“Warped Play: An Approach to Play that is Not-Quite-Right” (Playing with Splinters, Part III)
Please read the Introduction, Part I, and Part II.
Part II ended abruptly mainly for fear that it had grown too long and complicated. In summary, there is some relationship between technology and play. The former was broadly defined and inspired by its Greek origins. The latter was unconventionally defined as our species’ capacity to mentally grasp advantages and inspired by my study of strategy and design. The graphic hopefully captures it more clearly than my musings in Part II (though now that I step back and look at it with fresh eyes, it just spurs more questions/splinters…).
To confuse things even further, claiming that play is the fundamental approach to a dangerous and disorderly world exacerbates the “catholic problem.” So, I’ll step back and offer a more constrained and defensible idea. It is one that still emerges from investigating the hypothesis that play and technology are linked and asks: if this link exists, what are the implications and does anything useful flow from this thought experiment?
Technology is obviously about utility (“Does it work?”). Play is often narrowly associated with enjoyment (“Is it fun?”). Part II pointed to the opposite conclusion, however. Play is our approach to working through how to live well in a world of constraints. For example, the playfulness of childhood primes us for learning.[1] We grow through curiosity, immersive engagement with material, and even risky play. And a child-like approach to life after childhood supports creativity, vitality, and resilience. It clearly has instrumental value. If play also yields a joyful experience, that merely points to an evolutionary strategy for passing on our genes.
Of course, “strategy” is an interesting word to use with play (and with human evolution, for that matter). To begin with, strategy invokes a sense of intentionality that is not necessarily present with play. Indeed, many scholars point to the intrinsic value of play as one of its fundamental characteristics.
The instrumental value of play, however, can emerge inadvertently. That is, any given moment in any given act of play does not necessarily connect to ends that the players are conscious of (in the moment or ever). Their lack of awareness does not invalidate play as a broad strategy for human development. Again, it is enjoyable because it enhances our biological fitness.[2] It is how our selfish genes win the game of life. Let’s return to the world of human agency, however.
Many define strategy as a linear plan for “winning”; it is a quasi-science of reverse-engineering an imaginary end-state.[3] In geographical terms, you simply draw a line from where you want to go directly back to where you are now and then follow the path. There is, however, the idea of the “indirect approach” or even a more radical (but perhaps more effective) concept of “strategy without design.” The point being, strategy can be intentional and still involve some amount of opportunistic muddling as well as reliance upon serendipity, chaos, and cumulative effects.[4]
The decision to use more or less of an indirect approach is one of many decisions institutions consider when designing strategy. But right now I am not interested in strategic games organizations play, but rather the individual players.
Warped Play: A New Rhetoric
Thus far, I have deliberately been indirect, homing in on my topic by a process of elimination, skipping over what it is in order to sketch first what it is not. It is not about organizational behavior. It is not about direct, rational planning. All of these are relevant to play and strategy, but outside the point of this post.
It is also not about unconscious mental activity. Instead, the type of play I have in my mind is how individuals deliberately “warp” situations to realize strategic advantages.
This idea of Warped Play is related to “play” as in a small amount of space in which something can be moved or jiggled. Instead of physical space, however, this warping occurs in a temporal space. These are playful moments during which judgment, end-based rationality, common sense, customs, self-censorship, and even time are momentarily suspended so ideas can be twisted, distorted, splintered, mashed, and otherwise treated irreverently as playthings of the mind. Furthermore, by not just accepting what is given as permanent and rigid, there is also conceptual “play” in how much maneuver room you create (or take… more on that below).
Again, Warped Play is about competitive advantages. It is not solely playing with the limits of the idea being manipulated or how far one can stretch their imagination. It is playing against some situation or against someone, even if they are unaware.[5] It is strategic.
Of course, it does not require extraordinary circumstances or outsized impact (though we often use “strategic” to describe such momentous junctures[6]). We can practice Warped Play in the more or less mundane decisions that we face in the normal course of life. Indeed, perhaps deliberately pausing to test the limits or reframe the situation — especially when no one has prompted us to do so — is how we condition ourselves to be players able to intuitively realize advantages.[7]
To repeat, the following lines from Part II should be amended by adding “warped”:
[Warped] play, more fundamentally, is perhaps our species’ grand strategy for navigating and nudging a dangerous and disorderly world. [Warped] 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…
This all sounds very Machiavellian, I know. Truth be told, I have gleaned much from works on cunning, the trickster archetype, and what one author calls “the cultural roots of strategic intelligence.”
