Playing at Work:

Understanding the future of work practices at the Institute For the Future.

Abstract:

This article analyzes the latest management assumptions and theories of playing at work by examining how management strategies, especially relating to new media, invoke elements of play to create distinct and competing genres of discourse. After a brief overview of the latest management crisis of innovation, we will provide a few definitions of play, followed by a short summary of where play and other competing discourses converge and overlap at worksites historically. This context will then enable us to present an ethnographic account of play at work at a research think tank known as the Institute For the Future, a site where notions of play are linked to a number of business and cultural discourses about the future of new media and presented in full relief. What we find is that while elements of play exist, the discourses that arise from it do not necessarily belong in the realm of play at all. Instead, notions of play at work are tied to wider discourses acknowledging earlier 1960s American countercultural appeals for new values in management, and worker self-actualization and linked to a process for transforming that renewed impulse into the service of a networked economy in the 1990s.

In the 1990s, the management literature of business restructuring has (re)introduced ideas of sustaining innovation and creativity in the corporate domain. The strategies outlined in this literature all involve in part some tacit theory or set of assumptions about “playing at work”. In a recent review (2000) of Michael Schrage’s book, Serious Play: How the World’s Best Companies Simulate to Innovate, Kevin Kelly, the former chief editor of Wired Magazine, proclaims that “much to everyone’s surprise, the best way to deal with uncertainty resembles play. According to research by the author, the work of confronting uncertainty in business becomes ‘serious play’. Constructing electronic spreadsheets and fiddling with alternatives is one type of play–and one that has already transformed business practice” (GBN Book Club). Our article aspires to investigate and trouble these assumptions and theories of playing at work by examining how management strategies, especially relating to new media, invoke elements of play to create distinct and competing genres of discourse. After a brief overview of the latest management crisis of innovation, we will explore the definition of ‘play at work’, employing definitions of play as a guide, and give an overview of where play and other competing discourses converge and overlap at worksites historically. This context will enable us to present an ethnographic account of play at work at an independent, nonprofit futures forecasting organization known as the Institute For the Future, a site where notions of play are linked to a number of business and cultural discourses about the future of new media and presented in full relief. What we find is that while elements of play exist, the discourses that arise from it do not necessarily belong in the realm of play at all. Instead, notions of play at work are tied to wider discourses acknowledging earlier 1960s American countercultural appeals for worker self-actualization and linked to a process for transforming that renewed impulse into the service of a networked economy in the 1990s.
Numerous and recent stories in the management literature and business media recount a familiar refrain of how large multinational corporations, alarmed by the success of small entrepreneurial e-commerce startups, began to re-assess their own organizational identities during the 1990s. A number of pundits and scholars have declared that the most recent crisis in management is one of sustaining innovation, especially in the wake of the World Wide Web and other new media (Christiansen 1999/2000, Kleiner 1996, Schrage 2000, Senge 1990). The alluring opportunities for personal and financial fulfillment, portrayed in media representations of “dot.com” wealth also led to a groundswell of discontent within larger new media and internet service firms. A number of these corporations started to view “play” and ludic forms as new techniques to supplement traditional forms of economic analysis. Standard business approaches initially failed to see the commercial importance of the Internet and World Wide Web. Disturbed by their failure to predict this trend and hoping to take advantage of a new medium, established firms turned to new media consulting firms experimenting with ludic forms and embodied performances of future technologies and markets.

The theme of playing at work has an important historical dimension that shapes and channels corporate reconfigurations of it. The 1990s were certainly not the first time that companies have tried out ludic themes or have turned to nontraditional consulting firms. However, this management crisis parallels an earlier era in the 1950s and 1960s where the drive to develop creative and less alienating work environments also prevailed (Frank 1997), Kleiner 1996). Thomas Frank in The Conquest of Cool notes the influences of countercultural discourses on corporate managers. Rather than merely using the counterculture as a cynical trope for selling their wares, these managers longed to reform their own corporate structures as well.
In his research, Frank characterizes the advertizing and menswear industries as particularly inspired to adopt countercultural youth anthems. Similarly, play-forms and play metaphors arose during the 1960s through the 1990s from the same countercultural impulse; we will elaborate on its further refinement in the new media arena. With the advent of the 1990s, we are again witness to another surge of corporate anxiety rooted in the emergence of a pervasive new information and communication medium and the subsequent playing out of social and economic remediations of a networked society. That is, the socioeconomic fabric is being remade to accommodate the globalizing reach of the World Wide Web. Future scenarios gained wide corporate mainstream appeal during this period. Calls for “Playing at work” or incorporating some aspect of play into daily worklife has accompanied business accounts of the corporate crisis of innovation while simultaneously marking a hegemonic sphere of mass appeal and elite national interests.

One of us (Brooks) has carried out an ethnographic study of IFTF methods, researchers, and clients and has been able to access at first hand how the new media industry views its work. A symmetry of the research site was that the observor was himself being observed. If IFTF works (as we shall see) to develop a playground to contain the Other, the researcher represented for the company just the sort of Other they were seeking to incorporate – a marginalized graduate student from a relatively radical department. Brooks has been asked to design workshops and to network into visionary academia on behalf of the company. This mutual process of incorporation (of IFTF into academic discourse and Brooks into company discourse) is typical of a new sort of academically literate corporate culture akin to post-Napoleonic (and continuing) technocratic culture in France. IFTF offered for this reason and because it is a non-profit organization obliged to publish its own workshop material regularly much greater ethnographic access to its work processes than other firms doing similar work and allowed Brooks into its work environment as a close quarters participant-observer. In our qualitative analysis of “play” at work during two annual conferences (in 1998 and in 2000 respectively), we demonstrate the emergence of anxieties over the future of work practices and organizational forms. Tools of performance - specifically, scenario skits of the future - frame this “play” enacted by IFTF researchers and their clients.
Although the subject matter of future scenarios is necessarily about the future, strong themes of past and present lurk within these stories and performances, marking them off as highly stable containers of former practices even as they portray future forms of organization. Future scenarios, with their population of heroes, villains, quests and fairy godmothers, provide a social currency of metaphors throughout IFTF “play”, revealing highly structured and stable directions despite any discussion of the future. By exploring IFTF’s play at work and the larger discourses that surround its approach, this study will illuminate current forms of work practices in the new media industry, as it negotiates and creates new institutional relationships through the Internet.
Defining Play
Scholars of play theory assert that elements of play (or the play element) is a ubiquitous aspect of human culture from children’s play to serious rituals to work and war (Huizinga 1950, Caillous 1961). Johan Huizinga’s framework for play refers to it as a “freedom and stepping outside of life” and ordinary routines (Huizinga 1950: 8).

