“Playing with Fire: Play as Paradigms and Technology as Play” (Playing with Splinters, Part II)
Please read the introduction and Part I.
Part I suggested that play is not universally wonderful. This is evident in our language. Inappropriate sexual promiscuity can be playing around, bullies can play tricks on their victims, and we warn children against playing with fire.
Thinking about that last example of fire set me on a different path for this post. In fact, I was already deviating from my original plan by skipping over to Part III, writing that entire draft, deciding it was rubbish, completely reversing my conclusion, and then realizing after all that I needed to write Part II next. (But this is why we write, right? It forces us to confront and clarify the pseudo-logic of our internal musings.)
I still think more precision in our language is needed to resolve the “catholic problem.” Note that this is “catholic” as in universal and eclectic, not the religion (though spiritual traditions have their own play ideologues[1]).
The “catholic problem” emerges when we allow “play” to be a plastic construct that can be stretched to accommodate nearly anything in the human experience. I will admit that there is some charm in this global, undifferentiated version of play (but again, I’m an ideologue). More precise language can be an antidote to uncritical enthusiasm as well as a tool of critical analysis.
Detour
Yet, taking my brother’s advice to hold my predetermined plan “tightly…in an open palm,” I let my original outline slide off to the side. (You will have to imagine for yourself how I would have tied kaleidoscopes, tai chi, and maps to play…).
My new departure point comes from an unexplained line in the last post that linked play and another concept that is also ambiguous and also treated with reverence: technology.
One reason for shifting my approach is that it is not hard to find more precise categories of play, even if we often forget to employ them in our language.[2] Indeed, the main thrust of one of the canonical books in the field, Brian Sutton-Smith’s The Ambiguity of Play, is that there are at least seven sets or “rhetorics” of play.
He characterized each as a rhetoric because:
Its ideological values are something that the holders like to persuade others to believe in and to live by. Much of the time such values do not even reach a level of conscious awareness. People simply take it for granted for example, that children develop as a result of their playing [emphasis added].[3]
And of course, the “catholic problem” joins forces with the “ideologue problem” [1] when we take for granted that play — absent any other categorization — is worth our admiration and advocacy. As already mentioned, the same two problems can be seen with “technology.”
Technological Paradigms
The argument for rhetorics is insightful and worth engaging. When I read The Ambiguity of Play, however, I cannot help but wonder if one can substitute “rhetoric” with “paradigm.”
A paradigm is a coherent perspective, or a lens, for perceiving and interpreting a phenomenon. The term entered mainstream usage with Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 work on the history of science. The idea that the universe revolved around the Earth, for example, was a paradigm that organized a host of other intellectual (and theological) activities.
Of course, all views are partial; they are both incomplete and biased. Thus, paradigms are never complete and therefore tend to evolve through small tweaks (what Kuhn called “normal science”).
Sometimes, instead of evolution, there is an abrupt and wholesale abandonment of an old paradigm and an embrace of a wholly new perspective. That is, there can be a revolution. This is captured in the title of Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. One example of this so-called “paradigm shift” was the realization that we live in a solar system that revolves around our local star.
A paradigm is also a useful construct in the history of technology, which similarly employs it to describe a validated set of approaches to a set of validated problems (i.e., those questions amenable to those approaches). Yet, as science and technology are not equivalent, there are fundamental differences at play.
Simply put, scientific paradigms operate one-way and are total in scope. The geocentric model cannot co-exist with the heliocentric model, nor will the former return to replace the latter. Conversely, technological paradigms can co-exist because technology is not about what is the truth but about what is working. Furthermore, a technological paradigm can remain viable even amidst innovations, a fact David Edgerton describes in his insightful book, The Shock of the Old. High-tech does not necessarily displace low-tech.[4]
How does this lead us to a better grasp of play?
Treating the rhetorics of play as technological paradigms highlights that none are absolutely accurate and none are innately good. That is, each is partially right in both senses of the word (i.e., matters of truth and matters of morality). It also emphasizes that rhetorics can co-exist in a constellation of activities all held loosely together as play.
Furthermore, practitioners who wield play as a tool can employ various forms of play at various times, in various ways, and even in various combinations with each other in order to figure out “what works and what wows.”[5] Again, this implies (1) the capacity to discern what various forms of play are available and (2) assess, even if intuitively, which of those forms fit the task at hand. Both senses are dulled, however, when play is only one undifferentiated mass (the “catholic problem”) that is presumed to be intrinsically good for any situation (the “ideologue problem”).
