This post is part of a series of essays bundled under “Traveling without moving”.

Intro of that series can be found here.

The plan/ambition with this series: to share where I have been in 2020, what I learned, where I am going, and what is required.

The broader quest is to discover what is required to enable real change.

After the Pause-Post of end Nov 2020, we continue with “Play”.

“I’d like to do nothing for some time

be free

flying and gliding

like birds in the sky

left, right, up, down, up, down,…

defying centrifugal forces

unlimited by time, space, distance, force

like free painting

with myself as the paintbrush

and the sky as canvas

4-dimensional

playful like the birds,

showing little tricks,

challenge and pursue

but not limited

by any form of danger”

@petervan

It is a poem I wrote in 2012 laying at a pool at the Paradores Hotel in La Palma (Canary Islands), watching the birds playing in the blue sky…

This is the sort of play I would like to write about today.

This is the sort of play written about by Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens in 1938

I believe I already mentioned Homo Ludens in my post about a New Babylon

Huizinga believes play is of all times, and not limited to humans.

Animals play also.

A lot.

It is not “play” as in “game”.

Game – at least finite games – hints at some underlying sense for competition.

This is play without competition.

Play just for the pleasure of play.

Like birds in the sky,

cows in the pasture,

dogs on the beach,

humans teasing each other…

The core message of Huizinga is that play drives culture.

That the disposition of a culture is already embedded in the play preceding it.

By this we do not mean that play turns into culture, rather that in its earliest phases culture has the play-character, that it proceeds in the shape and the mood of play (Huizinga)

Play is irrational.

Play is a voluntary activity.

Play has a tendency to be beautiful. It may be that this aesthetic factor is identical with the impulse to create orderly form, which animates play in all its aspects. The words we use to denote the elements of play belong for the most part to aesthetics, terms with which we try to describe the effects of beauty: tension, poise, balance, contrast, variation, solution, resolution, etc.

Play casts a spell over us; it is “enchanting”, “captivating”. It is invested with the noblest qualities we are capable of perceiving in things: rhythm and harmony.

The child plays in complete—we can well say, in sacred—earnest.

But it plays and knows that it plays.

Play is a voluntary activity or occupation executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy and the consciousness that it is “different” from “ordinary life”.

We do not play for wages, we work for them

@Huizinga

The last one resonates well with my current state of being. For me, and especially since my retirement from corporate life on 1 Dec 2020, “work” has become “paid play”, although most of the work in 2020 was “unpaid play”.

But it is play.

In 2017, in my series “Trends for human advancement”, I strongly believed that structure is driving everything, and landed on the phrase:

“Structure drives flow drives behaviour drives culture drives change”

With the insights of Huizinga, I would complement it as follows:

“Play drives structure drives flow drives behaviour drives culture drives change”

So, to be able to change, we first need to re-learn to play.

“There is a third function, however, applicable to both human and animal life, and just as important as reasoning and making—namely, playing.”

@Huizinga

This brings me to the insights of John Seely Brown in “A New Culture of Learning”, who quotes Huizinga extensively

I rediscovered John Seely Brown (JSB) when reading “Design Unbound” that he wrote together with Ann Pendleton-Jullian. Much (!) more about that book and Ann’s work and how it changed and formed my thinking in 2020 and ongoing.

JSB talks about a “21^st Century Augmented Imagination”, with a better balance between Homo Sapien, Homo Faber, and Homo Ludens

Play, questioning, and—perhaps most important—imagination lie at the very heart of arc-of-life learning

In a world of near-constant flux, play becomes a strategy for embracing change, rather than a way for growing out of it

Play fuses the two elements of learning that we have been talking about: the information network and the petri dish (or bounded environment of experimentation). That fusion is what we call the new culture of learning

@JSB

Later in this series, we’ll also talk extensively about the concept of “Studios”, leveraging the practice of practices that is architecture (again, as so well documented by Ann Pendleton-Jullian in “Four Studios (+1)”)

The key point here that play and critique are indispensable tools and skills  for collective learning when integrating game play and game design in the scaffolding of the disposition of imagination.

Next time we’ll talk about “Anxious” one of the states of a post-VUCA world. And what a possible response to that anxiety can be.

From there – in subsequent posts – we’ll leave the road of reductionism and will enter a space where we will mix more abstraction and holistic thinking.

Hope you stay on board.

Warmest,