Play is a rehearsal for complex living. But for modern humans, it's become superplay - our imaginations (light and dark) speedily made real

DALL-E’s visualisations of the prompt, “superplay”

Here’s a column from our co-initiator and editor of the Daily Alternative, Pat Kane, introducing the themes and arguments of his forthcoming book SUPERPLAY: This Is Not A Rehearsal, being beta-developed on his E2 Substack platform. If you’d like to support this project, please click on his “Subscribe” options on the page.

PAT KANE: INTRO TO “SUPERPLAY: THIS IS NOT A REHEARSAL”

This is a world at play and in play. Dangerously and beautifully, destructively and constructively, in equal measure. 

Vladimir Putin conducts his full-spectrum war against the West, while being advisedby surrealist dramaturgs and philosophers stealing from postmodernists. His main opponent is a comedian and satirist who once played the part of a hapless president, and now plays the part (very well) of a heroic one. 

Elon Musk makes bold entrepreneurial and structural moves, yet nestles them in a cloud of puerile gags on social media, and thereby sends prices and evaluations shooting up and falling down. The wider public sphere Musk plays in is a seething palimpsest of screens, memes and narratives. The competition in this sphere is for perception-framing and emotion-management: a race to “world” your experience. The underlying infrastructure is computer-game-like.

Players are also advancing on the achievement of an artificial general intelligence (and consciousness), by virtue of machines toying with possibilities, and playing games against themselves. They are already applying their computations to the drastic questions of how we manage climate breakdown. Yet even in this crisis-zone, the most powerful paradigms are both playful and game-like (or even doughnut-like). How do we thrive within the rule-set of our planetary boundaries? How creative can our zero-carbon moves be?

There are other powerful contemporary play-forms one could track. For example, the wacky, rejuvenile culture surrounding blockchain and crypto currency—as if the enormity of tilting against the existing financial system required playfulness, taking reality lightly, to sustain its challenge. Or the sci-fi, superhero and fantasy franchises that grip the hearts and minds of billions; gods of various kinds playing with the cities and populations of this precarious planet, their audiences happily fiddling with the gap between superhuman agency and existential calamity. 

The last example points to the traditional, even natural function that play has for us: as a rehearsal, prototyping or simulation of realities, in a dedicated space, so that we can be better prepared for life’s surprises and challenges. (As this is also how play functions for many non-human animals, we can agree this is the elemental functionality of play). 

Yet the preceding examples are hardly rehearsals for reality. They are interventions in reality: speedy manifestations of imagination through powerful, radical technologies (and strategies). Their effect is to reduce the ambit of the traditional play-zone, in which trying and testing can happen without fatal or disruptive consequence. Dreams (day and night), fantasies, dystopias and utopias, now become operable and tangible: structures that people quickly live in, as both fleshy bodies and virtual avatars. 

I am calling this practice superplay. “Super”, because it is play in Johan Huizinga’s definition - “an influx of mind break[ing] down the absolute determinism of the cosmos” (Homo Ludens) taken to another level. When play’s recombinations and simulations escape from their boundaried practice space, and readily become the objects and environs of the lives of others, then the human species moves into both a wondrous and terrible zone. 

Wondrous, in that our finest imaginings—via CGI wireframes and game physics, bio-hacking and political campaigns—become worlds (and worldings) we directly experience. Terrible, because we can just as easily manifest our worst imaginings. Hamlet’s old line comes to mind: “O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space – were it not that I have bad dreams.” 

Superplay can rapidly end us—the game-theory that builds up nuclear (or bio) deterrence until using the weapons, or the likelihood of an accident, becomes inescapable. Or it can just as rapidly elevate us - the creative computations that could decarbonise our economies, or help us converse with animals or AIs.

So one of the consequences of superplay is an increased focus on the development of human intention, agency and self-awareness. Now that our play can be superplay, what is the quality of the dreams that fill our nutshell? Because, increasingly, play is not a rehearsal anymore.

This is a social, indeed institutional question - or it is so because we choose to be democrats, rather than elitists. It’s easy to assume that superplay is largely the province of superplayers. Two of them, Putin and Musk, litter our opening paragraphs here. Their endeavours and enterprises, glimmering with possible moves, use superplay as part of a top-down executive campaign - visions to transfix or divert their opponents, or to destabilise the populace’s grip on reality.

Yet these essays hope to demonstrate that superplay can be the practice of the people. Indeed it must be, if we are not to subject our very planetary existences to the vagaries and appetites of egoistic male leaders, the usual parade of tooled-up patriarchs. 

The machines that manifest and make possible superplay should not be in the hands of unaccountable elites, but distributed through the majority population, borne there by new kinds of institutions and organisations that aim to trust the passionate imaginations of citizens, carers and workers, not just trigger them.

Examples (or maybe they’re prefigurations) may include the municipal psychedelia of Dreamachine, or deep-fake AI mentors (Einstein-bot as your physics teacher, Gandhi-bot as your civics teacher), or techno-regenerative life-and-making communities [what we call CANs at the Alternative Global]. We intend to curate more of these, and invite your suggestions.

To end this opening: Being aware of, and becoming skilled in, the potentialities of superplay is an answer to the environmentalist Stewart Brand’s injunction that “we are as gods, and we have to get good at it.” We are in a moment where our imaginative, future-shaping intentions are eminently realisable, through ever-more radical technologies.

The idea of superplay helps us to understand how urgent - yet also how natural - the need for advanced human development is, as we weigh the new toys and tools that are in our hands, standing at what Toby Ord calls “The Precipice”. Who do we need to be, individually and collectively, in order to be superplayers? 

More from PK here.