Yet, I want to draw another distinction. Yes, play is part of those traditions, but the Warped Play I have in mind is inspired by a desire to support explicit values — not to undermine them.[8] It is supporting the sanctioned organizational ends while simultaneously questioning the preferred means of achieving those ends.[9]
Like the trickster’s roguish activities, this practice of irreverent imagination is typically covert. This is what distinguishes it from the related concept of Serious Play.
Warped Play is internal. It does not have to account for its logic (if it works, it tends to make sense in retrospect anyway[10]). Indeed, it may be hard for the player themselves to explain such lateral thinking (though I prefer reframing this as a “strategic sense” to make it distinct from “strategic thinking,” which we expect to be methodical and explicit).
Warping Wicked Problems
“Warped” is an appropriate descriptor on many levels. The visual imagery is directly linked to craft knowledge. As a verb, it is the act of manipulating material by hand, perhaps to reshape it, test its limits, loosen it up, or see if it fits (a term used above in reference to evolution). As a noun, “warp” are the threads running lengthwise in a fabric and weaving obviously links the word with tek/techne.
To go back even further in the etymology, “warp” comes from Proto-Indo-European word wer. The same root word is also contained within “subversion,” which links to the notion that not all play is benevolent or appropriate (i.e., Warped Play deviates/diverges, but not necessarily for devious reasons). The list goes on. To cite just one more, the related word “versatility” links to the playful agility of deft strategists.
“Warp” is even linked to throwing and the Old English word for projectile weaponry. The image of projecting violent force also gestures towards the quintessential tension between force and cunning, which is often described in the physical terms already used above: a direct versus indirect path. Indeed, “warped” again makes sense due to its linguistic connections to turning, bending, and twisting. Indeed, to be “twisted” has a duality that again highlights the connections to distortion, perversion, and manipulation…of both materials and minds.
Finally, Warped Play occurs in the moments, perhaps fleeting, that play out inside the micro “magic circle” of your own mind. While in this playground, time can feel warped. Ideas may fly at “warp speed” while the outside world seems to slow down (think, kronos versus kairos).[11]
I believe all of these actions are useful when addressing wicked problems.[12]
Warped Play in Action
This particular splinter has been in my mind since my recent deployment to the Middle East. As I described in this article about being your “Full Freaky Self,” I spent the last decade in educational roles. I often found myself coaching innovation teams or facilitating LEGO Serious Play workshops or giving presentations on why we should “rescue Icarus.” In other words, I worked in environments in which playfulness was largely accepted, sometimes encouraged, and at some moments, expected.
As a Battle Director for a multinational headquarters in Qatar, I found myself in a vastly different atmosphere. Our team scanned the area from Egypt to Kazakhstan in order to anticipate and react to a variety of threats (e.g., ranging from missile attacks, terrorist activity, or provocations by Iranian and Russian forces).[13]
Simply put, on a daily basis we were confronting the dual wickedness of the world: competition with corrupt actors and complexity of wicked problems.
A combat zone is not play. (Yes, I know there could be an argument that it is play, but that only demonstrates the plasticity of the concept.) And it was obvious from the moment I arrived that my normal playful approach was inappropriate for situations involving national security and human lives.
But maybe not. In fact, the type of play I have been describing may be extremely appropriate (as in fitting or effective) even while remaining inappropriate (as in disrespectful or heretical). Again, “warped” seems to eloquently weave both sides together.
Unfortunately, due to security classifications, I cannot go in much detail about specific moments when Warped Play enabled me to think creatively and critically. Let me offer this, however: there were intense and perilous moments when understanding how to secure our objective required questioning the wisdom of that objective, entertaining ideas that were clearly not feasible (or permissible), and generally making sense of the situation in ways that seemed not quite right.[14]
Why this is “Not Quite Right”: The Product of Warped Play[2]
As with earlier examples in these posts (splinter, partial, technology, craft, grasp, fit, wicked, and warped), there is utility in language and wordplay. Warped Play is not quite “right” for multiple reasons.
