Spirituality of Play

I am aware I haven’t posted for a while but I have a couple of things going round my head I need to do some research on to make them worth posting! These include: Quantum Spirituality, Games reflecting society and vice versa, how much fun I had at Bestival. If time allows maybe more posts this week!

In the meantime stop doing the Lambeth Walk hi thee to the Wittenburg Door for a bit of perspective. It’s make you laugh - money back guarantee.

I had the pleasure of attending the 2gether08 conference yesterday;. It was a conference designed for new media types and those with a social agenda to get together and examine ways of using digital to drive social change, play, and entertainment for good (for a more detailed break down of my likes and dislikes head over to inoted).

Examples of the kinds of discussion were:-

web 2. 0 developments to provide people with the tools they need to re-engage with local government
Using Facebook to drive Coca-cola towards using their distrubution networks to address infant mortality through distributing re-hydrations salts (1 in 5 children in Africa will die before the age of 5 from dehydration!) This is a campaign that is already working - join the Facebook campaign and read the blog.

I had a great time but I left feeling a bit low. I sometimes feel - no, most of the time I feel - like I am the only Christian in the Village. Are there conferences like this going on elsewhere and I am just missing them?  I know there is the Churches Media Council but frankly I am not clear on what they do and their social network hasn’t launched yet so I am not sure who I would “meet there”. At any rate, none of them were at this conference. Jesus said we should be in the world not of the world - it’s pretty difficult to be in it if you don’t engage with it.

Am I the only Christian working in a new media agency? Surely not. Send me your blogs - I want to read them! Let me know if you have any interesting work related conferences or if you too feel like you are languishing as a lonely grain of salt in new media/tv/advertising and are worried about losing your taste - or not!

Rant over.

Last night I went to the launch party for the excellent Hide and Seek festival which is going on at the South Bank this weekend. It was a great evening of gaming and play. I was soundly beaten at Ker-Plunk had my photo taken for sleeve face (I won’t be up there until after the festival I thik) and entered the SMS game Day of the Figurines
in which I am a 63 year old man called Aubrey (my choice). Most enjoyable and there is more to come so get yourself down there

Unfortunately there is no game that you can play without being here but maybe next year!

Adam Crowe has posted an interesting extract from Play Money by Julian Dibbell. He doesn’t comment on it, it just interests him. Essentially Julian is stating from experience what Pat Kane theorises about in The Play Ethic. When real worlds and ideas collide life gets interesting. And it’s interesting too what he says about our economic system being drained of religious significance. A playful system is taking its place and its vital that we engage with it and understand how our faith is enmeshed in it - because faith is enmeshed in daily life, its where faith is born and borne out so sticking with an old model while culture and society change will ensure that we get more and more out of touch with what motivates, upsets, inspires people . And if salt loses its flavour it is thrown out.

Anyway - have a look - http://www.adamcrowe.com/2008/06/23/production-is-melting-into-play here.

I steal this joke shamelessly from Bill Tidy the cartoonist who used it at btween recently.

oOo

Moses had been given the commandments by God on Mt Ararat. There were rather a lot of them - about 10 tablets in all but he was eager to return to the Children of Israel and give them the word of God so he set off down the mountain at a run. IN his eagerness to get to the bottom he tripped and fell!

Oh no - 7 of the 10 tablets were broken! What to do? Being a practical man he gathered up the remaining  tablets and all of the pieces and set off again.

When he reached the bottom he stood before the Children of Israel  and said,

“These are the 10 commandments that the Lord has given us to live by” One of the elders of the people said, “That’s marvellous but what are these other bits and pieces?”

“Oh that’s just a game i invented called Scrabble”

oOo

Well I didn’t say it was a good joke!

Hooray! Come out and play! Hide and Seek the pervasive games festival returns on 26th - 29th. Check out the programme on the site
including what looks like a very groovy pursuit game from Gideon Reeling who presented some brilliant games at the Mask of the Red Death lates in London earlier this year. (ps if you haven’t been to any of Punchdrunk’s performances you have to make a note to get to their next project - immersive theatre, like being in a game for real).

Anyway - you can start booking yourself into events from the 4th June so watch this space…

I haven’t written a thing for 3 weeks, because I’ve been on honeymoon! I have just gone through one of the key human rituals, marking a change of life and of status - I got married - and I haven’t had the time to think let alone write! This is mainly because of all the other rituals that have grown up around this key ritual, not because of the wedding itself. For instance, there is the ritual of taking your mum to see the dress, the ritual of indulging in time-consuming beauty treatments, the ritual of the hen night, the day itself (which nowadays seems to be a lot more about the party than the ceremony) and finally the ritual of taking a honeymoon.

