Prisms of Play

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ILLUSTRATION: JEMUEL DATILES

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Play is the watchword. Synonymous with freedom and creativity, it’s heralded as a savior across domains as diverse as business, education, and retirement.

We’re told that the solution to many of our most pressing problems is play, and that the problems themselves stem from a lack thereof.

s businesses, individuals, and members of society at large, we have lost our sense of childhood spontaneity and wonder, our ability to joyfully leap into challenges, and our determination to experiment and tinker our way out of those challenges – or so the story goes.

BY—

You could call it “Playism.”

LAURA DEMPSEY JAMIE FERGUSON VALDIS SILINS

ART & DESIGN– JEMUEL DATILES

But our devotion to play is not unfounded – after all, play can often get us out of a tight spot. Associated with childhood, play is a youthful affair. We play to discover the patterns and rules of a new environment and our role in it. Our species might be naturally suited to play; after all, humans have a long period of childhood development, much longer than other animals. By staying in childhood longer, we gain a distinct competitive advantage: the freedom to play longer and therefore adapt to a variety of environments and niches more readily than other creatures.

It’s no surprise, then, that in our current period of upheaval, we find ourselves called to play as adults. Data economies and their demands for our attention and connectivity; the uneven impacts of globalization and politically polarized responses to it; rapid scientific and medical advances like gene editing; gender politics and social unrest – these are just a sample of the forces reshaping our world. Our age is in a transition between settled horizons. To get to the next stage, we must reset assumptions that may no longer hold in our changing world – and what better way to do this than through play?

We might play because we feel compelled to, because a game or trigger has been placed in front of us and we are pulled in by the structure and rules of it. This is PLAY AS PROCEDURE. Most attempts at gamification fall into this reduction of play to a structure of progressive levels and linear feedback, and most corporate “play” goes no further.

But play can also be driven by our need and desire for expression. By playing with gender, fashion, and even body modification, we are using PLAY AS EXPRESSION to search for and build our identities and share them with the world.

We can use play to create something entirely unexpected – something new, something that we may or may not even understand the workings of. When we use PLAY AS CREATION, the thing we create can never be unmade.

Finally, play can even focus on the very laws and structures of the external world. This is PLAY AS DISCOVERY. It is about pushing the boundaries, as children often do, simply to see what happens. If I do this, then that will happen. But what if I do that instead?

The prisms of play we outline here frame a deeper understanding of the notion of play that goes beyond the facile conflation of play with creativity. Play is multifaceted and double-edged; it is risky, but necessary for adaptation and change. Here, we explore the different ways we use play and how these methods may come to shape our world in the future. Each scenario includes signals – changes happening today that exist on the fringes of mainstream life, but that have the potential to develop into highly impactful trends – as well as broader drivers of current change. Finally, we include surreal illustrations of future products, services, or business models that could develop if these hypothetical worlds were to take shape. By exploring these prisms and seeking to understand today’s uncertainties, we can gain the perspective we need to challenge the rules of tomorrow’s game, today.

ILLUSTRATION: JEMUEL DATILES

fig. 01— “Productive Dreamworking”

PROCEDURE When play is simply the execution of a set of rules, it becomes procedural.

The possibilities for the act of play shrink, while the consistency of their outcomes grows. The rules of the game, which the player learns and masters over time, become the reason for playing. From a child coloring inside the lines to an adult matching gems in Candy Crush, play as procedure is a way to pass time and master the rules of a context. But what happens when society as a whole is mobilized and compelled to play 24/7?

Over the last few decades, the boundaries between leisure and work have become blurred. Cognitive capitalism and the knowledge economy have placed a greater demand on businesses to generate information-based offerings, and employees are feeling the pressure to keep up. Because we feel the need to constantly learn about new tools and techniques, we fill our spare time with learning. We complete micro-courses, collect badges, and earn belts, and we do so by participating in gamified learning experiences.

