[-empyre-] playing vs productivity (and what does it has to do with videogames?)
Brock Dubbels
brock.dubbels at gmail.com
Fri Dec 3 07:18:14 EST 2010
The ideas about play, production, and exploitation are very important.
I apologize in advance for this long post, I would however appreciate
your feedback and consideration.
I have included a section from a paper in the publication pipeline, as
well as links to examples of work becoming play by managerial edict.
I am concerned about the subtle way play and gamification are used,
however, it may be a step in the right direction.
Hear me out:
Lewis Mumford leans heavily on games and play in his social
commentary, The Myth of the Machine-- and I recommend this book.
He looks at society as an expanded, extended game.
For my own part, I see play as Sutton-Smith does, an Ethos to an
activity -- a subjunctive mood.
I write about this in the Dance Dance Education paper I linked in my last post.
However, there are many who feel that play can only be defined as a
non-purposeful imaginative activity--like Huizinga.
However, I have found that as a classroom school teacher, my ticket to
success was in helping students to reframe unfun into fun.
To do this I had to design work-like task to resemble games and play.
I looked at games as a structured form of play.
Thus, I had to change their attribution of " this is work other people
are making me do, so that I can have resources and influence",
to, "this is a fun activity."
I know that this thread has been focused, for the most part on a
Social Science, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Marxist, Hegemonical
analysis of how games are being used to manipulate the lemmings, but,
if people are being lured into activities that they like, should we
tell them it is not good for them, to protect them from being
exploited?
And with this foreshadowing to the rest of my thoughts, here goes:
If play is an attributional approach to an activity, would we prefer
to be in a work environment that treats
"work people are making me do"
as fun and game-like, i.e. gamification,
or work where there is no frosting put on the brussel sprouts,
i.e., "you will work because this is why you are paid, and I do not
need to make it fun."
I have been part of a project at Microsoft using Productivity Games
for things like defect detection in translating Windows OS to other
languages. The task itself is tedious, and cannot really be done by
computers. But making it into a game has shown great promise.
Here are some press releases about the projects led by Ross Smith.
The projects have gotten a lot of coverage recently (some of which you
may have seen)
Forbes
http://www.forbes.com/2010/08/09/microsoft-workplace-training-technology-videogames.html
Forrester
http://blogs.forrester.com/tj_keitt/10-09-24-product_managers_take_note_microsoft_using_serious_games_product_test_and_you_can_too
Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ellen-galinsky/rethinking-how-we-learn-a_b_787688.html
McKinsey
https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Dispatches_from_the_front_lines_of_management_innovation_2705
Will we begin to see a change in the way we work as we begin to view
management and work differently?
For my own part, I prefer to work in game-like environments that are
creative and playful--but people work hard at their play.
Here is a section from a study in submission:
Play is not present in situations where fear is present. Perhaps we
suffer not so much from accountability, but a lack of imagination
about what that means and how it can be done (Dubbels, 2009b).
According to Sutton-Smith (1997), the opposite of play is depression.
The opposite of play, in these terms, is not a present reality or
work, it is vacillation, or worse, it is depression. To play is to act
out and be willful as if one is assured of one’s prospects (pg. 198).
There is an intensity to play that contradicts the powerlessness that
has been described in Learned Helplessness (Overmier & Seligman,
1967;Seligman & Maier 1967; Seligman, 1975)—that intensity and
personal power that is central self-determination (Deci & Ryan, 2002)
and personal agency in identity (Dubbels, 2009).
But play is not a panacea, especially not when viewed in a classical
sense like Huizinga (1955):
Summing up the formal characteristic of play, we might call it a free
activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life as being
‘not serious’ but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and
utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no
profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper
boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an
orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings that
tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress the difference
from the common world by disguise or other means.
Callois (2001) created categories of play that create states that are
definable and seem to have purpose, where Mumford (1954) sees play as
the very roots of culture in how we transfer knowledge and create
innovation and prosperity through mistakes provided through the wealth
of leisure. For Sutton-Smith (1997) play is THE evolutionary
adaptation that sets humans apart because of its variety, prevalence
and occurrence across culture.
The centrality of play in these opening paragraphs was not made to
give the impression that the Collaborative Production model advocates
giving kids some materials in a classroom and telling them to go and
play with them. Any manager can tell you that the result of that would
be the students defaulting to their preferred leisure activities and
socializing, and their assumption that nothing work-like is going to
happen, and no one is going to be accountable.
