The Power of Play
Friday, June 23, 2006 at 12:53PM “If science always insists that a new order must be immediately fruitful, or that it has some new predictive power, then creativity will be blocked. New thoughts generally arise with a play of the mind, and the failure to appreciate this is actually one of the major blocks to creativity.
Thought is generally considered to be a sober and weighty business. But here it is being suggested that creative play is an essential element in forming new hypotheses and ideas. Indeed, thought which tries to avoid play is in fact playing false with itself.
Play, it appears, is the very essence of thought.”
-David Bohm
Last evening I watched a PBS special on the Power of Play and was facinated for an hour with the way animals (including humans) use play. It was amazing to see that "child-like wonder" is so natural to all. The most striking thing was that given a choice, play always occurred at the edge of chaos -- or in the most challenging ways. Sheep, given both flat land and extraordinary mountain peaks, always chose the most dangerous (or interesting?) places to play and learn.
The program showed that play is actually an imperative of nature, a force that has a direct relationship to the survival of species, including our own. Perhaps it is important for us to play with new ideas now as we face our own survival.
Is this what makes an extraordinary thinker, doer? Someone who takes joy in playing with ideas ... in playing at the edge of chaos between what is known and not known?
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Though I wasn't able to attend, Monday's Seminar About the Long Now (SALT) featured Will Wright and Brian Eno on the notion of "generative play."
Stewart Brand took notes of the presentation and dialogue and distributed them via email. Several comments caught my attention and sparked my imagination, which I've reposted here:
--snip--
Back in the 1970s both speakers got hooked by cellular automata such as Conway's "Game of Life," where just a few simple rules could unleash profoundly unpredictable and infinitely varied dynamic patterns. Cellular automata were the secret ingredient of Wright's genre-busting computer game "SimCity" in 1989. Eno was additionally inspired by Steve Reich's "It's Gonna Rain," in which two identical 1.8 second tape loops beat against each other out of phase for a riveting 20 minutes. That idea led to Eno's "Music for Airports" (1978), and the genre he named "ambient music" was born.
Wright observed that science is all about compressing reality to minimal rule sets, but generative creation goes the opposite direction. You look for a combination of the fewest rules that can generate a whole complex world which will always surprise you, yet within a framework that stays recognizable. "It's not engineering and design," he said, "so much as it is gardening. You plant seeds. Richard Dawkins says that a willow seed has only about 800K of data in it."
--snip--
"These generative forms depend very much on the user actively making connections," Eno said. "In my art installations I always have sound and light elements that are completely unsynchronized, and people always assume that they are tightly synchronized. The synchronization occurs in them."
--snip--
Building models, said Wright, is what we do in computer games, and it's what we do in life. First it's models of how the world works, then it's models of how other humans work. A significant new element in computer games is the profound command, "Restart." You get to explore other paths to take in the same situation. Eno: "That's what we do with everything I call culture, everything not really necessary, from how we wear our hair to how we decorate a cupcake. We try something, surrender to it, and are encouraged to imagine what else might be tried."
It's interesting that just one verb is used both for music and for games: "play."
Thanks to Stewart Brand for sharing his notes.
For those not familiar with the Long Now Foundation, please go directly to www.longnow.org, where you will find no end of wonderful and useful ideas and information.
Todd