Joi Ito posted this week his contribution on neoteny to Seth Godin’s free new e-book What Matters Now:
The future of the planet is becoming less about being efficient, producing more stuff and protecting our turf and more about working together, embracing change and being creative. [...] It’s time we listen to children and allow neoteny to guide us beyond the rigid frameworks and dogma created by adults.
It’s a beautiful, simple idea – one that called to mind Russell Davies’ talk at Playful a few months back. An excerpt from Russell’s elegant presentation:
I listen to a lot of chat about games and hear lots about story and play, but very rarely hear about pretending, when, of course, pretending is central to the whole business. That’s how video game reviews should start – “In this game you are pretending…”
Note: The above text from Russell is taken a bit out-of-context, but is largely illustrative of the larger point. Please do take the time to run through the entire post.
This notion of pretend is really critical to both Russell and Joi’s points, I think – both in the sense that pretend is our most potent tool for dismantling existing frameworks (i.e. ‘what if there were no rules’) and the sense that it enables dissociation at the point that the germ of an idea is born.
As an aside, a few weeks after the Playful presentation, Russell managed to succinctly codify some of his thoughts around gaming in this image (which I think to be a great point of reference):
Related posts:
- Two Takes on Multitasking and Gaming
- “Your users don’t care that it’s hard…”
- Ambience as Ambiance
- Recurring Themes in (Musical) Collaboration and Co-Creation
- Nuisance Machines