Back at the workplace, we try to put our newly learned skills to use; however, we soon find that their application demands creative execution. It’s not enough to just apply our skills – we need to do it creatively. And so, with our workday hours already filled and our devotion to learning already occupying much of our lives, we turn to our leisure time and seek sources of insight and inspiration. A book, a film, an article, a passing observation in a park – anything could lead to a breakthrough insight. We make our leisure more productive, and the boundary between it and work time blurs.

This pressure to be productive is intensified by our consumption of products and services, as well as the business models driving them. A whole slew of tricks have popped up to encourage our constant interaction and engagement with products and companies, including behavioral nudges like intermittent rewards to flood us with a rush of dopamine and algorithms that select content to maximize its effect on our feelings. Our “Society of the Spectacle,” as named by French theorist Guy Debord in the 1960s, has morphed into a “Society of the Interaction.” More and more time of our time is cannibalized to increase the velocity of our interaction, as we build a world where every individual is continuously interfacing. As Netflix CEO Reed Hastings puts it, their only real competitor is sleep.

The fun of play is being replaced by obligation, and this procedural play is slowly collapsing the distinctions between work and life. Every day, work becomes more leisure-like, while leisure becomes more work-like.

SIGNALS

GAME-FULLY EMPLOYED A 2017 study by Princeton economists found that for every decrease in hours young men spent working over the last decade, their time spent playing video games rose by the same amount.

PAID TO STARE Gaze Coin is monetizing augmented reality (AR) and VR using eye-tracking technology and blockchain tokens. By basing advertising value on the amount of time consumers spend looking at content, Gaze Coin can help brands evaluate their designs, ads, customer experiences, and targeting efforts.

DRIVERS

ATTENTION ECONOMY The extraordinary growth in computing power, data capture and analysis, and business models based on free content have created an arm’s race to capture a psychological commodity that, by definition, remains scarce.

fig. 01— “Productive Dreamworking” Speculative Future Worldview: In this future, the boundaries between leisure and work have totally blurred. Work has been gamified, and leisure has been structured to generate value for companies.

The Product: Imagine a night-time gaming system that induces lucidity in the wearer, allowing them to perform creative tasks while in a dream state. Every night’s sleep is an opportunity to boost your pay check.

“PLAYBOR” SOCIETY Techniques to generate value from underutilized leisure time, along with social desires to make work more enjoyable and meaningful, have interacted in ways that have collapsed the distinction between work and leisure.

EXPRESSION When boundaries are blurred, new conditions for playful expression are created – ones that enable choice, openness, and fluidity. As James P. Carse notes in Finite and Infinite Games, in an infinite game – where the overall purpose is not to win, but to continue playing – rules and strict confines give way to “a progressive work of unveiling.” That is, instead of playing within boundaries, we play with them.

And playing with those boundaries is becoming increasingly commonplace.

Take gender, for example. Until recently, the options available to us fell into two neat boxes. But young people are increasingly questioning the idea of gender as a binary distinction ascertained at birth; in a 2015 telephone survey conducted in the US on behalf of Fusion, half of 18-34 year olds expressed a belief that gender exists on a spectrum. More and more, gender is being thought of as a choice.

The boundaries between male and female are not the only ones being questioned and changed: the borders between species have also been revealed to be fuzzier than we once imagined. This is revolutionizing the way we understand life. We’ve learned, for example, that forests are connected via the symbiotic “wood wide web” of mycorrhizal fungal networks, coral reefs are made up of a vast ecosystem of symbiotic microbial communities, and even the human body relies upon a whole host of bacteria to properly function, Our newfound understanding of life’s blurry biological constitution has occurred alongside an increasing ability to manipulate it. Advancements in synthetic biology and genetic engineering are offering new capabilities to hack (and play with) the body’s genome, from genomics firms investing in animal modification experiments to individuals using frighteningly simple DIY procedures to modify their own DNA using CRISPR gene-editing techniques. Though self-expression was once the domain of the arts, fashion, and bodily adornment, biohacking can take modification far beyond surface level. If the rules of the game have dissolved, so too have the limits for what life might become.

