Edited by Pat Kane (email)


:: Holiday Madness and the Leisure Cul-De-Sac ::

There's much angst in the British press at the moment about excessive hedonism in Mediterranean holiday resorts this summer.

In towns like Corfu and Faliraki, local police and authorities are cracking down on the behaviour of British party revellers (and their tour operators). Young men and women have been arrested for indecent public exposure and group sex on family beaches.

There have been some fatalities too - two in the Greek resort of Faliraki over the last few months: a young man's throat cut in a bottle fight, and a 25-year-old victim of a heart attack, believed to have been caused by cocaine use.

Much ink has been spilled about why British tourists - voted the worst in the world in a poll commissioned by the travel company Expedia last year - devote themselves to such extremes of intoxication, feuding and casual sex. Mary Riddell reminds us that the British Yob has a long history: she quotes John Dryden from the seventeenth century:

Meantime, your filthy foreigner will stare,
and utter to himself, Ha! Gens barbare.

So is this the danger of a society "at play"? Depends whether you limit your definition of play to its obvious cliches - play-as-freedom, play-as-triviality. Both are key elements of what we usually call "leisure" or "recreation" - those pumped-up, glittering zones of temporary relief from the working life.

Says one ex-tour guide: "what we were selling (tourists) was effectively a form of escapism - a break from reality they could talk about for the rest of the year". Listening to a radio discussion show on the same topic today, a party-tourist confirmed that "when you go there, it's like there's no rules at all - that's the mentality of the British tourist. We're just mad for it".

The question is: Would these fantasies of sensual anarchy be so furiously pursued, if British work culture wasn't so utterly dispiriting in its mainstream? If the "rules" of one's productive and purposeful life could be much more shaped by our own wills - that is, if we spent our waking hours playing games we want to play - then would the need to escape those "rules" be so urgent?

The glory of the BBC's The Office was that it reminded us of how boring, pointless and fake most British working environments actually are, even when they're at their most "enabling". The "break from reality" that the sex-and-booze holiday represents is as much a comment on the nature of "reality" itself: a reality which (as far as most working cultures go) lacks imaginative depth, any real engagement and standard-setting, no sense of possibility or surprise.

How could people's productive lives seem less like a iron cage to escape from, and more like a box of toys, tools or materials, in which one can be absorbed, fuflilled and inspired? An ethical player puts his or her hedonism - a necessary pole in the wide spectrum of play forms - in a proper relation to other forms of play: and these can be about self-development as much as self-indulgence, engagement with an exciting world as well as the search for a temporary utopia.

But if there is no collective social support for these wider explorations and extensions of self - that is, for a richer vision of "being a player" in the mainstream of our lives - then the holiday madness becomes a necessary let-off of psychological steam. Might there be a correlation between the world's politest tourists - the Germans, according to Expedia - also being the most socially supportive of its workers?

There's lots more about this to come in my Play Ethic book. But in the meantime, o alienated info-youth of middle Britain, go easy on the "fishbowls". And do you really want to bring holiday snaps home like this one?


:: Look and Feel ::

Virginia Postrel's latest book, The Substance of Style, is due out next month in the US. As a play thinker, I've drawn a lot of inspiration from her. Writing from a rigorous libertarian-Republican position, Postrel's "play ethic" comes from the streets and the malls, from the real contexts of people's messy lives. She's a caution to my own ambitions for a more enlightened public policy on work and play - but a welcome one.

The Substance of Style takes an obvious topic - the rising levels of design and style in the developed world economies - and subjects it to the rigours of political economy, in her trademark snappy prose. To sample her thinking, see this Q&A on her website, as well as this collection of related articles.


:: The Rules of Engagement ::

As you'd imagine, the etymology of the English word "play" is one of my favorites. Here's what it says at Bartleby.com:

ENTRY: dlegh-
DEFINITION: To engage oneself. European root found in Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, and possibly Latin. 1a. play, from Old English plegian, to exercise oneself, play; b. pledge; frankpledge, replevin, from Late Latin plevium (> Old French plevir, to pledge), pledge, guarantee; c. plight2, from Old English pliht, danger, peril, from Germanic derivative noun *plehti-. a–c from Germanic *plegan, probably altered (by dissimilation) from *tlegan. 2. Zero-grade form *dgh-. indulge, from Latin indulgre, to indulge, explained by some as from prefixed and suffixed stative form *en-dgh-- (*en-, in; see en). (Pokorny dhgh- 271.)

Could the ambiguity of the ludic be better captured - play meaning both engagement and indulgence, duty and danger?

So imagine my delight to read Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland - originator of Generation X, and fastidious culture-mapper - give this impassioned statement in an interview around his new book, Hey, Nostradamus!:

I think social and moral disengagement is repugnant. In the book the opposite of labour is theft, not leisure. And that's very much how I feel but there is part of me that wants to leave everything, like now. And I kind of fight that every day. The rational part of me says no you have to stay and engage in the culture and if you don't you're a coward.

There's a little nexus of words here - "play", "labour", "engagement" - which begin to address the point I'm hammering on about in the Play Ethic: what is an adequate language for human agency, for making our mark upon the world, in a post-work age?


:: Play Times ::

Open Source and Radical Samba Tech advocacy doesn't get cooler: the mighty new Brazilian minister of culture (and Latin-pop megastar) Gilberto Gil on why his country must support free software.

The library as the city's living room? Timely and visionary report from Re:Source. What better candidate for a true public play-space?

And finally...Indebted to Matt Jones of Blackbeltjones.com for this great outcome vs process quote from Bruce Mau:

Process is more important than outcome.
When outcome drives the process we will only ever go where we've already been.
If process drives the outcome we may not know where we're going,
but we will know we want to be there...

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