However, play is central to the pedagogy put forward in the
Collaborative Production Model, and much thought, research, and
reading has gone into the role of play in learning to structure this
model by Dubbels, (2008; 2009; 2010a; 2010b; 2010c), through the study
of developmental and cross-cultural anthropology. Play is important
for status and entitlement (Geertz, 1975) as well as rites of passage
(Turner, 1969; Van Gennep, 1960; Barnard and Spencer, 1996).
In this model, play is seen as highly useful when acculturated in
the learning space as the subjunctive mood, and games are used as a
structured form of play and the learning of content is built around
work that has playful possibility and the luxury of making mistakes
until one can demonstrate competence, if not grace and prowess.
Play is not new, nor games, but here games and play are used as with
a mash up of social and cultural –cognition for designing classroom
instruction; this model represents a cultural shift for many families
and schools, so the emphasis of this paper is not necessarily
preparing students for corporate America, but changing the classroom
to meet the changing needs of the 21st century—changing our
expectations about how our young people learn, from out-dated working
and middle class models of classroom compliance, to professional and
creative class roles for our students, where they make decisions about
their skill acquisition in producing objects and develop
responsibility for their own learning and perhaps find value in it.
Background
According to the National Academies report” Rising Above the Gathering
Storm, Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic
Future”, it was found that students are not being adequately prepared
for the innovation economy. According to the “Perspectives” section
of the text, Howard High of Intel Corporation is quoted as saying: “we
go where the smart people are. Now our business operations are
two-thirds in the U.S. and one-third overseas. But that ratio will
flip in the next ten years.” (Committee on Science, Engineering, and
Public Policy, 2007, p. 17).
The Whitehouse has become aware of these concerns and has launched the
"Educate to Innovate" Campaign for Excellence in Science, Technology,
and Engineering & Math (Stem) Education. To achieve this, we will
need to examine how we educate for this kind of “smart” citizen—the
professional and creative class (Florida, 2004)—those who look for
good problems and seek to solve them.
In order to train these types of citizens, we need to promote this
kind of problem solving. To do this and integrate basics skills, we
need to recognize that professions have language, codes, values,
tools, rules, and ways of approaching problems that are learned
through apprenticeship (Wenger, 1998)—so as the apprentice builds
relationships in the community through tasks and collaborative
production, they acquire content knowledge; the apprentice is also
learning the professional culture and decision making process—they are
learning the how. This can be done in the form of games that simulate
or seek to solve real problems that put the student in professional
roles of the professional and creative class (Shaffer, 2006; 2007).
In table 2, below, are two descriptions of the processes of
instruction observed by Jean Anyon (1980), in her work on the
instructional practice specific to schools based upon social and
economic status. The “Middle Class”, non-professional classroom
reduces the amount of decision making and autonomy for students with
emphasis on compliance; whereas the affluent professional model on the
right encourages decision making, judgment, and innovation which are
skills advocated by the White House and National Academies. Back in
1980, the middle class model seemed to be much more common and
accepted, however, with the workplace and information age upon us,
slogans such as “get your degree so you can start your education” are
telling. To align with this model some schools may need to change
their philosophy of instructional practice as well as their cultures—a
change in focus from content to process; from facts, content, and
holding a position to problem solving, decision making, and
professionalism.
Affluent / Creative Class Model
Work is creative activity carried out independently. The students are
continually asked to express and apply ideas and concepts. Work
involves individual thought and expressiveness, expansion, and
illustration of ideas, and choice of method and material.
The promise of a new curriculum does not remove the reality of the
expectations of minimum standards in standardized tests, basic skills,
and competence outcomes; and stakeholders should demand that students
have basic skills in what test taking can tell us about, reading,
writing, mathematics, and science.
Affluent/ Creative Class Workplace Description:
“A great team, and tons of meaty problems to solve. … It’s open,
collaborative. … We’re facing problems that are pretty unusual. … We
take the smartest and most passionate team-oriented people we can find
and put them in an environment where they can thrive. We value
innovation, teamwork, and good clean fun. … We’re still a small
company, so one person can make a big impact.”
When compared to the Middle Class Model:
In the middle-class school, work is getting the right answer. If one
accumulates enough right answers, one gets a good grade. One must
follow the directions in order to get the right answers, but the
directions often call for some figuring, some choice, some decision
making. For example, the children must often figure out by themselves
what the directions ask them to do and how to get the answer: what do
you do first, second, and perhaps third? Answers are usually found in
books or by listening to the teacher. Answers are usually words,
sentences, numbers, or facts and dates; one writes them on paper, and
one should be neat. Answers must be given in the right order, and one
cannot make them up.
• Since we now know that creative class job opportunities will
continue to grow, schools must adjust instructional techniques to
prepare learners to be part of the creative class.
