YOUTH TRENDS
Grow up: it's time to play
Sean Pillot de Chenecey, Captain Crikey, explores the developing ‘play nation’ –
a gathering trend for more ‘play’ in our daily lives which may have a major
impact on the future of youth marketing
O
NE OF the bastions of childhood is play
– and yet this is by no means an area
exclusive to children. A real, global trend
that’s gaining pace is the notion of ‘play’, form-
ing a new manifesto for the way we choose to live.
Yet how many brands reflect this social reality?
In his book The Play Ethic, author Pat Kane
says, ‘This we know – we’re stressed out, debt-
ridden, exhausted. We have less time for our
families than we feel we should have. We take
fewer pleasures from our entertainments and
consumptions than we expected to take. We feel
less connected to our communities than we ever
did. In our workplaces, we subject ourselves to
routines and duties which at best seem pointless,
at worst unethical or immoral. Yet we also feel
like hollow citizens, too weary to respond to any
political entreaty with anything other than a
shrug. In short, we are workers.’
The trivialisation of play was the work ethic’s
most lasting, and most regrettable, achievement.
This is ‘play’ as the great philosophers under-
stood it: the experience of being an active,
creative and fully autonomous person. As Brian
Sutton-Smith, Dean of Play Studies at the
University of Pennsylvania says, ‘The opposite
of play isn’t work. It’s depression. To play is to
act out and be wilful, exultant and committed, as
if one is assured of one’s prospects.’
Over 2000 years ago, Aristotle concluded
that, more than anything else, men and women
seek happiness. While happiness itself is sought
for its own sake, every other goal – health,
40 YOUNG CONSUMERS Quarter 1 2005
beauty, money or power – is valued only because
we expect that it will make us happy.
So to call yourself a ‘player’ rather than a
‘worker’ is to immediately widen your concep-
tion of who you are and what you might be
capable of doing. It is to dedicate yourself to
realising your full human potential; to be active,
not passive. As Sartre said, ‘Play is what you do
when you feel at your most free, your most
voluntary’.
At the beginning of this new century, the
social group that seems to be playing for keeps
is the digital generation. For them, play is natu-
rally what you do with your world; there’s no
angst or self-loathing about it … these are the
backpackers of Alex Garland’s The Beach, using
cheap flights and travel literature to make the
world their playground. But why ‘play’ and why
now? Eugene Levitt (author of The Psychology of
Anxiety) says, ‘One of the major roots of play
today is fear of risk and the ever growing sense
that things are falling apart … a broader infan-
tilisation of society makes play a socially
acceptable course to take.’
Yet the subject is an enormous one – and one
that is seemingly impossible to sum up neatly.
According to Roger Guillard (author of Les Jeux
et les Hommes), ‘The world of games/play is so
varied and complex that there are numerous
ways of studying it. Psychology, sociology, anec-
dotage, pedagogy, and mathematics so divide its
domain that the unity of the subject is no longer
perceptible. Not only are such works as Homo
© World Advertising Research Center 2005

Ludens by Huizinga, Jeu de l’Enfant by Jean
Chateau, and Theory of Games and Economic
Behaviour by von Neumann and Morgenstern
not aimed at the same readers, but they don’t
even seem to be discussing the same subject.
One may finally ask to what extent semantic
problems cause different and nearly incompati-
ble researches to be reported, which, at heart,
concern the same specific activity. It has even
been doubted that there are any common char-
acteristics on the basis of which play may be
defined in order to facilitate a cooperative
approach to studying it.’
Play and games have generally been regarded
as simple and insignificant pastimes for chil-
dren. There was no thought of attributing the
slightest cultural value to them … the first
impression was that playthings are mere gadg-
ets, and games are diverting and unimportant
activities better left to children when adults have
found something better to do.
Johan Huizinga defends the very opposite
thesis, that culture is derived from play. ‘Play is
simultaneously liberty and invention, fantasy
and discipline. All important cultural manifesta-
tions are based upon it. It creates and sustains
the spirit of inquiry, respect for rules, and
detachment. Summing up the formal character-
istics of play, we might call it a free activity
standing quite consciously outside “ordinary”
life as being “not serious”, but at the same time
absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is
an activity connected with no material interest,
and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds
within its own proper boundaries of time and
space according to fixed rules and in an orderly
manner. It promotes the formation of social
groupings which tend to surround themselves
with secrecy and to stress their difference from
the common world by disguise or other means.’