For Huizinga, play also encompasses a certain amount of secrecy and ambiguity: “It is ‘played out’ within certain limits of time and place” (Huizinga 1950). Differentness and secrecy are displayed in play by “dressing up.”. Huizinga for our purposes also points to the role of play in elite networks where “play promotes the formation of social groupings, which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means" (Huizinga 1950: 12). This is a long history. Leslie Kurke (1999) has a beautiful discussion of play (with no winners and losers) being attached to the elite and secret world of the symposium, where games were attached to common discourse.
It contains its own course and meaning where play begins and then at a certain moment, it’s over. While in progress, “all is movement, change, and alternation”. Connected with its limitation to time is that it also assumes a fixed form as a cultural phenomenon: “Inside the playground, an absolute and peculiar order reigns… It creates order, is order”. Once played, it endures as a fixed creation in the mind. (Huizinga, 1950). Overall, Huizinga's conception of play is framed as a theory of games, rule-bound, yet experimenting with rules outside the bounds of everyday institutions. As Huizinga states:
“All play moves and has its being in a playground marked off beforehand materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course. Just as there is no formal difference between play and ritual, so the ‘consecrated spot’ cannot be formally distinguished from the play-ground. The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc., are all in form and function play-grounds—forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world. Dedicated to the performance of an act apart”. (Huizinga 1950).
Like Huizinga, Roger Caillois defines play as a free, voluntary activity occupying a space, isolated and protected from the rest of life. In its basic form, play is about developing a response to the opponent's action--or to the play situation--that is free within the limits set by the rules. Caillois characterizes types of games-- according to whether competition, chance, simulation, or vertigo (being physically out of control) is dominant--and ways of playing. Caillois also investigates how games become part of daily life and contribute to the cultural norms of institutions. According to Caillous "... games are largely dependent upon the cultures in which they are practised. They affect their preferences, prolong their customs, and reflect their beliefs ... One ... can ... posit a truly reciprocal relationship between a society and the games it likes to play".(2)
Huizinga and Caillois’ theories are \starting points for acknowledging the role of play elements in institutional life. While present in some manner in virtually every cultural form, play elements (including genres of play like theater and ritual) emerge primarily as a scaffold for a variety of discourses to tap into, call upon, or resonate with in promoting discursive regimes (Edwards 1996, Engestrom 1987, Goffman 1974, Kees Van Der Heijden 1996). Other scholars view play as an initial strategy for learning and incorporating new practices (Engestrom 1987, Vygotsky).
While notable theorists such as Erving Goffman have embraced the game and theatrical genre as a powerful tool of social science, scholars such as Michael Billig argue about the dangers of overextending the game metaphor in social psychology and social analysis. He worries that these metaphors display nearly flawless performances of frontstage behaviors that inherently disregard the nature of argumentation, disputation, and the creation of rules that form the unacknowledged backstage of these events. His logic cautions against employing the metaphors of play too far in any analysis of the players, who are largely accepting the rules during the moments of play. When the game is in play, the critical sting of argument appears suspended, largely ignored by both player and audience. However, Huizinga especially acknowledges that the element of tension in play has a significant role since it is about uncertainty, and a striving to decide the issue and end it. Like Billig, Huizinga appreciates the tensions and contradictions of play "for seriousness seeks to exclude play, whereas play can very well include seriousness" (Huizinga 1950: 45).
The play element is drawn into a number of competing discursive domains to advance social and/or economic goals. In particular, as we shall see, play at work is used to mark off a space (outside of the corporation) and time (an ideal present where to Other is incorporated masquerading as the future). This process forms a discursive economy such as Michel Foucault describes, one that marshals a heterogeneous set of elements at strategic moments to booster specific claims for legitimation or acceptance (Edwards 1996, Foucault 1980).
Huizinga points to the difficulty of creating definitive boundaries between work and play. As a binary, it often breaks down, blurring and marking a continually shifting set of distinctions. According to Huizinga’s broad definition of play, one might claim that African American spirituals during slavery were an example of play at work (Genovese 1976). This vision is rather disturbing since it conjures up racist imagery of happy slaves at work. Calling this cultural form mere play overtrivializes a powerful musical discourse of tragic survival and search for collective meaning amid such misery. Technically, this historical moment does not meet Huizinga's definition of play as free and voluntary. On the other hand, recognizing elements of play at work in this process also helps us appreciate the impulse of creativity and strategic community making that spirituals provided for African-Americans under severe duress (Genovese 1976, Sanger 1995). In general, a number of strategies have been employed to make work palatable, and less alienating whether confronting or pursuing the modernist project of industrial expansion. In the ever newness of play discourse, workork in the 19th and 20th centuries, during the industrial revolution, whether voluntary (even this term is questionable) or not, has largely been characterized as a matter of dull routine, often mechanized and lethal. We will focus on how play is linked to a management discourse that invokes play elements to form discursive narratives highlighting imaginary workplaces, worker liberation and the networked society.
A noticiable intersection of work and play occurred in Europe and America during the transition from the Victorian ideals of work and delayed self-gratification to an emphasis on consumption and the birth of consumption during the 1890s. The department store, for instance, transformed itself from a mundane mom and pop corner store into a theatrical space replete with exotic themes and populated by a sales force that modeled and role-played the values of urban sophistication (Beniger 1986, Schivelbusch 1987, Zola 1992). Innovative advertizing, especially via department store window displays during this period, also came into its own; its practitioners made a profession out of the playful hawking of industrial made goods. Crafting a technology of enticement, the new department stores fashioned playgrounds of consumption as both a mechanism for reducing excessive inventory and as a means to teach newly arrived immigrants about urban living (Leach 1994). While these businesses did not necessarily ascribe to the complete definition of play asserted by Huizinga, one can appreciate the role of a heterogenous set of play elements in action.

