At CollabSystem we spot future trends when they aren’t even there. That’s why we are proud to announce the release on our White Paper on the Future of Play. White Papers are long documents in which experts ask a lot of questions, pose a lot of hypotheses and generally avoid committing to anything. That’s really the main problem with both the future and expertise, they are ultimately hard to pin down.
For the benefits of the readers of this blog and the many interested customers of CollabSystems, we thought it was worthwhile to share an executive summary of our Future of Play Whitepaper:
Sounds A Lot Like Hard Work
That’s it. That’s the whole summary. Thousands of hours of really expensive experts working on collaboration, consultation and community engagement with the best thought leaders, design thinkers, ethnographers, and other obscure experts and all we get is that Play Sounds Like Hard Work at some indefinite point in the future. We have to be excited about this conclusion, we paid a lot for it.
For those who like more detail, we wish the White Paper had it, at least in some kind of intelligible sense. However, underneath all the touch-feely design speak, the pop-culture trends and the marxist cultural critiques we have found the following key trends:
- Work is All Consuming – noticed that there’s a lot more demands than ever and work follows you on vacation, into the weekends and even into the shower?
- Work is Going Home – now that work has colonised your home, why not all your waking hours?
- Achievement is the Only Socially Valid Source of Satisfaction – nobody cares how much fun you have. They want to see your bucket list and CV worthy achievements
- Grinding Effort Against Impossible Challenge can be Rewarding – we are told
- People don’t get Paid to Play – valid point
- Children Playing Expands the Workforce – unwinding a bunch of illogical labour market red tape that protected them from exploitation, injury and death. If every is working all the time, we don’t need to worry about their future.
The combined influence of these trends is that we can see a great deal of pressure on individuals to play in ways that look like socially constructive work. Once people are doing socially constructive work for free somebody is going to work out how to make a buck out of it (After all penis-shaped space-adjacent rockets don’t come cheap). Anything that brings back the vulnerable childhood workforce is a good thing as far as the market is concerned.
So give up any hope of fun. Embrace the #futureofplay. There’s a lot of work to do to bring it to life for the billionaire platform owners of the world.
COLLABSYSTEM 