PoP Book 06.2s MidRes - Flipbook - Page 22
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said and done — the real nature and power of it — offers a much greater
chance of finding satisfaction, joy, and even prosperity in a world of
uncertainty and rapid change.
Secondly, there’s the large matter of games.
Play, of course, creates games, and since game-thinking lies behind so
many parts of current life, especially the more negative aspects like
incessant competition and polarising ideologies, it’s only through teasing
apart how these things work and how they relate to each other, that
we can make the best possible balance between freeplay and structured
games. On top of this, with ‘thinking’ machines and machine learning
systems beginning to eat into the areas where our creative playing has
never been rivalled before, we’ll need to nurture our most human abilities
more than ever; and playing is right up there with the very best of them.
•
This second part of the exploration comes to a clear nexus with technology
because, like everything else, play’s been hugely affected by it; bringing
us benefits and anxieties in equal measure. For sure, the digital decades
have seen great new opportunities for playing but, as we’ll see, they’ve
also steered things much more in the direction of rule-bound games
— and by no means just of the video kind. Over time, technology has also
been a perfect focus for showing how a play attitude affects life and
culture in one way, while a game attitude sends things on quite different
trajectories.
So the first big obstacle in the way of understanding any of this stuff,
is that everything to do with play and games is always lumped together
in one congealed mass: the freeplay of imagination that’s behind the
games we love to invent and play, mixed up with all the game-forms
we’re immersed in, including the ones we’re so conditioned to we don’t
even notice surrounding us.
With that in mind, let’s take some more small steps to progress this, with
another view of play and its games. This time, though, we’ll take a classic
childish perspective. And in order to see it clearly you might want to position
your imagination about three feet from the ground.
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What is Play? / Elephant
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