The World Fairs of 1892, 1933, and 1939 in particular stand out as celebrating a work “gadgets as toys” mentality that, in effect, created amusement grounds out of future visions of work practices. David Nye’s treatise on the American Technological Sublime categorize World fairs as “sublime” playgrounds that attempt to convey a grandeur of thought, emotion, and spirit in embedding technological tinkering within the American soul. These events directly afforded Americans an expression of specialness through the clever playfulness of invention and mystique, that somehow Americans have a special knack for innovation. Buster Keaton as the comic turned technological expert in the classic soundless movie The American, best epitomizes this merger of play-forms into a national and cultural myth of innovative dominance. These few examples reveal the careful and conscious use of play elements at work where areas of commerce become cordoned off as playgrounds for showcasing consumption, work, and technological dominance.
However, Huizinga expresses a skeptic vision of play in modern social life as "being dominated to an ever increasing extent by a quality that has something in common with play and yields the illusion of a strongly developed play factor" that he calls false play (Huizinga 1950). Writing at the height of World War II, Huizinga was concerned with Nazi uses of play and its conception of war (devoid of any recognition for the rules of fair play) as immoral. His words seem prescient as play-forms became sophisticated artifacts of portable, strategic game theory in the highest levels of U.S. military, industrial thinking.
While on the one hand, workers have used playing at work as a strategy to de-emphasize the authoritarian nature of employment, the active use of play as national and corporate policy reveals a different, similarly troubled aspect of playing at work. Of course the basic play character of gaming, in the sense of plotting one's own moves and anticipating those of a competitor have always been a part of competitive capitalism (for example, Jay Gould and JP Morgan), its translation into a theoretic domain enhanced by computing technologies offer the portability of play as a command and control philosophy for industrial, military rule (Edwards 1996). “Serious” play, the idea of applying simulation and gaming principles to areas of strategic national concern, became a mainstay of post-World War II industrial military thinking. Incorporating bits or elements of play by framing these genres as play-contests of national and international domination enables a strategic portability and leveraging of hegemonic discourses. In the advent of building spectacular though nearly (for obvious reasons) untestable nuclear weapons, simulations and gaming content of untested military systems then served as the basis for budgetary support and direct implementation of national and corporate policies from weapons programs to computer technology (Bell 1973, Edwards 1996, Schrage 2000). As Daniel Bell asserts, knowledge becomes ever more a "game between persons" (Bell 1973).
Game theory and simulations emerged as an integral element of the United States national military industrial strategy during the 1940s and 1950s. The Rand Corporation, as the premier US think tank during this era, led in the implementation of these theories for military planning. Herman Kahn, a Rand engineer, was the chief developer of scenario methodology as an alternative overlay to rigorous computer modeling. Borrowing the term from Hollywood movie scriptwriting, “scenarios”, as Herman Kahn saw them, “were supposed to be fictional and playful, not some sort of rigorous forecast. The point was not to make accurate predictions ... but to come up with a mythic story to bring the point home" (Kleiner, 1996). A controversial figure, Kahn coined the phrase "thinking the unthinkable" and called for thinking soberly and in detail about possible nuclear exchanges with the Soviet Union. However, By the mid-1960s, Kahn left Rand to found the futurist Hudson Institute (located north of New York city) where he and a small staff began to seek non-military industrial clients. Scenario methodology, with its elements of role playing, and a realizable narrative storyline, soon disseminated throughout major corporations and consulting firms such as Shell Oil and SRI (the Stanford Research Institute) by the early 1970s.
Similar to Herman Kahn’s Hudson Institute in its roots, the Institute For the Future, founded in 1968, represented a breakaway consulting firm from the more conservative, military footing of the RAND corporation. Their mission statement indicates their rationalist beginnings. It describes a small group of mathematicians and engineers who believed ‘that the right methodology would allow them not only to solve pressing social problems, but to forecast the future.’” (IFTF promotional brochure, 1998); the dream of Asimov in the Foundation Trilogy.
The New Age, countercultural movement during this period seeded a nascent work landscape within emergent computer firms that readily embraced its rhetoric. The countercultural discourse of rebellion against authoritarian institutions resonated with youth anthems that centered on experimentation laden with elements of play. Alongside this social trend, American business "was undergoing a revolution in its own right during the 1960s, a revolution in marketing practice, management thinking, and ideas about creativity" (Frank 1997). Influenced by the research and development Hacker culture of computing in the 1970s at MIT and Berkeley, (Agre 1998), the advent of the personal computer and the tradition of Silicon Valley gaming technology (Rheingold 1996) during the 1980s (and 90s) also spawned numerous efforts to streamline and create playful, college campus-like working environments, especially in the PC industry itself. The founders of Apple and Microsoft were not merely inventing a new appliance, they believed they were evangelically changing the world. Some scholars (Barbrook 1996) have called this the Californian Ideology, where San Francisco styled bohemianism connected with the “entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies” (Hudson 1997). Celebrating an economic libertarian ethic that warns against public sector intervention into new media, the merger of countercultural rhetoric with a conservative strain of individualism appears complete. Microsoft, Apple, and now the latest dot.com firms are notorious for ushering in a new set of work habits to the corporate workspace. T-Shirts and jeans, marathon propgramming sessions interspersed with flying Frisbees and pizza projected a cascading series of efforts in merging play, home, and work. However, this story is not simply one of co-option. As we will show in examples from IFTF, client representatives want to change their companies and alter what they perceive as stifling work environments, invoking play as one method of promoting that agenda.
Countercultural rhetoric enjoyed a resurgence in the 1990s, especially as smaller computer firms embraced creative work environments and appeared better able to adapt flexibly to the Internet. As one Los Angeles Times reporter stated, traditional “bricks-and-mortar companies have been slow to use the Internet because of internal barriers to change. Some treated it as a superficial add-on, just another form of mail order or a place to post corporate propaganda, without examining how the traditional business might learn new tricks”. (Kanter 2001: M5). Under the shadow of popular appeal enjoyed by Napster, the online music swapping site, record companies have been depicted as particularly slow in refusing to see beyond their traditional business models, underestimating “the allure of the Internet and the technical ability of young users” (Huffstutter 2000: A1). The takeover by Time Warner by America Online in 1999 further prompted major corporations to take notice and emulate the dot.com business culture. In dealing with a more complex and varied workforce and the unpredictability of untried business models, global corporations decided to adapt and incorporate the working philosophies of smaller firms. In order to reach this point however, they turned to consulting firms to mediate their relationship with Silicon Valley culture, new media, and teach them how to “play”.
Playing at Work at IFTF
IFTF carries out three primary areas of research in emerging technologies, health care, and in strategic planning (a more nuts and bolts consumer oriented team that does not follow scenario methodology; this division acts as a decided counterpoint to the ludic methods of the other two). The emerging technologies group has a client sponsored research project known as The Outlook Project focused on organizational innovation and emerging technologies. Funded through client participants, this program holds two annual major conferences or “exchanges” as they are called by IFTF. The term "exchange" has relevance as it implies a higher level of interactive participation on the part of its clients then one might see at traditional corporate conferences. These client conferences usually take place over a two-day period (beginning on Wednesday evenings, extending into Thursday, and concluding by Friday morning). They are also preceded by day-long pre-Exchange workshops related in some manner to the overall theme of the Exchange. The organizational hierarchy is relatively flat with one president and a number of research directors that operate with varying degrees of independence. Assistant research staffers support their operations.
Lastly, IFTF has a group of affiliated researchers. IFTF Affiliates, often from academia and working on short term contracts, serve as a major resource group for IFTF projects.

