Entrainment and enactivism

Playfully Changing the Prevailing Climate of Opinion: Climate change as focal metaphor of effective global governance (Part #18)

An earlier section indicates an increasing propensity to reframe communication-related activity -- even including warfare -- in terms of some sense of play. The challenge of climate change is how to make rising levels of engagement with environmental processes more attractive than competing attractors. How is the environment to be meaningfully embodied by the player in order to sustain healthier relations with it -- precisely because it is a more challenging game with the potential of greater excitement?

One indication is provided by Jane McGonigal (A Real Little Game: the performance of belief in pervasive play, University of California at Berkeley, Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies):

Ubiquitous computing and mobile network technologies have fueled a recent proliferation of opportunities for digitally-enabled play in everyday spaces. In this paper, I examine how players negotiate the boundary between these pervasive games and real life. I trace the emergence of what I call "the Pinocchio effect" -- the desire for a game to be transformed into real life, or conversely, for everyday life to be transformed into a "real little game". Focusing on two examples of pervasive play -- the 2001 immersive game known as the Beast, and the Go Game, an ongoing urban superhero game -- I argue that gamers maximize their play experience by performing belief, rather than actually believing, in the permeability of the game-reality boundary.

Another lead is offered by Alessandro Agostini (Homo Ludens: on the play-element in inductive logic, 2001):

As multi-agent systems are becoming more and more important, my strong belief is that it is important to develop a theory of learning agents in strategic processes, a theory that would explain how an agent's beliefs about the environment (which includes the behavior of others insofar as it affects him) evolve until they have come to agree with the actual properties of the environment. This opens new perspectives on the interaction of game theory and learning theory.

Yet another lead into participative democratic processes is provided by Daniel Roberts and Mark Wright (Object Oriented Prompted Play (O2P2): a pragmatic approach to interactive narrative. Edinburgh Virtual Environment Centre, University of Edinburgh):

This paradigm occupies the middle ground between open-ended play and structured narrative. Our goal is not to create a system which encodes, models, understands or generates a definitive narrative, but to create a system that facilitates collaborative play from which improvised narrative emerges. The narrative is object oriented in the sense that behaviours, attributes, and most importantly, stories are attached to objects in the scene. An object oriented architecture is appropriate for improvisation because its distributed nature does not impose much predefined structure.

The argument here might well be described in terms as a metaphor based on the physical and biological processes of entrainment (cf Attitude Entrainment: Communicating thrival skills and insights, 2004)

The interactiove processes of play might be understood as having resonant effects fundamental to such entrainment. In terms of enhancing human well-being in relation to the challenges of sustainable development and climate change, consider the arguments of D Talbot (Psyche and Play: Homo Ludens cavorts on the playground of capitalism, Doctoral dissertation, Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2004):

Frederich Schiller determined that an individual was not "fully a human being" without play; this dissertation is a treatise on the role of play in the quest for completeness or wholeness. Play becomes the tool for not only healing the fractured psyches of the postmodern age but also the fractured cultural stories or myths.

Play is as polysemous as the gods that populate the archetypal realm. The Notion of play sifted and shaped within these pages is frivolous and wise, childlike and earnest, free and restrained. It is, indeed, the tensional movement between these opposites, the play of paradox as distilled by Schiller and explicated by Drew Hyland’s responsive openness, and found within the give and take of Hans Georg Gadamer’s leeway. Play as movement, resonance, tolerance, the dance between the opposites, an embodiment of wholeness, an inherent aspect of being —that is the lens developed here through which I explore the mythos of capitalism within American culture. Play, or rather the Notion of play developed within this dissertation, becomes the hermeneutic for discovering soul within money and work, business and markets.

To uncover the archetypal forces within the dynamics of play and capitalism I call upon members of the ancient Greek pantheon but most importantly upon the stories: the ancient stories, certainly, but also the modern stories. A number of cultural and historic forces that influence the pursuit of capital within postmodern America such as the maximization of profits, productivity and consumerism are examined. By allowing the interplay of certain elements of these driving principles with "other," I create a playground that challenges the "truth" of contemporary cultural myths. It is on this playground, embedded in aspects of ritual, nature, the liminal, and the feminine, that capitalism can be re-visioned and made whole, inclusive of social and natural values, and can participate within a new story that augments the one-sided myths of constant progress and profit maximization with the play of relational being. It is on this playground that capitalism is ensouled.

Enactivism, in the form of second-order cybernetics, draws on the metaphor of laying down a path in walking on it -- as articulated by Francisco Varela (Laying Down a Path in Walking, 1987) [more].

Francisco J Varela, et al (The Embodied Mind: Cognitive science and human experience, 1991) argue that:

...it is only by having a sense of common ground between mind in science and mind in experience that our understanding of cognition can be more complete. To create this common ground, they develop a dialogue between cognitive science and Buddhist meditative psychology and situate this dialogue in relation to other traditions, such as phenomenology and psychoanalysis. The existential concern that animates our entire discussion in this book results from the tangible demonstration within cognitive science that the self or cognizing subject is fundamentally fragmented, divided, or nonunified....

The future may come to think of the conceptual activity in the thinking process over decades as somewhat akin to playing on the many keyboards of a conceptual organ. In this sense, and following Varela's enactivist articulation of "laying down a path in walking", the future is then composed and played into being -- offering far richer dimensions to the meaning of organ-ization (see also Future Generation through Global Conversation: in quest of collective well-being through conversation in the present moment, 1997). Varela's phrase might be reworded as "laying down a score in thinking".

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Entrainment and enactivism