Unexpected Media

Play/Time

Pat Kane, author of ‘The Play Ethic’ is the opening speaker at today’s InSync event for the London Games Festival Fringe. He talks about ‘play’ as being an increasingly appropriate response to and strategy for life in the 21st Century, a move away from the puritan ‘work ethic’ as a way for creating meaning and purpose for life.

He refers to the work of Brian Sutton Smith exploring the cultural significance of play. Smith describes play as ‘adaptive potentiation’: complex mammals need to rehearse to hypothesise reality, to practice tactics for survival. If we don’t play we don’t develop. In The Ambiguity of Play he outlines this and other concepts of play as the seven ‘rhetorics of play’.

Kane finishes the introduction to the day by talking about the ‘dark side’ of play, quoting the language of Donald Rumsfeld on ‘changing the rules of the game’.

Next up is Jamie Cason from BBC Comedy who describes the corporation’s early experiments in playful, game-like interactivity: Jamie Kane and Wannabes (the latter not yet available publicly). He makes a reasonable case that the BBC is responding to the challenge to digital media and is learning to adapt what it knows about well-crafted storytelling to new media.

Dan Hon refers to Masquerade as an inspiration for the ARG game ‘perplexcity‘ which his company Mindcandy have been developing over the past eighteen months. Kit Williams’ book, published over 25 years ago, was a set of complex verbal and visual riddles which lead you to buried treasure: a jewelled golden rabbit. It has provided a model for a number of experiments in participatory ARG games.

Play/Time has been curated by Tim Wright of XPT and is, in part, a launch of his ‘golf on the moon’ project. In the morning session he presents ‘In Search of Oldton‘, a blog which started as a project to recall and retell memories of his father and the village where he grew up. He describes it as a “90% true story”.