Brooks began studying IFTF and the Outlook Project in 1998 as a participant-observer through IFTF client conferences, staff research meetings, and one-to-one interviews with IFTF directors. Brooks audiotaped and wrote extensive fieldnotes during this period and has videotaped two IFTF conferences as well (Spring Outlooki Exchange 2000 and segments from the IFTF Healthcare Exchange Spring 200). . Video, though useful, was judiciously taken in an attempt to be as unobtrusive as possible during his tenure at IFTF work sites. He has traced the trajectory of IFTF scenario and role-playing exercises over the past three years from 1998 to 2000 and has noted the ebb and flow of ludic methodologies within the organization. In one of the first client exchanges Brooks studied, known as “Bandwidth to Burn” (1998), the Outlook Project performed a series of skits on the future of wireless and broadband devices for the consumer market.
Brooks notes that ludic approaches at IFTF reached their peak at IFTF’s Spring Exchange in 2000 where IFTF directors transformed their conference into a role-playing exercise (“CaféNet 2010”) for IFTF researchers and client attendees for the entire duration of the meeting. An analysis of IFTF ludic approaches in 1998 and in 2000 parallel the increasing prominence of dot.com success and challenge to the larger and more mature new media companies. We assert that as larger companies became more concerned about the dot.com threat, consulting methods at IFTF became more experimental as a method of reinvigorating these companies.
IFTF Fall Exchange 1998: “Bandwidth to Burn” (New media practices in 2005)
The 1998 IFTF Fall Exchange was held at a conference hotel in San Jose. The theme “Bandwidth to Burn” explored the digital possibilities and dilemmas of having significant increases in Internet capability and use. A notable skit that IFTF researchers scripted, acted and performed was known as “Agentwars”. This scenario explored the dilemmas of broader Internet use in the American suburban family where the darker underside of sibling rivalry raised significant issues about the continued commercialization of private spaces and the nature of computing in the home. In this skit, two cousins (little girls) who live separately across the country try to watch their favorite show together with the help of personalized software agents.
These agents, as envisioned by computer scientists, will represent and appear as our “virtual personas", help us connect with other people, search the Internet on our behalf to find information or, buy and sell products for us based on our personal profiles. They might even comfort us (Brand 1988). Despite some earlier technical glitches, the cousins are successful in watching their show until a cousin’s older brother comes home and demands to use the best terminal in the house. A battle of dueling agents ensues as each sibling’s agent tries to knock the other off the terminal until the babysitter intervenes.
The younger sister has a highly stereotyped agent in terms of gender, nicknamed “Babushka,” a branded character from a popular game in 2005 who appears feminne, cuddly and warm. The older brother’s agent, nicknamed “Dreadlock” exhibits another highly gendered masculine persona indicative of the teen attitude of its “extreme sports, roller-blading” owner. Dreadlock plays the scarier role of agent “terminator” and almost wins the battle until parental authority steps in to intercede. During the client discussion and reaction that followed, IFTF facilitators and clients clearly aligned into various spheres of corporate debate amid the heightened contradictions highlighted by the performance. .
What appears as a sibling spat in the scenario becomes a metaphor for a broader battle for control over directions in computing during the client discussion that unfolds. The skit’s nickname “Agentwars” raises the specter of “software” agent to a more ominous level. The framework highlights the conflicting and contradictory feelings about animated bits of code created by us, haunting our devices.
The scenario’s purpose is to bring these contradictions into full relief and use them to propel their clients to discuss the social implications of innovation; in this sense, IFTF has wisely harnessed the power of activity for the software designing audience. The primary contradiction that clients encounter in the scenario is the conflict between the “official” purpose of computer agents which is to help their owners find information and the “unofficial” uses that these agents come to play. Inevitably, the official “corporate” mission becomes diluted by the siblings’ hostile interaction with each other through their devices. The software agents are portrayed in the skit as both benign and hideous “monsters” that threaten to brand our children, and temporarily, usurp authority away from their corporate creators and defy the parental figure in the home.
In this scenario, computing agents, as assistant companions to the children, end up fighting a proxy war between brother and sister over the best interactive terminal in the house. It is important to note here how the symbolic use of children in the scenario fits within a long history of western cultural symbolism. Children are often located between a world of people and other-than-human beings (Mukerji 1997). As Chandra Mukerji comments, “the association of children with animals is an uncomfortable social fact” (Mukerji 1997).
From this observation, it is not a tremendous leap to state that the children in “Agentwars” serve as cultural and cognitive markers in negotiating our relationship to software agents, the new “monsters” of the high tech era. The use of children in the skit allows the clients to participate in a form of children's play, allowing them vicariously to inhabit the subject positions implicated in the narrative. The association of children with software agents allows entry into a cultural process of childhood that both “carries and reworks problems of order and disorder, natural virtue and natural danger, that are long standing, variable, and continually enacted in each new ‘present’…” (Mukerji 1997). Contemporary American views of children epitomize the contradictions in relating to our own virtual devices. Framed as precious resources, children and software agents are also a “threat to order, subversively noisy, and willful” (Mukerji 1997).
So a number of real and symbolic battles are fought here between the agents themselves, between the children who use the agents to work out their hostilities, and finally the very real tension between the corporate (IFTF client interests) and parental control responsible for bringing this technology into the home. On another level, the skit mimics the ambivalent feelings of the clients themselves as they grapple with the visions of their own companies. The IFTF researchers led by the facilitator actually model some of the directions that the ensuing client discussion will follow. After this brief interaction, clients broke up into various groups discussing consumer, business applications, and social policy implications of this scenario. Client reaction varied from one of exploitative enthusiasm of the new technology to a concern over potential designs that violated privacy and trust as shown in the following excerpts:
Corporate enthusiast:
Client 1: “’You play James Bond’—Television shows evolve a cast of set-top interactive characters, so viewers can become their favorite character. Programming is scheduled in half-hour segments that users buy, so they can find out what happened to "themselves" in the next segment”.
Cautionary critic:
Client 2: “Trust becomes a big issue as knowledge is more packaged and branded. No one is sure whose influence goes into the packaging”.
One way of managing these tensions was to ensure some type of community reflective process guided by IFTF research staff who modeled how discussion on these topics would proceed. To highlight the contradictory forces at stake, IFTF writers employed the technique of a “Greek” chorus to comment on the scenario as it began and concluded. The creators of the skit comically termed it a “geek” chorus in honor of its Silicon Valley topic. Composed of a cast of three IFTF researchers, the chorus’s intention was to underline and focus client attention on the convergence of software agents, market forces, and family. Their scripted roles within the play also carried over into discussion with the facilitator who queried them on the validity of the future the clients have just witnessed. Throughout the entire scenario, the “geek” chorus commented on the dramatic action as it occurred.

