CNET’s news.com has a brief story about IBM’s foray into the virtual world of Second Life. Commenting on the corporate giant’s use of virtual space, one consultant with IBM noted, in typically hyperbolic language:
“Success (in the future) will depend on how well you play the game, literally,” Doug McDavid, executive research consultant at IBM’s Academy of Technology, said here Monday night at an SDForum event titled “Virtual Worlds: Ready, Fire, Aim.”
“A generation (has) lived in these environments, and they’ll bring that perspective into the workplace. How this plays out is in the integration of work with this playful perspective,” McDavid said. He added: “This is an unstoppable phenomenon.”
To begin, I’m not sure about “a generation having lived in these environments,” unless he includes email and instant messaging as one of “these environments,” and even then I’m not sure it qualifies as a lifetime of experience. But more interesting to me is the comment on “the integration of work with this playful perspective.” This upbeat attitude (mark my words) will be short lived. It is, to be sure, all the rage now: Executive training sessions on play and games are quickly becoming the norm among professional trainers. CEOs build meetings around piles of Lego bricks, which the VPs are encouraged to use to “think creatively.”
This isn’t really new, though. Several decades ago, as game theory became the hot topic in the social sciences, businesses experimented with the “let’s play at work” approach. It didn’t last long.
But, for the most part, I think what is happening here isn’t that corporate culture is embracing play by venturing into ludic space. It’s just the opposite: Corporate culture is crushing play (rationalizing it, mediating it, Socratizing ™ it) by occupying formerly ludic space. Historian and philosopher Oswald Spengler, saddened by the approach of the Nazi regime (as was Huizinga), observed that “genuine play” was no longer even a possibility in the metropolitan West: He would likely have been even less optimistic about the possibility of play within an international corporate culture.
IBM certainly has a growing stake in the future of those online spaces. Evidence of the software giant’s commitment to R&D for virtual worlds came this week when it announced a new social-networking tool for the enterprise. Called Lotus Connections and expected out later this year, it aims to help people find colleagues of similar interests, among other things, in virtual worlds.
Still, audience members at Monday’s event expressed doubts that the corporate world, or the general public for that matter, was ready for a virtual space in which co-workers’ avatars, or digital self-representations, could be naked versions of themselves.
1 response so far ↓
1 Rob Pongsajapan // Jan 24, 2007 at 3:58 pm
The evolution of Second Life from playful/unpredictable to the “safer” present-day community where many citizens seek to replicate real-life structures echoes the life cycle of many online communities (BBSes, the early Internet and the influx of ‘illegitimate’ AOL members, Friendster’s campaign against fakesters, etc). Perhaps the “crushing” of ludic spaces results in part from a desire to create controlled environments within the larger, less constrained space. It seems like institutions seeking to enter ludic spaces usually identify what can easily be co-opted to fit within their existing culture and then create walled gardens—such as IBM’s island in Second Life—where they can enforce their conventions. The question is how the surrounding community reacts to that sort of isolationism—do they wall their own ludic space off in an attempt to recapture the true playfulness they had before the arrival of the corporate types (e.g. MOOs and MUDs)? And does that walling off eventually result in the death of the virtual community, which thrived because of its openness?
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