George Butterworth and Margaret Harris
(Principles of Developmental Psychology) believe
that, ‘Play is a deceptively simple term that cov-
ers diverse activities … play refers to a certain
quality of behaviour, rather than to any particu-
YOUTH TRENDS
To call yourself a ‘player’
rather than a ‘worker’, is
to immediately widen your
conception of who you are
and what you might be
capable of doing. It is to
dedicate yourself to
realising your full human
potential; to be active,
not passive
lar activity and “serious” behaviours can be per-
formed playfully. Many species, including
humans, have special signals to indicate that
they wish to engage in social play. For instance,
rhesus monkeys look at the play partner through
their legs, whereas humans may smile, or offer
objects, as an invitation to play. Play stands in
contrast to work; the former is intrinsically moti-
vated, the latter has a serious extrinsic goal. Play
is a pleasurable, voluntary activity ... in symbolic
play, cognitive processes create an imaginary
reality. Mundane objects are made to “stand
for” other things as they become props for
games.’
In The Psychology of Art Lev Semeonovich
Vygotsky says, ‘In object play, meaning is pre-
dominant over the physical characteristics of
objects … rules follow from the meaning attrib-
uted to the prop object. (The hobby horse
must be ridden and not used for other pur-
poses.) Thus, symbolic play creates a zone of
proximal development. Eventually, however,
almost anything can be made to stand for any-
thing else and play becomes increasingly
internalised as pure symbolism. Play is essen-
tially a separate occupation, carefully isolated
from the rest of life and generally engaged in
with precise limits of time and place. There is a
place for play (for example the ring, the stage
YOUNG CONSUMERS Quarter 1 2005 41
 YOUTH TRENDS
and the board) and nothing that takes place
outside this ideal frontier is relevant. To leave by
mistake, accident or necessity may disqualify or
entail a penalty.’ Elsewhere, Meyer Barash,
translator of Man and the Sacred notes ‘Play is an
occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy,
ingenuity, skill, and often of money . . . it is also
an essential element of human social and spiri-
tual development.’
Another take on the subject was the wonder-
ful book Flow – the Psychology of Optimal
Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who
tried to understand as exactly as possible how
people felt when they most enjoyed themselves,
and why. His first studies involved a few hun-
dred ‘experts’ – artists, athletes, musicians,
chess masters and surgeons – in other words,
people who seemed to spend their time in pre-
cisely those activities they preferred. From
their account of what it felt like to do what they
were doing, he developed a theory of ‘optimal
experience’ based on the concept of ‘flow’,
meaning the state in which people are so
involved in an activity that nothing else seems
to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable
that people will do it at great cost, for the sheer
sake of doing it. Csikszentmihalyi noted that ‘it
has long been recognised that the productive
activities of a society are a useful way of
describing its character: thus we speak of hunt-
ing-gathering, pastoral, agricultural, and
technological societies. But because flow activ-
ities are freely chosen and more intimately
related to the sources of what is ultimately
meaningful, they are perhaps more precise
indicators of who we are.’
Yet, in a modern ‘Play Nation’ playtime is no
escape – in a recent study into cultural trends
James Woudhuysen from the Policies Studies
Institute wrote, ‘Play has insinuated itself into
the pores of everyday life as the direct outcome
of the need people have for community, safety
and security in a world that is seen as frag-
mented, stressful and dangerous.’ He had five
major points to make:
42 YOUNG CONSUMERS Quarter 1 2005
1. play has a new pervasiveness
2. IT in general and mobile phones in partic-
ular will give a major boost to play
3. play rarely provides us with moments of
liberation
4. play is now as much about community-
building as about commercialism
5. a culture of fear now surrounds play.
The Work Foundation says that the rise of
many high-potential small and medium-sized
companies, who offer a fun and flexible envi-
ronment, is forcing larger organisations to
reconcile the working environment they offer.