Treating play forms as tools then leads to an intriguing notion that technological paradigms are not just an insightful analogy to play, but that play is a technology.
Is Play a Technology?
Here is the part where I’m metaphorically “playing with fire.” There’s the intellectual hazard of offering speculative — very speculative — ideas. Another risk is asserting uncommon definitions for common words. For example, as mentioned in a footnote in Part I, technology is not just a thing (and it certainly is not just a digital thing). Yet, that is the dominant understanding today, which makes my argument an uphill battle.
Second, I want to employ fire — fitting, since it travels faster uphill — as a metaphor to explain my unusual definition of technology; or, injecting Sutton-Smith’s language, my rhetoric of technology.
Like fire, which is an example of a specific technology (when used with intentionality), technology in general:
● is integral to our species;
● comes in many forms, each of which is always a part of a system with physical, psychological, and social elements;
● can be used for many purposes (including non-rational ends) that are more or less right (accurate and appropriate);
● behaves in ways that are sometimes predictable (especially when viewed at the macro level) and sometimes not (especially at the micro level);
● can seemingly contain its own animating force (hence the reference to “behavior” in the previous bullet);
● and requires/emerges from a base of craft knowledge (which is not equivalent to scientific knowledge).
This conception of technology is broader than our conventional modern usage in at least two ways. First, as already mentioned, we sometimes point at a specific thing, perhaps a machine or our smart phone, and call it technology. Even when we treat “technology” as more expansive — when the thing is a “piece of technology” or when it is defined as a branch of knowledge — we lose some of the interesting threads woven into its ancient etymology.
“Technology” is a synthesis of the words techne and logos (which also forms “idealogue”; see endnote [1]). Originally it meant a systematic discourse surrounding the useful arts (as opposed to the fine arts). Art, in this case, comes from the Latin ars, which came from the Greek techne, which means craft. So, technology was originally the study of a specific craft or craft knowledge in general.
The notion of craft knowledge is key here. Imagine weaving materials in order to build a shelter’s roof or its fabric coverings. That image is very close to the heart of techne since “to weave” is precisely the meaning of the Indo-European word the Greeks build off of, tek (which lives on phonetically in “architect” or “textile”).
Craft knowledge, which precedes scientific knowledge, is how humans learned to navigate and nudge the complex and competitive world around them. We are Homo faber, the making animal. Thus, in its most expansive treatment, “technology is all the human mental, physical, and social activities — including research, design, production, transfer, alteration, use, repair, and discard — necessary for realizing the creative manipulation of the material world.”[6] (We will return to the duality of the verb “to realize” shortly.)
Of course, the narrower meanings of the word “technology” are more prevalent: it is a field of study (which is how we get one of the first uses of the word in the US, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) or, more commonly, a specific “art” such as computer technology, manufacturing technology, or aerospace technology. Is it fair to add play to that list of technologies?
Play does share some of the qualities of technology mentioned above. It manifests in many ways (sometimes unpredictably), is morally neutral (though often treated deferentially), and is an animating force that is fundamental to the human story (we are also Homo ludens, the playing animal).
I hesitate, however, because technology, techne, and craft all imply materiality. Technology, in other words, may not just be a thing, but there is still some physical thing involved. In fact, in a world in which nearly everything seems connected to technology — especially as I defined it above — play may be one of the few things that can exist, at least in some forms, independent of any artifacts. Typically, for scholars, practitioners, and the general population alike, play (as verb or noun) is centered on action. And action is distinct from artifacts, even though many of the activities we call play do use playthings.[7]
Am I Making Sense?
I feel like I’m still tumbling down the rabbit hole, publicly working through these ideas, wondering if I am making sense. Is play a technology? Though the idealogue in me hoped it would be otherwise, play is no more a technology than sense making activities are (even though that phrase invokes the act of manufacturing). Neither are grounded in materiality, and that seems to be the sticking point.
And yet, again I’m tempted by the clues of language. Making sense implies active participation in how we construct meaning, which is a dynamic dance between perception and projection. We do not just passively sense the world around us; we filter it, we probe it, we construct theories that shape what we perceive.
Likewise, I’m reminded that in craft knowledge (and design in general), questions and answers can co-evolve in an iterative fashion. In other words, a tentative, sacrificial idea (or design “move”) functions less as a solution that ends the investigation and more as a device for making sense of the emergent context. All of this leads me somewhere I did not anticipate (and if I’m losing you here, please just go with it for another moment!).