First, the ideas generated by play do not necessarily need to be correct. Consider a metaphor from storytelling from “Heroes for a Wicked World”:
Truth is not the only — nor the central — issue. Of course, to have purchase on our minds, stories must be true enough. That is, stories must offer sufficient coherence and fidelity. The first is internal to the story and evaluates coherence in both senses of the word: the story’s integrity (how well it fits together) and its clarity. The second, fidelity, juxtaposes the story against one’s paradigms and determines the implications of the comparison (i.e., metaphorical reasoning). It is a measurement of how well a representation captures the subject being represented. If a story is relevant to one’s life, faithful to one’s perspective of
reality, and in accordance with one’s culture and character, these are good reasons to extract some insight from it…
We are innately equipped to evaluate stories — and indeed, all communication — on the basis of coherence and fidelity, guided by values, emotions, and pragmatic concerns. Verisimilitude, the appearance of accuracy, trumps veracity. Hence, we do not, and should not, obsess over truth when it comes to storytelling. In fact, accuracy probably subverts the power of a story. Surprise and intensity come easier outside the conventions of truth and these additional elements drive us to devote our mental resources to a story; to pay attention. It is a worthy investment.
“Our compulsion to tell and listen to stories with no relation to the here and now or even to any real past,” Boyd writes, “improves our capacity to think in the evolutionary novel, complex, and strategically invaluable way[s].” He continues, “By developing our ability to think beyond the here and now, storytelling helps us not to override the given, but to be less restricted by it, to cope with it more flexibly and on something more like our own terms.”
The quote is all the more relevant and worth quoting at length since Boyd’s On the Origins of Story defines the art of storytelling as “cognitive play with pattern.”
Another metaphor from technology: maps are useful tools because they are close enough to the truth while not overwhelming us with all the details. Indeed, this example points to another area in which being not-quite-right is valuable, metaphors.
Metaphors are more than literary devices. They are tools for thinking, helping us make sense of the world by extending knowledge of one area into another. Yet this is not just where meanings converge but also where they diverge (again, note the linguistic connection to “warp”).[15] Indeed, a mere sliver of overlap can be even more helpful. When designers use analogous inspiration, for instance, they go far away from the source to generate innovative approaches.
So, the products of Warped Play are not quite right.
Second, the process of Warped Play can appear not quite right as well; as in, does Warped Play even qualify as “play”?
Why this is “Not Quite Right”: The Process of Warped Play
As with my experience in the operations center, engaging in anything playful seems inappropriate for serious moments. Also, twisting the rules and questioning the wisdom of the objective seems subversive — even if you ultimately honor the rules and the goals and produce a “right” answer.
Furthermore, Warped Play is often concealed so as not to risk seeming foolish, disrespectful, or — in the term used often with Alice’s Wonderland — mad. There is something not right about such hidden, self-authorized behavior, which brings up another point.
Leaders who help individuals feel “safe, supported, and stretched” foster environments in which questioning the status quo and playing with wild ideas is condoned and encouraged. Warped Play, however, happens in spite of the environment; it is always a struggle against — against constraints/norms, against the environment, and against others.
This contradicts one of the conditions that define play, that it occurs in a safe/condoned space. In fact, the principal sense in which Warped Play is not quite right is how much it contradicts the conventional conceptions of play.[16]
Take one definition already mentioned, Bernard Suits’ description of play as “a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” This implies some enjoyment motivating the player to subject themselves to artificial constraints. Inversely, Warped Play operates to overcome necessary obstacles and is driven not by fun, but by practical considerations. Because of this, the normal qualification that play requires freedom from pressure is also not applicable to Warped Play. In fact, there is a paradox in that the moments play seems least appropriate may in fact be the moments when it is most useful.
Another tension emerges from Gray’s assertion that “play always involves some degree of mental removal from the immediately present real world.” This does apply to Warped Play, which makes/takes space for imagination. But, contrary to conventional notions of play, it does so for the sake of reengaging in the immediate present and realizing a competitive advantage. So again, Warped Play violates the assertion that play is not instrumental or at least immediately relevant to the player’s real world.
On the issue of instrumentality, there is some fuzzy logic on efficiency that seems relevant to mention here. The playful, indirect approach appears, at first, to be less efficient than a direct path to the desired end. But efficiency is a measure of energy spent to achieve an effect. If the same effect can be realized with less investment of time and resources, we deem it to be more efficient. If the strategy is not effective, however, then efficiency is meaningless. Setting aside the not infrequent scenario in which ends are modified or abandoned, navigating and nudging wicked problems may require Warped Play. In other words, the indirect approach may be the most efficient because it is the only approach that is effective. Hence, one military theorist quipped that “effective results in war have rarely been attained unless the approach has had such indirectness as to ensure the opponent’s unreadiness to meet it… In strategy, the longest way round is often the shortest way home.” Again, the notion that play is inherently inefficient is contradicted by Warped Play.
All New Ideas Start as Heresy
In the introduction I referred to the “heresy problem” and now I must explain myself. Admittedly — and not unlike strategy — I altered my original intent as the situation unfolded.
