a public event I'm doing at the Cambridge Word Fest next month, Sunday 24th April. It's with Carl Honore, the author of the excellent quality-of-life manifesto (my, there seems to be a lot of them round here) In Praise of Slow. See you there, or you can buy tickets here.

Here come the Pancake People

Haven't visited edge.org for a few weeks, and delighted to find this piece of zesty zeitgeistery, from Richard Foreman - founder of the Ontological-Hysteric theatre in St.Mark's, New York (oh, joyous invocation of memory...). Foreman has come up with a new thumbnail for modern selfhood. We are, in short, 'The Pancake People':

But today, I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the "instantly available". A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance—as we all become "pancake people"—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.

Not bad, heard worse info-age metaphors... and there's lots of excellent high-grade commentary on Foreman's piece from the likes of Rushkoff, Jaron Lanier, Steven Johnson, etc (scroll down the Edge page).

Grant Morrison Is The Devil

Not quite getting the posting balance right between Typepad and del.icio.us at the moment... But anyway, here's a belated heads-up on the latest works from Grant Morrison, Scotland's most imaginative writer/creator ever. This spiffy LA listing mag has a catch-up article on two comix - one called We3, about three genetically modified animals on the search for home (like Watership Down meets Craig Ventner), and Seaboy, which seems to be a parody of Disney-esque aspirations to a perfect social world.

I once spent a bizarre bus trip to Belfast with Grant on a Creative Entrepreneurs junket, and I don't think I've ever met anyone with their brain as on fire as his. (Between us, it was like Polymath Death Match, and I got royally floored).

Grant's work also proof that comix are a medium which can, ideally, reconcile the power of dramatic text with the spectacle of images, in a way that actually allows the reader some ability to reflect in their own time and space. It's an artform that sustains the 'autonomy of the player' which I'm always keen to promote. Though Grant would undoubtedly regard me as being too Cartesian-western for even saying so... (We have a history, now reconciled).

Creative Crass?

The title of this piece - "Why I Don't Love Richard Florida" (which actuallly sounds like a great short story title) - depends on knowing who Florida is. (See Creative Class for a speedy skinny - essentially, hipness sustains city vibrancy more than big mass projects).

Florida has taken something qualitative and turned it into something quantitative. That's what social scientists do. It's their special form of creativity. But in his argument in favor of economic development based on the arts and on businesses favored by the kind of people who enjoy the arts, he seems to have exaggerated either the size or the creativity of his Creative Class. I don't have any more faith in the prevalence of Florida's class than I do in the so-called values voters who cropped up after the elections. Both groups exist in nature but have been somewhat inflated for the sake of argument.

These days every time I walk down, say, Rivington Street, on Manhattan's Lower East Side, or Fifth Avenue, in Brooklyn's Park Slope, I notice how the distinctions between the hip places are beginning to blur. One cool business district looks pretty much like the next, just the way one suburban mall looks pretty much like the next. And once you start thinking about creativity in terms of class, hipness as a monoculture seems like the inevitable outcome.

For another take on the relations between hip counterculture, and its marketisation, see the vastly illuminating set of interviews that Ken Goodman aka R.U.Sirius recently did with Raw Story, around his new book on the counterculture. The interlocutors are Thomas Frank, Joseph Heath, and Douglas Rushkoff.

I think this is a big issue: what might an authentic urban vitality be? At what point might policy makers and planners in cities push their embrace of difference too far, turning it into the kind of identikit designerism the Metropolis writer sees? (See the magus Momus on the perils of this). Or, from a ludic perspective, is this just unsophisticated pining for a simpler, less mediated world?

Blissful bureaucrats, hopeful nation

Wrote this piece for the Independent, out today, on two very substantial books summing up the recent 'happiness' literature - a theme we've touched on a lot here. Good to get a chance to grapple with it all (and get paid for it!), but I remain unimpressed with the whole agenda:

Happiness is not a warm gun, contrary to what John Lennon sang. But it might well be widespread access to some powerful tools for living - whether social, technological or educational. Our fretting legislators, and their gurus, should provide these, then stand well back and let the multitude decide their own paths to joy, rather than seek to impose a presumptive "common good". We need to remember the "happ" in happiness - which means, in the old Norse, "luck or chance". Sustain the conditions for happiness, sure. But let happiness happen, too.