H: "So they have these agents that set up their viewing for them--and maybe make some of their entertainment choices based on their interests. Is that it?"
T: "Yes, but they still argue over the choices just as much. Is this really better than a remote control, or are the agents just a branding platform?"
M: "I don’t know, but I wouldn’t want to be responsible for that Dreadlock character. Seems like a pretty disagreeable agent to me."
Theories of situated learning and apprenticeship delineate the type of bridging activities that IFTF scenarios provide to their clients for understanding and playing with innovation (Rogoff 1990, Engestrom 1988). Yrjo Engestrom’s study of how institutional activities can instigate moments of contradiction for the sake of learning requires that:
“the teacher works his way from the inside of the activity to be developed. This means that the teacher takes as his point of departure the double nature and inner contradictions of the leading activity of his pupils...The teacher acts as the devil’s advocate, confronting the learners with the contradictions of their own vital activity in a bare form” (Davydov 1982 in Engestrom, 1988).
Engestrom sees modeling as a vital element in creating a learning environment. Still other scholars propose an expanded approach that breaks this modeling practice down into discrete learning planes of guided participation, participatory appropriation, and apprenticeship (Rogoff, 1990). Recalling IFTF’s original mission in orienting clients to the future, IFTF literally trains them to “see” future trends in a dynamic, performative mode. By creating stories of the future, IFTF expects clients to invoke a set of memorable stories as referents in later stages of their own strategic forecasting work.
A Visionary Learning Ground
Client representatives to IFTF are in many respects people who see themselves as visionaries and innovators within their own company who go to IFTF to practice and develop their visionary status (Personal conversation with Chuck Sieloff, an IFTF client affiliate, Fall Exchange 2000). To accomplish this task, they must play a simulated game of organizational change making. The IFTF Outlook Exchanges enhance the client’s role in this endeavor by staging familiar and provocative forums borrowed from popular cultural outlets such as children's play or TV-like formats. Such forums allow IFTF to attach their own veil of irony even as they use the conventions to break up the settled thoughts, and opinions of its clients, at least in theory. Common TV elements of the Café 2010 Exchange (the 2000 Exchange) included a mock newscast, a simulated parade of disgruntled hackers who continually interrupted the newscast in a Jerry Springer-like free for all, and a series of client skits that incorporated these elements into their own performance structures. TV narratives and stock elements provided guideposts in developing a future canvas 10 to 20 years ahead full of interstitial conflict.
Popular cultural theorist Joshua Gamson describes audience participation talk shows as a contested space where new discursive practices are developed. “The talk show can be seen as a terrain of struggle of discursive practices…What is perceived as a confrontational device becomes an opening for the empowerment of an alternative discursive practice” (Gamson 2000). IFTF attendees have a stake in creating tools that outfit them for assuming their visionary status to stage a forum for discussing alternative business practices to sustain and foster innovation. Whether this forum is truly alternative still remains an active research question. IFTF encourages this visionary sense-making by simulating a transformative process to undermine the prejudices of its clientele. During this particular moment, IFTF invokes a carefully articulated platform and vision of the future that allows the client the immediacy of an authentic voice, a voice of experience that challenges status quo practices within their own organization. This experiential voice is in fact a manufactured one since the future is not yet here, IFTF creates a staged documentary of future threats and performs legitimizing rituals to convey a voice of transformative power. The clients come home having had a simulated and nearly shamanistic experience of the future.
Who the client corporations send to IFTF is significant. Corporations usually send certain managerial level staff as visionaries who may or may not have that specific job description. A key question of where corporations keep their visionaries is a compelling one for later research. Corporations usually employ their most entrusted visionaries to cement alliances or to grow unspoken friendship networks. As part of its mission, IFTF allows client representatives the opportunity “to do the vision thing”, where they hone their skills in challenging their respective CEOs to create more dynamic work environments. Large corporations rely on this role even if at times they diminish it, especially in difficult economic periods. As potential visionaries, clients carry a rather strong set of social skills along with being incredibly bright and smart people. Clients expect IFTF to create "playgrounds" for visionary practice while also articulating a sociology of future work practices. The play elements of IFTF theatrical narratives offer client representatives a range of subject positions, "imaginary, yet coherent and emotionally invested ways of living within a discourse" (Edwards 1996). Scholars such as Michel Callon note the power of narrative in discussing technology for engineers as entrance into a world of sociological choices (Callon 1987). IFTF in this sense forms an integral part of corporate work practices as a training ground for practicing visionaries. This visionary practice is itself linked to the countercultural shifts in management thought during the 1960s, where a number of creative processes including elements of play become the next generation toolkit for this managerial elite (Frank 1997).
Gendered Storytelling
The scenarios told at the Fall Exchange were also highly gendered exaggerations of potential new media consumers. The “little sister” in the story is framed initially as the bold collaborator, engaging in the maintenance of family ties via a new medium. Her brother in contrast plays an anti-hero who exerts his willful independence through a scary software agent. Both constructions call to mind Nicolopoulou’s study of world making and the types of story forms that children invent during early development. Young girls in creating their own stories of the world rely on familiar tales of the home and collective participation; young boys, in contrast. invent worlds full of heros who battle momentary threats ending in some type of violent demise and subsequent renewal (Nicolopoulou 1997).