Still, there is enough heretical material remaining to preserve the name and spirit of that irritating splinter.
There are the internal heresies. I wrote in ways that violate my academic training. It was informal, self-referential, and at times, rambling. I offered speculative ideas and altered the narrative in mid-stream.
I also critiqued the sentiment that play becomes everything and yet offered my own version of the “catholic problem” in which play is the basis of human survival. Mea culpa…
Then there are the external heresies. I proposed a rhetoric of play that does not fit the scholarly definitions of play. What I assert about play and those who are ideologues (such as myself) can seem controversial. And the nature of Warped Play itself is to be heretical.
All of it adds up to something that feels not quite right… but right enough to be useful.
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, and Zoe Yap for reviewing earlier drafts.
[1] To further link play and strategy, there is a line of thinking that strategy is the domain of the weak. In other words, with overwhelming force you can just take what you want and when (which is one way to define “politics”). Without power however you must rely on cunning intelligence, and what exemplifies vulnerability and weakness more than childhood? And if we “grow old because we stop playing,” is it because adults embody the ability to get what we want directly and thus forgo practicing oblique, indirect approaches and lose our ability to patiently, gracefully tolerate frustrations that come with less control?
[2] Likewise, the continuation of our species is dependent on procreation which is why our genetic code equipped itself to rely more on pleasure than conscious family planning!
[3] To understand how “winning’ is a problematic concept, see Pure Strategy. In that work, Dolman writes, “Strategy is thus an unending process that can never lead to conclusion. And this is the way it should be: continuation is the goal of strategy — not culmination . . . strategy is not about winning . . . victory is but a moment in time, a point of reference in a continuously changing web of history. It is never an end. It is ever a new beginning” (p. 4–5, 9). Also, see Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games (not Sinek’s version!).
[4] For examples, see Mintzberg’s Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, “Ends + Ways + Means = (Bad) Strategy,” “Mixed Scanning,” “Strategy Emergence as Wayfinding,” “In Praise of Silent Transformation,” or “Metis and the Art of Serendipity.” There is a dissertation worth of additional references to cite here and am happy to share more if you are interested. I will offer one more extremely indirect approach to strategy: building the strategist and trusting they will make the right decisions based on the emergent context. This also highlights that indirectness can be temporal as well (undulating tempo versus immediate impact of the direct, linear approach).
[5] There is a related concept called “dark play.”
[6] I am reminded of both the notion of the lone, heroic strategist (which is about as mistaken as the heroic inventor myth) and Daniel Burnham’s belief that we should “Make no little plans, they have no magic in them to stir men’s blood.”
[7] This is not the reframing that occurs as a deliberate step in Design Thinking, though an acupuncture practice of Warped Play can build that sensibility (or is it the other way? or both?). It is more akin to the idea in design thinking (yes, uncapitalization changes the meaning; see here) that designers “perform this little dance around a problem, taking stabs at it from different sides” (Design Expertise, p. 26).
[8] Though I often reference metis as the tacit knowledge of how to realize advantages, this notion of virtuous wisdom aligns Warped Play more with another Greek concept, phronesis (practical intelligence). For more, I highly recommend Everyday Strategic Preparedness.
[9] This is also addressed in “Designfulness (Part II): Undisciplined by Design.” This also reminds me of the “virtuous insurgents” of the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum.
[10] “The rational part of the brain is excellent at rationalizing decisions made elsewhere” (quoted in Ideaflow, p. 72).
[11] Researchers note how employees will work longer when passionate about a project and that they may steal moments during the day to devote extra attention to those projects. Csikszentmihalyi famously describes creativity in terms of play and “flow states” that alter the perception of time. See “Ideas are Born in Fields of Play” for more.
[12] This is “wicked” in the sense of complex problems and evil, but the definition of “wicked” as playfully mischievous also fits nicely with Warped Play. Of course, wicked and warped are themselves synonymous.
[13] Washington Post article on our interactions with the Russian military.
[14] Ken Roach offered the Biblical example of King Solomon resolving a dispute with an absurd— but effective — “solution.”
[15] This is represented visually in a Venn Diagram. The amount of overlap shows the degree of commonality or not-quite-right-ness. For more see “Paradigms, Metaphors, and Puzzle Solving in Organization Theory,” or Metaphors We Live By.
[16] Again, to avoid a dissertation length tangent on the definition of play, I will mainly rely on two sources: Scott Eberle’s “The Elements of Play” and Gray’s “Definitions of Play.”