‘The irrevocable decline of job security means
that fun may be a more durable adhesive tying
talent to an organisation than a promise of pro-
motion and advancement.’
Led by America, management theory favours
play; on both sides of the Atlantic the vocabulary
of business is today suffused with metaphors
that are as inane as they are playful. Managers
‘draw up a game plan’, ‘get on the fast track’,
‘stay in the right ballpark’ and play ‘hard ball’.
They ‘touch base’ with everyone. (And at a time
of turmoil in America where the difference
between ‘reality’ and ‘image’ is ever more
blurred, it’s well worth remembering Jean
Baudrillard’s comments from America – ‘it is
Disneyland that is authentic here’.)
So – there we have it – an occasion of ‘pure
waste’ that is utterly vital to our well-being as indi-
viduals and as a society. In The Play Ethic Pat
Kane says that the radicalism of the play ethic is
that it asks us to seriously consider what the
American Constitution calls ‘the pursuit of happi-
ness’. And the roots of our happiness, surely, lie
deep in our playful selves. ‘As well as all the previ-
ous prescriptions, proposals and policies, we could
do worse than to occasionally becalm ourselves
and try to recover those early moments – when the
art of life was easily learned and joyfully practised.’
From the interactive, ‘fun’ office of the knowl-
edge economy to the carnival atmosphere of the
anti-capitalist demo, participation in playful per-

The latest Apple iMac. iMacs have been celebrated as a
joyful elision between the realities of IT at work, and the
possibilities that IT contains for play.
formance is something that shapes more and
more of our world. Play has also been the key to
Virgin’s competitive stance. Virgin Airlines pio-
neered the building of computer games into
every airline seat. It gives each passenger a free
bag of childish, toy-like accessories with which
to while away the hours. Both management
theorists and social commentators have adopted
thespian, sporty and playful models for the
future of work. Architects and designers have
adopted play – Norman Foster’s 40-storey City
of London HQ (a gherkin shaped monument to
the importance business and society now attach
to risk), is described by one design critic as
‘ludicrous’. Jonathan Ive’s design of the Apple
iMac is widely celebrated as a joyful elision
between the realities of IT at work, and the pos-
sibilities that IT contains for play.
But is play as an instrument for communitar-
ianism more than commercialism? In an anxious
new century, the instrumental purpose of play
has become more communitarian and less com-
mercial: in the past, the growth of play was,
firstly, ascribed by Maslow to the general growth
YOUTH TRENDS
of consumption, and in particular to a short
hop, on the part of the West, from physiological
and safety needs to self-actualisation needs, and
from material scarcity to plenitude. Rolf Jensen
of the Copenhagen Institute of Future Studies
suggested that play grew out of the contempo-
rary desire for narrative. For Jensen, information
society had been superseded by Dream Society,
in which firms were tribes that had to win sup-
port by telling stories about their products and
appealing to irrational emotions. In New York,
Michael Wolff, a consultant to the US entertain-
ment industry, spoke of what he called
America’s ‘Entertainment Economy’ – a product
of defence spending, the need for an alternative
to shopping malls and urban decay, the spread
of cable television and of the example set by
Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.
If any movement takes the values of play to
their most militant political conclusion, it’s the
‘No Logo’ radicals so ably described by Canadian
author Naomi Klein. They rub global brands
such as Starbucks, Nike and Gap in their own
exploitative dirt … ‘we’re not going to play your
games anymore – we’re going to play our own’ …
and they do – from their use of the net to co-ordi-
nated global protest, to their subversion of
billboards and public advertising; from the rave
atmosphere of their street protests, to the humour
and wit of their sloganeering. It’s the combination
of spontaneity and absorption, of applied creativ-
ity and voluntary action – in short, their identity
as players – that defines their politics.
So – ‘player’ or ‘worker’? In 2005, expect this
question to get louder and louder as the debate
over the play ethic really gets going.
Sean Pillot de Chenecey
worked with youth specialist
advertising and research
agencies in the US and
Europe throughout the 1990s
before setting up his own
consultancy in 2000, Captain
Crikey, which specialises in
consumer intelligence and
new product development.
www.captaincrikey.com
YOUNG CONSUMERS Quarter 1 2005 43