“Beware the Ideologues of Play, Including Me” (Playing with Splinters, Part I)
Please read the introduction.
Play along for a moment and imagine you are Jim Fixx in 1977. You have just published The Complete Book of Running, which will soon set a record as the best-selling non-fiction hardcover book ever. But you are not just selling books; as the story goes, you have ignited a fitness revolution.
I don’t imagine any change on this scale happens with tepid suggestions or moderate endorsements. No, you are trying to shift the needle from “zero to one” so you are bold in your claims: running can cure health problems, enhance your resilience, boost your self-esteem, and even induce a legal and free “high.” Swayed by your conviction, millions are now following your simple advice to jog.
And then you die…
…of a heart attack…
…while running.
In all fairness, running probably did not cause Fixx’s death, but it did lead some to pause and question his enthusiastic claims. Even today, we are still having conversations about the risks and rewards of the activity (which I think, speaking as a certified personal trainer, is healthy).
This cycle seems natural: an innovative idea emerges with bold, maybe even exaggerated claims, and then the pendulum reverses, eventually settling towards a balanced position that appreciates both the advantages and disadvantages of the idea.
Sometimes, however, the initial hype is so outlandish that the idea does not recover from the initial reassessment and simply fades away. Tainted by overpromising and underperforming, it is abandoned and mocked as a bygone buzzword.[1]
I have witnessed this reaction (from some) with “design thinking” and “innovation.”
I wonder if play is next.
And if so, I wonder how I have contributed to this. Have I been an ideologue when it comes to play?
According to the dictionary, an ideologue is a “blindly partisan advocate or adherent of a particular ideology.”
Yes, that sounds about right.
When I first discovered play as a field of study — a serendipitous confluence of a running injury, a year at the US Air Force strategy school, and an uncomfortable hotel bed on a family vacation — I was enamored. Articles and books were just gushing about the benefits. They promoted play as integral to everything from our individual health and wellness to social structures and human evolution.[2]
It is unsurprising then, that any mention of play tends to be met with an approving head nod and a knowing smile. I know this because it is exactly how I react.
Admittedly, it was a long time before I approached the topic with any sort of objective analysis (despite my academic training, which includes 3 Master’s degrees and a PhD). In the meanwhile, I promoted play as “the” tool for innovation to groups across academia (Arizona State University and Air University), industry (Chick-Fil-La and workshops with corporate coaches), and government (Defense Innovation Board and US Space Command).[3]
To be honest, I have not moved far off that initial appreciation of play as central to everything from fitness to strategy. Just last week, I gave a presentation to a group at NASA on the value of playfulness. And I am eager to continue researching and writing about the topic as well as employing it as a trainer, coach, educator, and facilitator.
My concern with being overly zealous is not that I think less of play — though I now appreciate there are ways it can be abused and even abusive — but that I do not want to sabotage its momentum.
For decades, serious treatment of play was relegated to cultural historians, sociologists, anthologists, and other academics. That is changing. Play is increasingly part of our public discourse, thanks in no small part to wonderful writings (covering higher education, society, business strategy, and even emergency preparedness), conferences (this is just one example), podcasts (check out Why Play Works or Strategic Play), and even new therapeutic modalities.
Essentially, I want to warn others who are engaged in advancing the “technology of play.”[4] In our excitement to spread our gospel — and we should indeed stay enthusiastic — let’s not forget to inject some of the detached objectivity of the scholars who have been exploring this field for a long time (even before Fixx made running popular!).
That measured treatment should start with acknowledgement that play is not intrinsically good. Some forms of play can lead to harmful addictions or at least distract us from higher priorities (gambling is one example). Also, as with any powerful tool, play can be wielded for nefarious purposes; the potential for beautiful creation implies the inverse capacity for destruction. We must somehow qualify our advocacy to acknowledge these darker shades of play.
Yet, that is hard to do when we allow ourselves to be imprecise in how we speak about it.
Again, I have been part of this problem, using “play” to stand in for a whole universe of divergent concepts that deserve to be treated with more discernment. That means I am often late to catch on that a conversation on play is more like two trains passing each other on parallel tracks. I find this most often happens with someone who equates “play” to game design, whereas I approach it as an element of “strategic sense” (what ancient Greeks called “cunning intelligence”).
Talking past each other is not the only issue that emerges without greater discrimination. Imprecise language creates the topic of the next post, what I call play’s “catholic problem.”
Continued in Part II
The views presented here do not necessarily represent the views of the United States, Department of Defense, Department of the Air Force, or their components.
Thank you to Lucy Taylor, Jack Trew, Ken Roach, Robert Poynton, and Zoe Yap for reviewing earlier drafts.
[1] As an example, consider the BodyBlade, which is still sold and still claiming to be “the perfect product for every body.” Evidence actually supports a less audacious claim of its usefulness but you still rarely see this in gyms or fitness centers and it definitely has a reputation as a gimmick.
[2] Some examples include De Koven’s A Playful Path, Charlie Hoehn’s Play It Away (a really accessible and interesting read), Huizinga’s cultural history, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (less accessible!), and the book that was my gateway into this world, Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul by Dr. Stuart Brown. I absolutely want to highlight that, like Fixx’s advocacy of running, these works are important for getting play the recognition it deserves. Like so many innovative ideas, the more sophisticated treatment of the subject that I’m hoping for rests on a foundation laid by early zealots.
[3] In many of the cases, I simply took all the “rhetorics” of play discussed in the canonical book The Ambiguity of Play and mechanically fit aspects of innovation into each one. I also published this article on “Rescuing Icarus” (which became a presentation I did multiple times, eventually reaching a few thousand individuals). By the time I did this keynote, I had at least attempted to be more practical with the information (but still not precise in my description of play).
[4] I am using “technology” as a historian of technology, which is to say that it is not limited to a material thing, but rather the know-how (or techne) associated with realizing advantages through the creative manipulation of socio-technical contexts. For more, see The Icarus Solution (p. 19).