This could have interesting implications for companies. Though modifying life to achieve particular forms of commodified expression surely falls into an ethical grey area, it is not difficult to imagine companies using synthetic biology to create living expressions of their brands. Imagine, for example, if Disney could bridge the gap between their imagined worlds and reality by creating customized CRISPR pets that mimic the features of a beloved animated character.

In a world where categorizations and boundaries have been made indistinct, a tension is emerging between Modern ideas of progress toward a universal truth, and Postmodern fluidity with no target endpoint. It is, in a sense, a classic trade-off between freedom and stability. For those who take pleasure in these blurred boundaries, this world is truly a playground, but for those embracing social scripts while seeking to understand the truth of who they are, this fluidity can be frightening and unmooring. How can we truly know ourselves or others when it’s so easy to change who – and what – we are? fig. 02— “My Dream Pet” Speculative Future Worldview: This future features extensive advancements in gene editing, and people are now comfortable using CRISPR/Cas9 to customize the traits of their pets to suit their preferences. In this world, companies take advantage of these new possibilities to create living expressions of their brands.

The Product: Imagine watching a movie like Alice in Wonderland and falling in love with the Cheshire Cat character. Instead of heading to the toy store to buy a stuffed animal of his likeness, you can get a kitten that looks just like him. And it doesn’t just have to be existing characters – any pet you can imagine, you can create.

SIGNALS

DEFINITELY INDEFINITE A small study completed by Uppsala University in Sweden found that children who attend gender-neutral kindergartens are less likely to be influenced by societally conditioned gender stereotypes compared to children enrolled at traditional pre-schools. The gender-neutral pronoun “hen” was officially added to the Swedish dictionary in 2015 and is commonly used by many Swedes.

BACKYARD BIOHACKING David Ishee, Mississippi-based dog breeder and biohacker, is attempting to reverse the genetic disorders caused by the selective breeding of purebred canines by incorporating DIY gene-editing techniques into the breeding process.

DRIVERS

SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY Advancements in synthetic biology have occurred at such a rapid pace that widespread deliberation about the ethics of gene editing has struggled to keep up, and lawmakers have grappled with addressing the open-source nature of the technologies.

POSTMODERN IDEOLOGY With its focus on subjective experience and rejection of the concept of objective natural reality, Postmodernism has taken new forms on both sides of the political spectrum, from “fake news” to identity politics.

ILLUSTRATION: JEMUEL DATILES

fig. 02— “My Dream Pet”

ILLUSTRATION: JEMUEL DATILES

fig. 03— “Our Creation”

SIGNALS

CREATION Creativity is about becoming sensitive to problems, disharmonies, and gaps in knowledge; searching for solutions and making guesses; testing and modifying hypotheses; and communicating the results of this labor to others. In today’s world – which is largely characterized by our exhaustion of finite resources, an outdated model of exponential growth, and the stagnation of existing ideas surrounding intellectual property – it is becoming increasingly necessary to find new ways of creative thinking and challenging traditional modes.

Using play, we can come up with new and valuable ways of thinking and making in the world. Here, play is not a separate activity with its own set of rules – it is an ongoing creative process that we use as part of our daily lives to enhance our adaptability, to learn, and to promote improvisation and a sense of purpose.

The idea of creativity as we understand it today emerged alongside humanism during the Renaissance. For the first time, achievement and intellect were valued over dogma, and individual creativity was understood not as a conduit for the divine, but as the result of abilities that had been cultivated through broad education. Today, a new version of the polymath is reflected in transdisciplinary research as individuals from different specialties engage in combinatory play.

This approach prioritizes the ability to make connections that help remove the boundaries to creative thinking and problem solving.

