Latest..
A short story about entertainment, torpor and all things visceral
View more presentations from Anne McCrossan
View Anne McCrossan's profile on this website. Read her blog at Visceral Business
A Few Thoughts about Play and Engagement by Anne McCrossan
A very stimulating two day conference was put together this week as a line of enquiry led by Pat Kane and Escape Artists called ‘The Play’s The Thing’. To use his own words, Pat has spent years ‘researching, advocating and practising play as our enduring principle of possibility and optimism in the human condition’.
The two days of the conference explored a wide range of dimensions of wellbeing and the role of play as part of the social agenda, and it meshed very well with Visceral Businesses ideas about social business and how, ultimately, engagement, shared value and co-creation comes through doing things that move people to respond and make a difference.
So, play for us has never been a passive but a highly creative pursuit, and with that in mind it was a great opportunity to be involved in a line of enquiry that was so stimulating.
Those two days, and the number of dimensions explored in them, were a refreshing antidote to the massively overhyped, headline grabbing nature of ‘gamification’ that’s somehow managed to obscure many currencies of play on offer that are less lightweight, more nuanced and in the long term almost certainly more sustainable.
The enormous level of flux being experiencing in community and commercial landscapes right now suggests that maybe it’s time we conduct a very conscious consideration into how we develop the ways we can ‘do interaction’. What happens when ‘gamification’ becomes a generic, what then?
For this conference I was asked to think about the question ‘what possibilities for sustainable wellbeing does networked and gaming culture bring us?’, particularly as we see an emergence of cyberbeings and cyberbusinesses, and this is a summary.
A very stimulating two day conference was put together this week as a line of enquiry led by Pat Kane and Escape Artists called ‘The Play’s The Thing’. To use his own words, Pat has spent years ‘researching, advocating and practising play as our enduring principle of possibility and optimism in the human condition’.
The two days of the conference explored a wide range of dimensions of wellbeing and the role of play as part of the social agenda, and it meshed very well with Visceral Businesses ideas about social business and how, ultimately, engagement, shared value and co-creation comes through doing things that move people to respond and make a difference.
So, play for us has never been a passive but a highly creative pursuit, and with that in mind it was a great opportunity to be involved in a line of enquiry that was so stimulating.
Those two days, and the number of dimensions explored in them, were a refreshing antidote to the massively overhyped, headline grabbing nature of ‘gamification’ that’s somehow managed to obscure many currencies of play on offer that are less lightweight, more nuanced and in the long term almost certainly more sustainable.
The enormous level of flux being experiencing in community and commercial landscapes right now suggests that maybe it’s time we conduct a very conscious consideration into how we develop the ways we can ‘do interaction’. What happens when ‘gamification’ becomes a generic, what then?
For this conference I was asked to think about the question ‘what possibilities for sustainable wellbeing does networked and gaming culture bring us?’, particularly as we see an emergence of cyberbeings and cyberbusinesses, and this is a summary.
The wellbeing agenda isn't navel-gazing, it's innovation and survival by Pat Kane
Read Pat Kane's article on the wellbeing agenda at the online Guardian
Transforming Behaviour Change: Beyond Nudge and Neuromania by Jonathan Rowson
Transforming Behaviour Change: Beyond Nudge and Neuromania by Jonathan Rowson
Ben Irvine - The Journal of Modern Wisdom