Don’t get me wrong - I thoroughly enjoyed getting married and all the little rituals that contributed to the build up. For instance, I had a brilliant hen night - although I kept being aware of the phallic symbolism and my mind kept wandering to the reason for all that symbolism and ritual such as the good natured humiliation of both myself on my hen night and my groom on his stag night, (that’s what writing this blog has done to me!) But for me the ceremony and, yes, the party were the key things. I could have been just as happy without a hen night and without a honeymoon. It was having all my friends and family together to witness our committment before God that really made me grin like a lunatic all day.

It might seem like stretching a point to call all these things rituals but I feel that these newly constructed “must-do” activities have all built to add importance and significance to the central ritual itself - the marriage in the church or registry office - because in our culture apparently simply standing in front of your partner and promising to stay together for the rest of your lives before God, your family, their family and all your friends just isn’t significant enough any more.

Modern society associates cost and extravagance with value.  To be worth something, an event or object has to cost a lot and has to be extravagant - hence expenditure on uncessary stuff and lots of it BECAUSE IT’S YOUR WEDDING DAY (cue girlie screaming).

So is it surprising that a substantial part of getting married involves spending vast sums of money? I don’t mean the outlays that would always be required when setting up a big event - drink, food, invitations etc - I mean all the other stuff. For instance, designer shoes (no one is going to see them), a special perfume for the day, special socks for the groom and party, just married flip-flops (I kid you not), designer jewellery, and favours for the tables (Why? Can you remember any favours from any of the weddings you have been to?…)

Our affluent culture expresses itself through expenditure and parched of the normal ritualistic experience of the rest of the world - their religious or social observances - it has to bump up the gravitas of the rituals it still holds on to, such as weddings, through attributing them as much “value” as it can afford by splashing out ridiculous sums of money on them.

Let’s be clear - my wedding cost about the same amount as an average wedding, so it was a lot of money! And I don’t regret any of that expense, but I could easily have spent twice as much and at times I felt under pressure to do so despite the fact that I wouldn’t have been able to afford it. I just think it’s sad that society feels sometimes that our simple vows are so irrelevant that they will only be important if made on a sunny day in the perfect dress, perfume and designer clothes.

*Yes that is me and my husband in the picture.

It’s always interesting (and sometimes amusing) to see why people come to my blog and trying to work out what it is they are actually looking for. One of my posts is about a boys football team made up of both Israeli and Palestinian lads that is a small peace initiative around play. I titled the post “Jumpers for Goalposts”.

I was a little confused that I the search term “Jumpers for Goalposts” came up so often as a way into my blog but now a helpful soul has typed the following search term “where can I play jumpers for goalposts 2″ . Turns out that Jumpers for Goalposts is a game!

http://www.mousebreaker.com/games/jumpersforgoalposts/play.php

But watch out - it’s addictive…

Next Tuesday Grand Theft Auto IV is released, you know, adult content and violence, prostitutes, being rewarded for murder etc etc and so forth. It’s so popular now that even Chanel’s uber dude Karl Lagerfeld has even put together a playlist of his favourite toons for one of the in-game radio stations.

What to make of this game? Is there a spiritual response to it and if so what does that involve?

• Point of interest 1: One of my friends used to get beaten by their father as a child, so harshly they once went to hospital. They loves violent horror films.
• Point of interest 2: Brian Sutton-Smith in The Ambiguity of Play notes that often play is way of making sense of events, removing their power.

These two things are of interest when approaching a play that positively encourages and rewards attitudes and activities that would be considered to be seriously morally depraved in real world situations. There is a sense that there is violence in all of us that wants an expression - this may be born out of experiencing violence and needing to find catharsis or out of wanting to express violent tendencies that are not expressable in society. Any spirituality ignores this at its peril.  The world is not sweetness and light, there is evil, and play can offer individuals a way of expressing and therefore dealing with that.

Having said which, is there a difference between classic shoot’em ups of “good” vs “evil” and games like GTA in which take expression beyond that into exploitation of the weak and subjected in society is encouraged - I am thinking particularly of point scoring for running over prostitutes etc. (No, it isn’t nice nor is it healthy.) Most people do not experience this kind of life event, nor do they actually approve of criminal activity if they are honest about it. Particularly not when it affects them directly.

This game has an unhealthy pre-occupation with “the world” in all its worst expressions. Thinking of play as progress intimately linked with learning then you would have to say that it’s not a game that should be played by children or perhaps even teenagers. Learning that such casual violence is funny inures you to real suffering in real life. I woudln’t ever say that video games cause people to be violent - it takes a lot more for a person to break social norms in that way. But I would say that it contributes to our culture of indifference and ignorance. The game objectifies people in a particularly graphic way and once you objectify you can justify anything.

I’m sure it will be a great success.

And now for something lighter - how about this version of Grand Theft Auto instead?

At the moment I am obsessed by a game on my mobile phone - Sims DJ 2. Basically you mix tracks on a simpled mixer, save them and then have to play them to make Sims dance in a variety of different club environments.

If you are bored this weekend or the sermon is particularly bad I recommend that you download it asap and get playing. It has the magical property of making time speed up!

Have a great weekend.