
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
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
(Photo: Performers of The Free Association. Credit: Lidia Crisafulli)
4.6
9898 ratings
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
(Photo: Performers of The Free Association. Credit: Lidia Crisafulli)
5,389 Listeners
1,839 Listeners
7,886 Listeners
109 Listeners
1,791 Listeners
1,046 Listeners
344 Listeners
898 Listeners
953 Listeners
273 Listeners
1,921 Listeners
1,080 Listeners
248 Listeners
355 Listeners
48 Listeners
747 Listeners
277 Listeners
480 Listeners
244 Listeners
736 Listeners
2,964 Listeners
278 Listeners
28 Listeners
16 Listeners