The Big Society, Play and Broken Realities

I was just sent a link (thanks Ed) to this Pat Kane presentation about how the big society should/might maybe be a playground, but it is not. He’s channelling Sebastian Deterdings points about what separates gaming from mere pointification. Meaning, Mastery and Autonomy. He’s got a nice quote in there about play flourishing in the right mixture of risk and safety. It certainly doesn’t flourish in an atmosphere of risk and pain. Big Society Britain is about as playful as the Roman Arena. So I can fully agree with Pat’s final “Big Society: 50% right idea, 100% wrong time” comment. Spot on.

About the same time I saw a bit on Zocalo about applying game design to work. Basically responses to Jane McGonigal’s book Reality is Broken. Most of them obviously hadn’t read the book and were talking from their own point of view, but Jesper Juul’s point is spot on. Games are abstractions, simplifications and simulations of real world situations. Applying them wholesale to different environments – work, companies, the Big Society, etc – loses the richness of the situations and creates black and white decisions where there need to be fuzzy, political, sensitive ones.

Also if we do end up creating effective systems for feedback and control that are ‘fun’ we have to think about what that ‘fun’ is. I always like the last of Marc LeBlancs eight types of fun. Submission – the aesthetic pleasure of a game as mindless pastime.