Rather than receding, gendered story forms persist in the storytelling of professional adults from journalists to consultants. Stories of masculinized heros and evil villains particularly marked media accounts during the rush of dot.com success and eventual demise (at least in stock value). In teaching its clients the value of play in work practices, it is then not as surprising to discover a set of dynamic interactions at IFTF similar to that found in Nicolopoulou’s research. Again, even as IFTF aids its clients through a metamorphorsis of corporate change and adjustment to the World Wide Web, age-old gendered archetypes persist in their adult play, bridging a familiar past with an uncertain future; and the ideal corporate present is created as a future playground
IFTF Spring 2000 Exchange: “Café 2010: Organizing for Innovation”
The apogee of ludic methods at IFTF’s Outlook Project during this research was attained at the Spring Exchange in 2000. The location was a hotel in Palo Alto where a ballroom was redesigned into separate sections with curtained fabric to create a series of mini-cafes. Each café had a specific theme associated with it. Clients were assigned to a particular café to chart the future of specialized industry concerns from telecommunications to consumer durables. IFTF narrative summaries of the exchange tell a story of ’cafés’ “set up as future environments to help participants imagine entirely new structures, issues, and strategies for their organizations. Café participants had a chance to map the world of 2010—identifying the types of challenges they will face in their industries as they try to reorganize for innovation. Out of this exercise, new visions of 'organization for innovation emerged in the form of industry skits by participants' on the last morning of the Exchange (IFTF Outlook summary 2000).
The format of the conference was experimental. People "traveled" through a special portal (a decorated hallway with a futuristic décor of white draped fabric over steel scaffolds and piped in music called ironically “Happy Future”) “in time” to "Cafenet", a multimedia-café in 2010, the metaphor for the client working dinner to begin the conference. The point was to discuss what had happened in the last ten years, in an original simulation of "virtual hindsight forecasting". These elements of staging marked the entrance into a metaphoric playground, creating a productive atmosphere of serenity, a sense of belonging to a social elite, where a naturalized sense of sobriety and restraint prevailed. This atmosphere was manifest as one of the directors, in full costume (a futuristic garb complete with purple hair) welcomed clients along the hallway into the room. All the clients recognized her as both a respected IFTF director, trusted colleague and friend as they passed by and played along with the game. The hotel ballroom had that ritualistic air usually which reminds one of family or other societal ceremonies from weddings to debutante balls, or the masked ritual in Eyes Wide Shut, depending on your preferences.
The opening introduced Café2010 as a newscast of the future with IFTF staff serving as news anchors from the future delivering an in-depth Dateline style documentary on the decade of innovation from 2000 to 2010. One of the principal directors of the Outlook Project portrayed the anchorwoman of this café and began analyzing the major “volatilities” (IFTF referred to them as the 7 major volatilites) for that decade, with the help of a large projection screen where a powerpoint presentation underlined her speech. Her network broadcast was continuously interrupted by anonymous but memorable "hackers", whose blurred faces appeared on the larger screen symbolically representing the challenges, threats, and success stories in the new world of 2010. Although this show is a pre-recorded sequence of images a few of the voices are recognizable as IFTF staffers. The media world in this scenario is a free-for-all as a succession of Hacker personalities chimed into the broadcast at times overlapping and interrupting each other. IFTF narrative summaries describe how “’Skinnycasts’ short concise newscasts presented background information on the evolution of business, technology, and large organizations, and ‘network hackers’ conveyed perspectives on volatile issues as well as on organizational strategies” (IFTF Outlook Summary 2000).
The most extreme Hack involved a recurring Luddite-like personality known as the “Unafunder” (an ironic twist on the real, now imprisoned and infamous American Unibomber, who, over a number of years, mailed bombs to prominent scientists as part of tirade against technology). An Exchange report summary describes this character as “part of an underground network of hacker/innovators who are deliberately disruptive, not only of the worldwide communication infrastructure but of the economy as well”. He is the “boogie-man” of 2010 scenarios and beyond containment, incessantly recurring as a Freudian Sandman that recurring dreaded monster in our dreams, uncanny and disturbing.
The goal of IFTF in creating this Exchange was to call attention to the pressures on organizational environments and how that might transform the culture of large organizations. IFTF purposely designed an experimental environment to engage participants to imagine new organizational structures; its goal was to “inject an element of play” as part of the innovation learning process. The format reflected a desire by IFTF staff to forgo even traditional IFTF approaches of enacting scenarios. Suspending the lines of audience and performer, the Exchange projected a dynamic mix of issues, actors, and some impromptu roles and scripts for addressing the hypothetical living environment of 2010.
This moment recalled the Interval informances (See Notes: 3) of 1996 with clients co-creating an embodied experience of the future. The borders of organizational consulting were blurred as well as the ideological, social, and national boundaries of topics that would potentially affect client businesses.
IFTF’s skits help in deprogramming a technophilic Millenialism by framing the emergence of social innovation to negotiate the terrain of new information technologies. To IFTF researchers, the reinvention of institutions will involve imagination and conflict. IFTF provides a very small glimpse into this conflict but shies away from truly intractable problems (Africa is nowhere to be seen here and its presence is subtly erased until the very end when participants raise its absence in a manner akin to a ritualistic absolution). The paraphrased subtext of discussion expressed sympathy near the end of the Exchange: ‘we never discussed the problems of Africa…we should have…’ (Author Videotape, IFTF 2000 Exchange).Technology within developing nations did serve as a topic at the latter end of the Fall 1998 exchange, although with the exception of China and some aspects of the digital divide, this discourse has not dominated or garnered significant attention in subsequent Outlook Exchanges.