Funny how my self-determinist/libertarian tendencies occasionally surface and surprise me. This is part of the ambiguity of play, of course. Whenever I hear people telling me to play, I resist furiously; whenever people reduce play to triviality and abandon, I equally object. I suppose the sense of things being 'in play and at play' - ie open, processual, emergent, co-creative - is the one that always fundamentally fuels me.

Yet asking people to live with that kind of optimism and energy in the face of change is often, I confess, tough. There's a classic local example of how full-spectrum playfulness annoys people happening here in Scotland, with the launch of an excellent report from Demos on Scotland 2020: A Hopeful Nation (Eddie Gibb, an old journo mucker, explains).

Most press response has been scornful of their plea for a 'future-literacy' in Scotland -  "what about GDP?", wailed an ex-Enterprise Scottish minister on a late-night political programme. Demos have been playful enough to deploy excellent fiction writers - including Ken McLeod and Julie Bertagna - to 'imagine' some Scottish futures.

I wish them all the best. But It strikes me that, more than ever, we need to defend and extend our open media networks, in order that we can disseminate different wisdoms and perspective than those which get through the mainstream media gatekeepers. I have my lock-picking ways (a ratio of four insults to two insights is usually what most editors need for review prose - Boyd Tonkin, at the Indy, being an exception). But it's hard to be profoundly play-ethical, when our ideas-media is dominantly utlitarian and modernist in tone.

Now this is why I want a fight over broadcasting powers being returned to the Scottish Parliament...(Later. Much later).

"Touchy-feely network spiritualism" (bring it on)

Tart and salty coverage of the Play Ethic, and its umbrella consultancy New Integrity, from an excellent leftist web-magazine called Seven Oaks.

The problem with the Kanes and the Leadbeaters of this world is their zealous insistence on an online, open source technological, networked cyber-utopia which confuses familiarity with the fads of the day with serious critical enquiry. The result of which is a drunken misalliance of Chicken Soup for the Soul touchy-feely network spiritualism and the crass market genuflecting offered up in books like New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s best-selling business bible The Lexus and the Olive Tree.

It really needn’t be said that the dedicated players and Pro-Ams (“…climbing says more about who I am than my job. Journalism is my job but climbing is my passion.”) who best typify this dawning age are noticeable by their absence from the coal face of the information economy. The new media age has yet to produce the shorter working hours that Kane yearns for, nor has it produced a new generation of players: for every ad agency creative loitering at the water cooler, for every down-with-it pro-am actor slacking off from the PR company, there are too many McJob workers taking Leadbetter’s “Living on Thin Air” slogan to dangerously literal extremes.

As the precarity post below shows, I (nor my colleagues at Demos) don't underestimate the scale of the reform and activism required to build a social settlement that could cope with players and pro-ams as our mainstream identity, as meaningfully active people.

Much to respond to here, but not enough time in my play-and-care days. Let me do so obliquely by pointing you to a piece I've just had published in the Learning Teaching Scotland magazine Connected, about the relationship between ICT, Play and Education. In short, it's not just about training people for a market-future, but about composing a life-narrative of a creative society worth living in:

The challenges of techno-mobility might also be opportunities to think again about our institutional frameworks for learning. We could even profitably return to notions of the 'learning web', first proposed in the 1970s by educational radical Ivan Illich in his provocative book Deschooling Society, which saw the whole city and environment as a scene for ubiquitous learning and understanding. 'Playing around on street corners', with wireless capability, could take on a whole new dimension.

Yet the wider societal context to this is important. This new techno-literacy – which kids are assembling by themselves in their own largely unregulated time and space – is an honest response to a fundamental shift in the structures of post-modern life: the life of flows and networks, the power of culture and ideas, summed up by the 'information age'. Almost entirely autonomously, children are using play to make themselves imaginatively capable for this new world.

And a methodological note: the good player feels, and then she touches.