A semantic economy has emerged from this growth of transdisciplinary thought, in which information is accessible to all, everything connects, and the businesses gaining a competitive advantage are those creating new informational value for the entire ecosystem – not those who best reduce costs and leverage assets for themselves. Individuals with similar interests from different backgrounds are coming together in order to create solutions for complex issues. In this sense, our shared problems are acting as unifiers, with these challenges quickly becoming the new medium for multidisciplinary collaboration. Small and large entities alike can now experiment across researcher domains, and this cross-pollination of disciplines is accelerating scientific and design processes.

Rooted in creativity, free play and experimentation support the research-creation approaches that link interpretive and creative disciplines. The maker movement has defined the notion of always being in beta – that is, it encourages a process of incremental development and utilizes nimble distributed manufacturing – and it encourages playing, tinkering, and hacking as a process for creation in and of itself.

Together, these emerging elements place an emphasis on creative thinkers and makers who take time to play and create new ways of thinking and doing. As people increasingly seek out a balance between creative exploration, meaningful projects, and community, everyday life could become a space for play that can provide new concepts for meaningful growth.

fig. 03— “Our Creation” Speculative Future Worldview: In this future, the concept of infinite economic growth falls out of fashion as resource scarcity becomes critical. The practice of recirculating inputs for zero waste gains popularity, and consumerism is gradually replaced with a culture of repurposing, recycling, and reclaiming.

The Product: A new type of organization emerges to capitalize on new ideas around the sharing of intellectual property. Imagine a fabrication laboratory (“fab lab”) in which all materials are recycled and ideas are stretched and reused to maximize their usefulness.

THE GAMBIARRA MOVEMENT Spanning the fields of art, design, electronics, and more, Gambiologia is the art of repurposing, recycling, and reclaiming.

More than just a demonstration of resourcefulness, it is also a political and ethical gesture. It questions industrial processes and mechanisms, rejects consumerism, and postulates the need for greater personal and societal autonomy.

SAFECAST The Safecast project in Japan has pulled together hackers, crowd volunteers, and business resources to determine how best to build radiation-monitoring equipment, attach the equipment to cars, and monitor radiation levels in the wake of Fukushima.

DRIVERS

CIRCULAR ECONOMY Circularity focuses on minimizing inputs, emissions, and waste by recirculating and regenerating inputs while encouraging system-wide innovation and mutually beneficial sharing networks.

SHANZHAI MODEL In Chinese popular culture, a Shanzhai (shan: mountain, zhai: stronghold) refers to a remote village in the mountains where bandits once recreated their own form of society. The term gained popularity with the rise of counterfeit product production.

Shanzhai factories were small production units, originally run by families who shared plans, news, retro-engineering results, and blueprints with others via instant messaging groups. Despite not having a promotional label like “open-source,” they became practitioners of distributed manufacturing.

DISCOVERY When it is used for discovery, play is about uncovering the connections in a given domain – it’s about exploring how something works and what it contains. Think of a child playing with a console to determine which button does what. We can use play to discover uncharted territory or remap assumed connections; it bestows on us the gradual ability to control our surrounding world by understanding the causal connections between its constituent parts.

If play is key to discovery, can we use it to uncover a new political system that better serves our needs?

The past five years have been devastating to presumptions around political stability – though it’s not quite clear why. Some people point to growing inequality as a root cause for this shift, while others argue that inequality matters little as long as the absolute wealth of the nation grows. Others lay the blame on digital culture, vilifying in particular the rise of social media, business models that monetize attention, and “fake news” vectors. Still others believe that celebrity visions of democracy, which have been unleashed by an unchecked and over-valorized consumerism, have torn apart the political fabric of our society. The left-right axis, previously relatively easy to demarcate, has become confused. While the causes are debated, few can ignore the gaping tear in what many assumed was a stable and permanent political system.

Into that void have flooded a number of players with ideas for addressing the innumerable problems we currently face. Some envision a liquid democracy, where citizens would be consulted and polled on a regular, even real-time basis. Others imagine neo-reactionary models in which city-states work to recruit the ideal inhabitants. Both concepts, though they stem from widely disparate perspectives, address issues of government accountability and responsiveness. What if there really were more effective ways to discover what worked best in policy and governance? Could we, through iteration, discover new models and prescriptions for how, say, marginal tax rates impact effort and motivation? Could we turn politics into a real-world lab? And who might fund such an experiment?

