Play

“Play is manipulation that indulges curiosity.”

Jesse Schell

A child taking an object and pretending it to be a car is playing. Play has no rules, no goals, and aims at no real-world outcomes (unless you consider the experience and creativity as something that will form the child). The activity itself is the purpose, it is autotelic. Play is not restricted to humans, animals play as well. In his famous essay Homo ludens. A study of he play-element in culture from 1938, Dutch historian Johan Huizinga states:

Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing. We can safely assert, even, that human civilization has added no essential feature to the general idea of play. Animals play just like men.

While we are very familiar with the playful nature of our pets like dogs and cats, it’s a little bit more surprising to learn about wild animals playing as well. Raven, bears, octopuses, and even fish engage in behaviors that satisfy the definition of play. Medical doctor, psychiatrist, and clinical research Stuart Brown[1] recounts an encounter from the Canadian far north.

As part of PSFK's popular series of 'Future of' reports, they released a 140 page document that covers the new ways we are working and the implications for business and for workers. Available in different formats to buy or just preview, the themes of PSFK's Future of Work report cover the Ideal Workforce, Empowered Culture, Intuitive Connection and Agile Workplaces.

How successful is gamification? If you believe analyst company Gartner’s Brian Burke, “80 percent of current gamified applications will fail to meet business requirements.”

This is a catchy headline, that has led a lot of bloggers and media to put the stamp of failure on gamification. And it is the proof for the critics that gamification designers have no clue what they are doing. But when you listened to the Gartner webinar and read the report, the picture looks more diverse, and put into context to other technologies, the story is pretty much different.

Two of these technologies of the past ten years had undergone similar scorn and criticism: CRM and social media. A quick research on data and reports published about the failure (or success) rates for them will give you a déjà-vu moment. CRM failure statistics from analyst groups like Gartner, AMR Research, Butler, Forrester and others range between 18-70%, with still 49% failures in 2009, eight years after first statistical success data for CRM was published. And according to Gartner, “[t]hrough 2012, over 70 percent of IT-dominated social media initiatives will fail.“ Having attended a number of social media-related conferences in 2012 and before, I can tell you that many companies are still struggling with getting a working social media strategy in place.

One of these things that was left out in the book “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” is the one about everything poo and loo and the differences between men and women in that regard. I remember those innocent days as a boy, when we tried to outrange the other boys peeing, or writing our names in the snow (yes, with what you are thinking). It seems that ever since this was the normal way of boys. Girls of course had to fail, due to a small but crucial  missing piece. Psychologists referred to that later as “penis-envy.“

Technology has taken that a step further. A take on that was done with the installation of special urinals at the Amsterdam Schiphol airport in the 1990s (watch closely to see the fly in Figure 126). Dutch maintenance man Jos Van Bedoff remembered that back then in the Dutch army somebody had put small, discrete red dots in the barrack urinals, which dramatically reduced “ misaiming”. Van Bedoff suggested to do that for the airport, and plastic flies were embossed In the ceramic urinals. They helped reduce "spillage" (and cleaning costs) by 80%.

Ethymologist can actually trace that back way longer. First “insects” – bees – where seeing sported in British bathrooms in the 1890s. It didn’t stop there. Soccer fans today enjoy “scoring” goals with the “SoccerWee” by the appropriately named “The Wee Urinal Games Company.“