The Play's the Thing (for advisor Kieron Kirkland)
It’s no accident that ‘play’ can mean both a story and an action.
As adults we’re not playful enough. Most of us get stuck in the same story. Maybe we’re too cynical, jaded or lazy to make up new roles or rules. Maybe the practical pressures of adult life mean that the boundaries between our real and imaginary worlds get closer together. For whatever reason, the stories and games we play turn from Superman saving the world, into super-accountant-man nailing an excel formula before 5pm (the shittest super hero story, ever).
Children are almost inherently disempowered, so maybe that’s the reason why they’re able to, or inclined to, play out stories that are so different from themselves - becoming super heroes or flying mermaids. But in picking up and inhabiting these characters, stories and games, they pick up all the implicit rules and relationships that come with them. I never actually played ‘Cowboys and Indians’ as a child, but if I did, I don’t think I would have engaged in a Foucaultian analysis of why the ‘Indians’ were the bad guys and always lost. What’s worse is that all the assumptions that are baked into these stories are often reinforced by adults when a child tries to change them - Mermaids don’t fly apparently.
So play is interwoven with these existing relationships, rules and interactions. And playing often consciously or unconsciously reinforces these. If you really want to change the world, you have to change the way things interact. In developing your work, how much are you disrupting or reinforcing the relationships in play? A new interface may shift the child to technology relationship, a new social media feature change interactions between friends, while access to data could change parent/carer relationships.
But it’s not just interactions with other people. As a magician, I work with magic. One of my goals is to make people see the world differently. Even if just for a moment, I want them to believe that something that isn’t possible is possible – to get the audience to engage in a “willing suspension of disbelief”. The trick is getting the balance right. Make it too believable and it ceases to become magical, too unbelievable and it’s just a stunt and it has no link to their belief structure. At the heart of this is people’s relationship with the world. I want to fundamentally mess with the way they relate to the world by changing their relationship with the possible.
I want you to ask yourself how is your playful experience changing what it possible? How is it redefining how people interact with the world, themselves and each other? What new relationships and interactions are you creating, and which ones are you changing (or reinforcing)? How are you looking beyond an engaging experience (the foundation for any successful product) and redefining the world young people experience through your play?