Introducing Hacker 1: Neil Heartstrong and the new face of Union activism
Activism in the future is exemplified by one of the first hackers into the IFTF “skinnycast” as he calls attention to social innovations that IFTF clients ordinarily might not consider so closely. His dialogue highlights the tension between the labor networks facilitated by the Web and the “power hierarchies” of corporate authority. Knowledge workers in this scenario have banded together to steer the ethical directions of their organizational work spaces. Neil Heartstrung, the character created by IFTF scenario writers, narrates the course of Union activism for 2010:
“I guess when you're up on the MNC observation deck, the concerns of ordinary folks must seem inconsequential. You issue upgrades and you know that we will respond just as your social scientists predict we will. And so you can be smug in thinking you are steering this shiny new technological wonder. But you're wrong. It's steering you. Your belief that you still somehow control progress is naïve, nostalgic and not at all true. We define our own morality. Your bioethics specialists are just lawyers in scientific suits. It's we the people who understand what it means to be human. We are the court of last resort. We are not just knowledge workers. We are knowledge. And if our roles do not allow us to share that knowledge in the way we see fit, then we will find other ways to do that. Realizing that we had to find our own lifeboats of meaning or else surrender our fate to the upgrade path--that's what the Innovation Decade was really about.”

While the discourse of activism resembles the traditional rhetoric of workers unions and is heightened here, it is also tightly contained and underscores the ability of capitalist discourses and enterprises to encompass multiple ideologies, co-opt, and possibly transform them. The avid goal of IFTF clients is to retain innovative talent and one method of doing so is to tap into the discourse of worker activism where “human expression becomes the organizational imperative” (IFTF 1998). The ability for larger firms to provide a welcoming site for “playing at work” and “playing” with new ideas becomes a formal tool for, in some manner, co-opting the strident rhetoric of union activism while also addressing the concerns of frustrated client representatives themselves, who as visionaries and knowledge workers struggle to make themselves heard. However, as Thomas Frank argues, co-optation theories do not account for the lived realities of the management workforce as neatly as they might (Frank 1997). As noted earlier, the clients engaged in creating their own visions of the future in a series of skits presented at the very end of the exchange. Directly addressing the points of the Heartstrong character, one of the client cafes (Cafe Perpetua: Durables manufacturing) acted out the heroic fantasy of an innovation worker who, stymied by his company's neglect of his ideas, quits his job and takes a spiritual quest through to India. There, he starts learning the value of networking, seeks a guru who advises him to seek "oneness" with the Net, and starts his own company that eventually buys out his former employer. In describing the advertizing and the menswear industries of the 1950s and 1960s, Frank writes how "both industries underwent 'permanent revolutions' in their own right during the 1960s, with vast changes in corporate practice, in productive flexibility, and especially in that intangible phenomenon known as 'creativity'", even preceding some aspects of the countercultural movement. The counterculture, with its emphasis on rebellion, according to Frank, "served corporate revolutionaries as a projection of the new ideology of business, a living embodiment of attitudes that reflected their own" (Frank 1997). IFTF discourses of the future and emphasis on play, invokes play elements and countercultural symbolism, as a resource for dealing with the latest innovation crisis in management.

