Rethinking “Play” in the Digital Age
Play. We spend a lot of time playing when we’re kids. We play less in our adult years. Play can be unstructured, the form most preferred by children, or structured, like most sports. We also spent well over a century doing our very best to not let children play. Some societies still do, they are often called meritocracies. Fortunately, this is changing.
As we increasingly automate much of our work in the digital age, such as the promise of Artificial Intelligence, rethinking play in our societies may be crucial. In what way and how?
As is often the case, to get to where we need to go, we need to go backwards a wee bit. Prior to when we started living in one place and farming, children played a lot. So did adults. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors used to work around 15 to 20 hours per week. Sometimes a little more. But not often. So they had time to play. Children were encouraged to play, with minimal adult intervention.
Playing enabled humans to develop music, art, language, writing and all kinds of other technologies. Play may have been a very important aspect to developing technologies to begin with. Play is about using our imagination. Technologies are born of our imagination. Specifically, how we imagine a future state of being. Play is experimentation. It is an important part of our culture and culture is the code we use to survive as a species.
Around the time we started to build larger cities and nations, we needed citizens to behave in certain ways. We needed to train them for work activities when they grew up. The Church (in Western societies anyway), needed followers too. It was all mixed together. Leaders of society all agreed, play was the enemy. And we needed to knock the stuffing out of it, especially in children.
Jon Wesley, the founder of Methodism in the English Church once said, “Neither do we allow any time for play…he that plays when he is a boy, will play when he is a man.” It was largely organised religion that ran education systems until the mid nineteenth century when States began to take over control of education systems. Although organised religions do still run various levels of academic institutions around the world.
It wasn’t until the latter part of the nineteenth century that play was brought back into the education system. Not fully however. Since then, there have been various small projects in education systems to introduce unstructured play, mostly through private institutions. Play in most education systems is limited to short periods during the day. Sports is a form of play, but can be limiting in terms of the need to abide by set rules.
Our industrial age found play to be inconvenient and obstructive to creating productive workers. Taylorism, created by Frederick Taylor, is an example of an anti-play mindset. It’s underlying idea was automating humans and treating them as machines as much as possible. Taylorism holds a significant influence on management theory to this day.
It is why industry seeks to automate as much as it possibly can. Humans are often the single most expensive part of a business. Humans are weird, they do unexpected things, they like a living wage, they have health issues, they take a long time to train and if they decide they don’t like their boss they go somewhere else.
Manufacturing is constantly being automated. Eventually, robots will be good enough to play a key role in construction, plumbing and electrical work as well. Now, as Artificial Intelligence seeps into society over the next two decades, knowledge workers too are under threat of job losses.
The reality of all technological revolutions has, despite doomsayers, resulted in more jobs, not less. Our global population is about to enter a period of significant decline as well. We will need a lot of robots and we will need AI. We may in fact, be looking at a time of very interesting jobs. And this is why we need to rethink the role of play in the very fabric of our society in the Digital Age. What does this look like?
We Will Need to Rethink Play
In my work helping organisations to innovate and applying anthropology to make those innovations as human as possible, I spend a lot of time researching, thinking and doing deep work, all around technology and using technology heavily. I thus have long treasured play. One of my favourite forms of play is messing around with a very long, heavy, didgeridoo. I’m not very good at it. Our cats find it annoying, which is funny. My kids and wife role their eyes. It’s fun. It is play.
Research has shown that play for adults is as important as play for children. While in children it helps them develop social skills, understand the world around them and explore their interests, in adults it helps reduce stress, increases creativity and helps us continue to learn.
The future of knowledge work and work in other areas will see us working alongside AI, using it to perform the drudgery work. This, hopefully, will also lead to a decline in management applying the brutality of Taylorism to humans.
Humans will also live longer in the very near future. Already, Gen Zers can expect to live to 140+ years old. The generation behind them, may well expect to live to 180, perhaps 200. As AI is advancing rapidly, so will the technologies continue to combine in novel ways that extend our lives.
This means that you may spend the first 15–20 years of your career as an accountant, the next 15 as a marketer and the next 15 or so as a carpenter or painter. Retirement at 65? How about 135?
This is why we must rethink play. From childhood throughout our adulthood. Yes, we will have to rethink education as well. But play will be a critical underlying thread to finding happiness. Not in the future, but right now. Play helps us to be more human. In some of my innovation work I actually structure play time. The outcomes are often quite impactful.
As part of play, comes activities like the arts. The aesthetic elements of culture; art, design, architecture, music, fashion, are key to human healthy human societies. It is part of how we imagine things. From our imaginations, we build our futures. Our technologies.
Through play, we find our interests in life. Schools that emphasise unstructured play and even let students determine what and how they want to learn, do exceedingly well. A wonderful example is the Agora school in the Netherlands. This could very well be the future of school not just for children but adults as well.
We are slowly beginning to realise the importance of play, something our ancestors knew all to well and that somehow we lost during the Industrial Revolution. It is interesting that Klauss Schwab who envisioned Industry 4.0 completely forgot that one truly human benefit may that we have more time to play. The Techtopians of the world, don’t talk about play either, just a more efficient, consumerist society. This is telling of how we are still locked in the mindset of scientific management seeing humans as machines and consumers. And how little we have come to value play.
Just as capitalism is undergoing huge changes and academia is about to as well, so will we be rethinking retirement and careers. And how we play. If we rethink play, it will help us rethink a lot of other parts of society. No, we will not create a utopian society, that’s a nice dream, but not realistic.
So, we should ask ourselves, are we willing to make the societal changes, to be brave enough, to bring back play?