Thoughts on Things
Though they do share some characteristics and there are plenty technologies of play, I must relinquish the claim that play is a technology.[8]
Yet, intuitively, there still seems to be some thread weaving play and the broad definition of technology offered above.
If technology encompasses the “mental, physical, and social activities…for realizing the creative manipulation of the material world”; and if the verb “to realize” has a mental component (to become aware of) and a material component (to make real or to actualize); then that points to a possible relationship between play and technology similar to the co-creative process of making sense described in the last section.
Maybe play is, first and foremost, the mental moves that help us realize advantages amidst complexity and competition. Sometimes that mental activity prompts (and then interacts with) the material artifacts that define technology. Thus, while play is not a technology, perhaps technology rests on a foundation of play.
Still, our “thoughts on things” are not only about how to grasp physical things and not even limited to a better grasp of conceptual things that eventually manifest in visible forms (i.e., the activities of play, the “voluntary attempts to overcome unnecessary obstacles,” that normally define the subject[9]).
Play, more fundamentally, is perhaps our species’ grand strategy for navigating and nudging a dangerous and disorderly world. Playfulness would then be the underpinning of our strategic sense, a capacity for flowing between active intervention and agile adaptation — between force and cunning — in order to craft and grasp opportunities for advantage.[10]
Though at times we employ our strategic intelligence intentionally, most of the time we rely upon the play instincts shaped by nature and nurture.[11] Simply put, play is how intelligent animals are programmed to approach life. No wonder then, that we can see it manifest in nearly every aspect of the human experience. To use the imagery of digital technology, we are human v1.0 and play is our operating system.
Not Quite Right
I offer this novel interpretation of play in the spirit of expedience, which is to say that this is an explicitly tentative proposition and should be treated as we would approach technological knowledge (which hinges on utility versus scientific knowledge, which strives for ultimate accuracy). In other words, this model is not necessarily right, but is it right enough to be useful?
In the spirit of embodying the ideas being discussed, the next post borrows the design “technique” — another word derived from techne/tek — of testing sacrificial ideas. Specifically, does this paradigm/rhetoric help us make sense of play? Does this map, even if it is not quite right, get us closer to grasping the splinters in my mind?
Continued in Part III.
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] For example, see Ellis’s Happy Now and Sweet’s The Well Played Life. In fact, returning to the title of Part I, there is also an interesting link between religion and the etymology of ideologue. The root word logos has both a theological definition (which is why there is an element of worship) and a philosophical connotation regarding how we interpret reality (which is why ideologues are committed to a particular perspective).
[2] Again, in these series, I am more interested in speaking to practitioners of play, so I want to avoid an overly academic argument over semantics. Here, for example, I can admit that perhaps the use of “play” without greater precision is acceptable because the context will provide sufficient fidelity. For example, when someone says, “she has character” we assume it is good character and do not demand a qualifier even though technically the term is ambiguous.
[3] The Ambiguity of Play, p. 11–12.
[4] For a great book on the role of play in invention, see Wonderland.
[5] I’m deliberately citing a book on Design Thinking because of the deep connections between that field and technology and play. All are hard to define, tend to be treated uncritically, and can be integrated into a single practice. There are other, deeper connections, as well…
[6] The Icarus Solution, p. 19.
[7] It is hard, but not impossible, to imagine play that does not involve the use of, or reference to, physical artifacts. Children improvising a skit outside with no props is the first example that comes to mind. Speaking of theater, there are interesting links between play, technology, rhetoric, and theatrical performances. I flirted with this idea briefly in my thesis on fiction as a tool for educating strategists, “Heroes for a Wicked World.”
[8] Admittedly, I had hoped otherwise. I had sensed a potential for eloquence, which is one of the non-rational factors Kuhn identified for abandoning established ideas for a promising, new-but-yet-to-be-proven, paradigm.
[9] The quote is from The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia. The concept Bernard Suits introduces in the book, “lusory attitude,” is technically about games and not necessarily all play. Indeed, Part III will explain a form of play that is not about games per se but rather a strategy to overcome necessary obstacles.
[10] Renowned theorist Sir Lawrence Freedman labels the tension between force and cunning as “the most powerful dichotomy in all strategic thought” (Strategy: A History, p. 42). Again, language hints there is more to the story: “craft” is knowledge of how to manipulate material (thus, technology) as well as how to manipulate minds of others (thus, cunning intelligence or what Greeks called metis).
[11] This is treacherous territory, I know. I will only gesture towards the more robust scholarly treatment in Gino LaPaglia’s The Cultural Roots of Strategic Intelligence.