New tech players have harnessed network effects and near-zero marginal costs to grow at unprecedented speeds while maintaining the quick, iterative mentalities of their startup days. Now, with piles of cash on hand and irons in multiple fires, many of these giants have inched into political terrain.

Amazon’s open bid for its second headquarters has pitted city against city; Google has forayed into local politics with Sidewalk Labs, a city-building initiative, and its equally ambitious Jigsaw, a geopolitical think-tank; and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sought public approval and exposure with his 2017 photo-op tour of the US and hiring of an internal pollster. Many important players are eyeing just how to interact with, and potentially help shape, the politics of the future. fig. 04— “A City of Our Own” Speculative Future Worldview: In this future, political unrest has led to alternative forms of governance and ways of living. Trail-blazing adventurers have adopted the idea of “steading”: living on “artificial” floating islands that fall outside of any government’s sovereignty. Startup colonies compete to attract new immigrants to stay, test out, and iterate the rules of their new societies.

The Product: A large corporation has sponsored a “stead” and is inviting adventurous consumers to test out new ideas and parameters for this particular settlement.

It’s Google meets Singapore – and they’re looking for citizens like you.

SIGNALS

SEASTEADING EXPERIMENTS The idea of developing seasteads – autonomous floating cities at sea – is gaining popularity. In 2017, the French Polynesian government signed an agreement to create a special governing framework and economic zone for the development of a seasteading project.

LIQUID DEMOCRACY Pol.is is an open-source, AI-driven platform for participatory democracy that enables the flexible design of systems for voting and delegation. It was most famously used in Taiwan after the Sunflower Movement occupied parliament in 2014.

DRIVERS

POLITICAL INSTABILITY Populist forces have been rising across the developed world, fed by rising economic inequality, changing migration patterns, and a collapse of trust in institutions, including government, media, business, and NGOs.

GAFANOMICS A modern, networked, economic system has been spurred by Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple (GAFA), but it also encompasses “unicorns” (startups worth over $1B), Chinese tech giants, and all other companies changing our lives through computer technology.

ILLUSTRATION: JEMUEL DATILES

fig. 04— “A City of Our Own”

The different manifestations of play matter when we want to think beyond play as a blindly positive force. Rather than a fountain for creativity – a juvenescent spring that kindles minds parched by years of business indoctrination – play is manifold.

It can be a way to inculcate new habits, binding us to procedure through repetition and compulsion. By playing with the boundaries of labels and categories to see what new combinations lead to, we can find unique ways of expressing ourselves. Play can also be a way to create entirely new possibilities as we find unexpected resonance and connection across disciplines, materials, and ways of tinkering. Finally, we can use play to discover the ways things work as we look for the causal connections between objects and systems to iteratively decipher their functions.

When confronted by changes in our environment, we have a few options: We can turn away in fear or anxiety, we can ignore the changes and hope business as usual will get us through the next quarter, or we can face the uncertainties head on to start making sense of what’s different. Play can help us make sense of this uncertainty; it is an open-ended process, and with it, we can explore and understand the many possibilities for our future.

Today, with uncertainty surrounding how we will continue to monetize attention, tinker with our genes, move past infinite growth to build more from less, and structure our political systems, it is easy to feel trapped between horizons in multiple domains. Of course, these are only some of the many interlocking, complex changes we will continue to face moving forward. By embracing the challenges of today with a play-driven mindset, we can gain a sense of how to transition to the next phase. With this understanding, we can begin to answer a daunting question: Where do we go from here?

ILLUSTRATION: JEMUEL DATILES

Laura Dempsey, Jamie Ferguson, and Valdis Silins are Foresight Strategists at Idea Couture.