One thing I love about “new media” (please excuse the use of a buzz word) and “Social Media” is its ability to involve the user in the process of selling them something. There’s many examples of this out there. Skittle’s were one of the first to open up their doors to UGC and social media with their uncensored Twitter interface on their own home page. “Skittles, making pedophiles fat”, was among some of the other inevitable abuse. But it worked. The Skittles site had never had that kind of attention and at least it got people talking. No such thing as bad publicity and all that…

Now, Tippex, the somewhat outdated (in my humble opinion) method for the correction of typos has released their own attempt to involve the user, generate that viral “love” and inevitably, get people buying. It’s playful, entertaining and it has achieved a purpose… I’ve been forwarded the link twice today and now, I’m sharing it too. At the time of writing, there were 11 million video views… and the comments, for the most part are all positive. I think it’s a job well done.

The video is here: NSFW. A hunter shoots a bear!

“Playbour” is one of those new hybrid words that bored creatives and techno-supremo’s keep brandishing around when talking about all things digital. The catch on and then we’re stuck with them. This one however tells the story of the current emerging superpower of Social Media. A tool that people are only really beginning to understand how to use and exploit.

So, what is “Playbour”? Well, take a pinch of play, throw in a dash of labour and hey presto, you have yourself a nice little oxymoron and the word “Playbour”. These are two polar opposite words. Play by definition means “not work”, work quite obviously means “not play”. But when mixed together, they generate new meaning. A bit like “Military Intelligence” or “Girly Man”. “Playbour” itself refers to a new paradigm in how companies, individuals, organisations and networks can achieve goals and tasks. Think Mechanical Turk, but you don’t have to pay the workers.

As an avid iPhone app downloader, with apps ranging from sports to an autism calculator, from Twitter to banking, yesterday, I came across a new app named Waze. Waze has been billed as a “Social GPS” where users, over time, will score points in return for mapping out roads and traffic. FourSquare meets TomTom. Users can “steamroller” new roads, map road directions, and collect “goodies” along the way in a pac man-like chomp. It’s constantly updating, and, as with other forms of social media, it complies to your usual core Network Theory rules. The more people that use it, the more value it holds.

But why would people engage? Well, because there is an element of play, a dabble in the realms of fun and most importantly, there is a competitive edge to it. Well, there can be, if your that way inclined…

When we begin to delve into it a little, there are plenty of examples of the power of play. A fortnight ago, Google turned the homepage of the worlds most famous search engine into a simple Pac-man environment. You could chomp your little way through the “G”’s and “O”’s of Google and and avoid those pesky little ghosts of 1980’s fame. I spent perhaps five, maybe 6 minutes playing it. The rest of the world? Well they spent 4.8 million hours, of work time. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I dare say that is somewhat more work than your office gets done, ever. Imagine if you could harness that power.

Imagine if the millions of users and hours involved in Farmville could be used to actually plow fields, plan cities or at the very least, power Wales. The power of Play is immense. Points and Prestige are rapidly becoming the new Pounds and Pence. So, sack all your staff, make the work a game and pay them in “highscorer” bonuses. Who knows, might even work for British Airways.

Play is not the same as gaming and not withstanding my previous post on the significance of (computer) gaming I’m most interested in a more diffused Ludic sensibility than challenge, reward profiles.

This has prompted me to start a new literary quest.

George Perec is an excellent example of playfulness in literature that most closely resembles the design sensibility of playful; experimentation in structure and content. Part of a larger Oulipo movement, Perec created huge palindromes, playful structure/content – See Life: A Users Manual for a really sophisticated novel ‘about/exploring’, the jigsaw.

This post was prompted by Perec’s 1969 novel A Void. This is a 200 page novel that does not use any words containing the letter ‘E’ (credit here to Gilbert Adair’s translation into English, retaining this pattern).

For many years the book has been out of print and 10 years ago I abandoned my search for a second hand copy. I was happy to see Vintage Books republished this in 2008. It’s funny and a good read, as well as being clever and playful.

PS. Perec’s next work “Les Reveuentes”, ‘used’ the ‘e’s left out of A Void. In this book ‘e’ is the only vowel used.

I find the transcendental nature of game playing fascinating. The ease with which people can be transported out of their bodies, overriding time, meals, appointments, social interaction tells me that this must be a significant phenomenon. As someone half a step from OCD, I have to keep such things at arms length apart from the occasional 20 hour Civilisation session. The fact that books, music, art, films, so rarely grip us in this way is not necessarily a positive thing, but it is important.

In addition to the normal turbulence and buffeting my most recent blog ‘sabbatical’ has seen me increasingly thinking about knowledge exchange and the role play can have in this. A few things prompted this.

I have established a new relationship with a game design studio set up inside Huddersfield University. Run by Damian De Luca and Ruth Taylor, these guys have some interesting ideas about how games and visualisation can contribute to research and we are actively pursuing collaborations on a number of fronts.

The second prompt is the work of a colleague of mine in Imagination. Valerie Carr is an interior designer and researcher and is working on knowledge exchange through designing games with healthcare professionals. She has a completely different and very interesting perspective on knowledge exchange, drawing on Organisational Development (OD) as opposed to my post-structuralist ‘meta’ interaction design. Big thanks to her for giving me a guide into this (superficially dull), area, by giving me some good stuff.

The final area that was pretty new to me was Eva Brandt’s work on play in participatory design processes. Even though I met Eva in Hong Kong fairly recently, I was not aware of this aspect of her work.

I’m enjoying learning more about play from these and other dimensions. It’s time to ease off the intellectually draining running of events with companies for a little bit (as much as I can), and get back to some more abstract, enriching (fertilizing?) research.