Adulthood and the importance of play

As an adult you have responsibilities, and life settles into routine. Researchers have found that even in the most boring jobs, workers find ways to introduce elements of play to make the time pass, while people with more creative occupations use play to free their imaginations and release creativity. The Situationist art movement of 1950s Paris thought that play was a political act, and that the city could be used as a playground to rebel against the restrictions of capitalism. Their legacy lives on in the immersive “street games”, such as snakes and ladders played in multi storey car parks and city-wide zombie hunts. But this natural tendency to play is also being co-opted by employers, some of whom want to “gamify” boring jobs, to make workers more productive by turning the tasks into a game, or who encourage their employers to play at work to make them more creative. Can workers really be asked to play on demand, and what happens when they play in ways that the employers never expected or wanted?

Presenter: Steffan Powell
Producer: Jolyon Jenkins

(Photo: Performers of The Free Association. Credit: Lidia Crisafulli)