• If we can develop basic skills in service to creative, and
meaningful work, we may find more energy and motivation to seek out
this competence, these basic skills in service of higher learning . .
.thus, basic skills as a means to creative work rather than the reason
to work— this is the 21st century classroom.
• 21st century skills and decision making science have been have been
studied and listed by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills,
http://www.21stcenturyskills.org and Keith Stanovich—below in table 3.
These can be integrated into creative class curriculum
• The freedom and ownership in creative class school work may present
opportunities to begin solving real world problems and make school
feel relevant and important.
Decision Making 21st Century Skills
Adaptive behavioral acts
Skillfully access, read, analyze, evaluate, integrate, and use text
and graphic information in multiple print and electronic formats;
Judicious decision making
Think critically, creatively, and systemically to problem solve
current issues, identify future opportunities and innovations, and
flexibly adapt to change;
Efficient behavioral regulation
Work with autonomy and cooperatively with available information and
build a vision for the completion of task assessing time, materials,
team, skills, and needs-based assessments
Sensible goal prioritization
Synthesize and clearly communicate learning, using appropriate
language and presentation to achieve a specific purpose;
Reflectivity
Have time to discuss, explain, and transfer skills, information, and
processes to new formats, technologies and audiences.
The proper calibration of evidence
Test or views ideas through hypothesis testing and cognitive theories
of the activity and what is happening and why
With this list of skills and competencies, it becomes easy to lesson
plan for projects, inquiry, and connecting standards and critical
thinking essential to participating in the creative class. Through
planning with this matrix, the manager can simultaneously plan like I
did for basic skills and higher order decision making as part of
larger activities and habits that carry over into patterns of behavior
as problem -solving culture.
With this long post, I would like to return to the original point:
Is this idea of productive play really a description of gamification?
And is that bad?
On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 11:24 AM, davin heckman <davinheckman at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think Simon's concern as well as Julian's followup point to
> something really significant. Aside from being economically
> unsustainable for a company to produce such games..... I suspect that
> it is socially unsustainable, as well.
>
> My sense (and I guess that I am simply being optimistic here) is that
> if such a model continues and becomes dominant, either people will
> abandon it wholesale OR human culture will have to be altered in such
> a fundamental way that it will become unrecognizable.
>
> The fact remains that in order to make money off "play," such work has
> to successfully pass itself off as play. But work, for its own sake,
> always requires some motivation (self-benefit, communal benefit, fear
> of discomfort, fear of the lash, etc.). At the extreme fringes of
> coercion, people are always looking to escape such work, to subvert
> it, to free themselves from it, etc.
>
> And while there is a great region of slack within which people can
> rationalize work for a period of time as play, can play and tell
> themselves they are getting work done, or can be fooled into thinking
> they are doing one while actually doing the other.... in each case
> this requires a misrecognition in order to happen. In other words,
> the perception must be inaccurately cognitized (misrecognized). From
> here, misrecognition is either further rationalized (transformed into
> a different type of play) or rejected. In simpler terms, people like
> to play, but not to be played. Some people even like being "used,"
> provided they can conceptualize their "use" as something that they
> control, comprehend, rationalize, etc. Some people can be fooled into
> being used. But people, on the whole, seem unhappy as mere
> instruments. People strive for meaning, even if it is only of the
> most stripped-down, existentialist flavor.
>
> The most extreme example of such a totalizing play is money. People
> do get very wrapped up in the accumulation of merit by way of
> arbitrary tokens. But even still, these tokens, like the labor they
> represent, are forever being translated into real or imaginary
> strategies of gaming the system (winning lotteries, hitting jackpots,
> striking it rich, saving money, improving your salary, the all you can
> eat buffet, inventing the next paperclip, etc). Yet, in spite of
> this, most people I know seem to work with the understanding that the
> system itself is not the purpose of life. And the fewer strategies
> they have for gaining strategic benefit within the system of play and
> the greater the awareness they have of the various ways in which the
> game is rigged, the less content they are to work within the system,
> to ascribe meaning to it, to take pleasure in the sort of games that
> exploit the player.
>
> I don't want to pretend that people don't get routinely taken
> advantage of.... and that our backdrop of change and innovation is
> the source of a great siphoning away of capital. But I also want to
> guard against fatalism. All these imaginary credits and tokens and
> wins and losses are only relative injustices. The place where they
> become immediately urgent are at the fringes of need, where people
> starve and thirst, shiver and bleed. The number of imaginary tokens
> generated by the manipulation of imaginary tokens is most significant
> when the energy devoted to honoring these tokens conceals or obscures
> more basic needs.
>
> And, here, I think, might be the real urgent question about the
> various games we play: Where do we place our attention? How do we
> form our notions of what's real and imaginary?
>
> As an aside.... you might get a kick out of Susan Willis' "Playing
> the Penny Slots" Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination, Vol
> 2, No 2 (2007):
> http://ojs.gc.cuny.edu/index.php/situations/article/viewFile/299/292
>
> Davin
>
> 2010/12/1 Julian Raul Kücklich <julian at kuecklich.de>:
>>> I fear the issue might concern a political imperative. Playbour is that
>>> mode
>>> of play which has been rendered productive within the market economy. Our
>>> play is other's profits. Capital has managed to appropriate our down-time.
>>> Do we want our play to be productive in this context?
>>
>> Simon, you summed it up concisely. This is precisely what I was trying to
>> get at in my writings about "playbour" --- be it in the context of modding,
>> massively multiplayer games, or FarmVille. David P. Marshal wrote about
>> games being the perfect "intertextual commodity" --- a closed loop of
>> gameplay, movie tie-ins, hardware, and advertising that seems increasingly
>> hard to escape. What FarmVille does explicitly --- i.e. make players
>> spokespersons for the game and spamming their facebook friends --- has been
>> implicit in gaming culture for a long time. The "always-on(line)" mantra of
>> contemporary PC and console games is another example of this worrying trend:
>> you sign on, you are visible to your friends, your progress is made public,
>> your purchasing decisions transparent, so it is becoming increasingly
>> difficult to engage in "non-productive play".
>>
>> Zynga seems on the verge of becoming a company without employees --- as
>> everything that can be outsourced is outsourced to either third-party
>> companies (e.g. in Bangalore, India) or directly to the player community. I
>> can't really imagine a business model like that being sustainable in the
>> long run, but meanwhile some people are making a lot of money.
>>
>> Julian.
>>
>> dr julian raul kuecklich
>>
>> http://playability.de
>>
>>
>> Am 01.12.2010 12:02, schrieb Simon Biggs:
>>>>
>>>> From: Georg Russegger<georg.russegger at ufg.ac.at>
>>>> Reply-To: soft_skinned_space<empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
>>>> Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2010 08:23:36 +0100
>>>> To: soft_skinned_space<empyre at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
>>>> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] playing vs productivity (and what does it has to
>>>> do
>>>> with videogames?)
>>>>
>>>> is dualism helpful: playing vs. productivity. (it might be just a catchy
>>>> title)
>>>> wouldn't something linke "prdoductive playability" (i guess julian - hi
>>>> from
>>>> austria - runs a blog with this title)
>>>> give the perspective on where play has its productive moments?
>>>
>>> I fear the issue might concern a political imperative. Playbour is that
>>> mode
>>> of play which has been rendered productive within the market economy. Our
>>> play is other's profits. Capital has managed to appropriate our down-time.
>>> Do we want our play to be productive in this context?
>>>
>>> For those who wish to critique or attack the economic hegemony we inhabit,
>>> a
>>> route to this is to ensure one's play is unproductive or, even better,
>>> anti-productive (eg: destructive). This is what I understand the Wombles
>>> and
>>> other groups are all about.
>>>
>>> Best
>>>
>>> Simon
>>>
>>>
>>> Simon Biggs
>>> s.biggs at eca.ac.uk simon at littlepig.org.uk
>>> Skype: simonbiggsuk
>>> http://www.littlepig.org.uk/
>>>
>>> Research Professor edinburgh college of art
>>> http://www.eca.ac.uk/
>>> Creative Interdisciplinary Research in CoLlaborative Environments
>>> http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/
>>> Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice
>>> http://www.elmcip.net/
>>> Centre for Film, Performance and Media Arts
>>> http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/film-performance-media-arts
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number
>>> SC009201
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> empyre forum
>>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>>
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--
--
Best regards,
Brock
Brock R. Dubbels
brock at vgAlt.com
612.747.0346
415.968.9072
The Center for Cognitive Sciences
The University of Minnesota
Room S310 Elliott Hall
75 East River Road
Minneapolis, MN 55455
University page
www.videogamesaslearningtools.com
Consulting
www.vgAlt.com
One of the greatest mistakes of our day is to think of movement by
itself, as standing apart from higher functions . . . Mental
development must be dependent on it. It is vital that educational
theory and practice should become informed by this idea . . . Watching
a child makes it obvious that the development of his mind comes about
through his movements . . . Mind and movement are parts of the same
entity.
Montessori, 1967, pp 141-142
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