Strategic Playing and Containing Discourse
IFTF is part of a long tradition of futuristic play festival that is made to appear new, and radical. This focus on play facilitates IFTF’s role in creating a set of apprentices who can play the role of visionary critics for their companies. IFTF inherits an American tradition of discussing and representing the future that centers around play as a method of centering attention and managing an IFTF community dialogue as well as containing, and steering a specific discourse on the future. IFTF methods are not new but are made to seem a bit outrageous or edgy, a strategy that is not necessarily disingenuous but points to the negotiated entrance of play in the corporate domain. Play is meant to be spontaneous, display the unexpected, and surprise with clever ambiguity. In this case, part of IFTF’s brand is to showcase this aspect of the enterprise and perform the semblance of experimental processes.
Several scholars note the technological determinist refrain in a society seeking to normalize change itself, to enhance capitalism and its "permanent revolution" as David Harvey comments where capitalism incessantly reconfigures itself to adapt to new markets (Castells 1996, Harvey 1996, Schiller 1999). Play acts as a dependable, manipulable, portable, even comforting and resonating, resource. Even play as a discourse enables us to digest change as given, as something to celebrate, revel in, and tinker with, infantalizing us in its excess. Scholars of the network economy note its most robust feature is its "ability to reconfigure". Castells calls this a decisive feature in a society driven by constant change and organizational fluidity. A company can turn the "rules upside down without destroying the organization" because its material basis "can be reprogrammed and retooled." (1996: 62). It is not surprising then that play has figured so prominently in management discourses for innovation. If one of the projects of the networked society is to convert work and information into a space of flows, instantly manipulable, then play becomes a suitable metaphorical space for capturing a sense of this flow (Castells 1996, Gerlach and Hamilton 2000). In the language of Michel Foucault, we are disciplining ourselves into a space of work routines that mimic play attempting to induce a fluidity that IFTF skits attempt to capture but cannot so readily contain.
Billig's research on the historical battles over sports rules that ensued during the 19th century particularly over baseball, soccer, and rugby yield insight on the underlying backstage metaphors informing IFTF processes as well. Billig notes how athletic contests accompanied the work dislocations of the Industrial era and focused on the containment of excess; that is, the necessity for rules of restraint in games that involved working class people that otherwise threatened to explode in riot or rebellion. In his analysis of these games, Billig points to the intricate rhetoric that game and theatrical metaphors overlook. Rhetorical flourishes in the Socratic style for example always threaten to implode the assumptions of statements they initially support. Like Freud’s concept of the “uncanny”, Billig’s work attests to the game metaphor’s basic inability to contain argument, rule breaking and improvisation that continually rise up to change and alter the boundaries of the game. Although IFTF's theatrical skits are not always strictly games by definition, they mimic and stage imaginary contests over technology. While the IFTF skits may restore some sense of order or containment, their implications for a threatened disorder continually spill over into client debate or client generated skits. That is, client anxieties mirror personal concerns about status, the directions of their respective companies, and future threats to a networked economy dominated by increasingly larger corporations.
In reviewing IFTF uses of play, a system for managing and capturing differences arises in acting out various discourses of the future from those supporting a networked economy to others anxious to destroy it. Eric Lott in Love and Theft, explores a similar, though distinct, set of differences that were constitutive of the male, white working class patrons of minstrelsy in the Antebellum era of the U.S. during the 1830s-1850s. By focusing on a unique cultural code of symbolic play known as minstrelsy, Lott reveals how black culture defined white identity through overlapping interrelationships and close alliances. This flirtation with black culture uncovers uncanny dualities and strong fetishes of simultaneous recognition and denial of all things black and marginal. Through minstrelsy, Lott maintains, the desires of the white working class gets put on stage and acted out in all its anxiety and lived complexity. In attempts to stage and capture elements of black culture, the white working class sought to establish a clear difference between themselves and a fictional Other. While using a very different genre of play, IFTF's practices exhibit similar processes. As Edwards notes narrative discourses, in order to be effective,
"must provoke in their audiences the sense that 'yes, that could be me--I could want to be that, be that kind of person, be moved by that outcome, help in that way, be satisfied by those offerings'. Or they may take the opposite approach, constructing alien or dangerous Others whom audiences will want to escape, destroy, or at least define themselves against, and proposing their own intellectual and material products as bulwarks or assistants" (Edwards 1996).
The Other in IFTF discourse refers to groups that do not hold a majority of political, economic power, and reflects the strategies of dominant groups to understand, restrain, and in some cases celebrate them. In IFTF’s Café 2010, this Other takes the form of Hacker personalities representing the activist worker (Heartstrong), a Chinese citizen who represents a new wave of global workers and runs a large internet firm with loyalty to the Chinese diaspora, an entrepreneurial model minority who runs an identity, tracking service for matching workers to projects, and the Unafunder terrorist hack, among others. Assuming the form of Hacker (the coyote trickster of Native American folklore) this Other chimes in to interrupt the majority dialogue of the IFTF forecast, creating the growing sensation that the demographics of the Other will overpower the dominant discourse. Staging the Other is intentional here to set the clients off-kilter and afford them the experiential knowledge of 2010 that they can legitimately point to as potential future issues or as threats requiring active remedy, (especially when distributing their visions to their respective corporations). IFTF offers this Other to its clients by re-imagining how it might intersect, block, or work into client organizations’ forecasting visions. What becomes clear however, is that the fictional Other staged and created in this instance, reveals more about the legitimate concerns of the client representatives themselves over the future of work and societal practices.
Conclusion
Playing at work in the 1990s included a significant amount of discourse engaging with the future of work practices. The dialogue of the future becomes a platform and staging of present tensions, providing the dream of nimbleness and play that large corporations want but can never quite grasp. Future scenarios make the future safe and attainable, allowing some to go back to work as usual. They are one of the tools of the trade in the great capitalist game of incorpration, so well described by Zizek (2000). In the realm of corporate consulting, the ludic form is still just one of a large number of activities that large companies buy into – they are probably also buying economic forecasts, undergoing other methods of group analysis, etc., depending on the latest trend. IFTF, through its ludic Othering, reflects untenable realities and makes them safer for corporate consumption, allowing for the quiet distribution of smaller more digestible bits of moderate change.

Understanding and reading future scenarios translates into a process of deciphering hegemonic shifts within elite power, a force that is not quite as static as it appears. IFTF client representatives are demanding corporate renovation and face struggles within their own organizations, seeking some welcoming resonance with firms like IFTF. Similar to the reflective displays of department store windows, IFTF translates a mixed vision of hope and muted threat, pointing to an imagined community and redemptive spirit of aligned corporate, activist, and technological forces at the intersection of new media. Playing at work thus acts as a hegemonic bridge to negotiate a range of networked boundaries, both human and digital.

Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their most helpful reading of the text.

Notes
1. Debate exists over the terms "futurist" and "forecaster". I use the term futurist because it embodies a wide range of history and represents its practitioners' struggle for legitimacy. Tracing the origins of both might be a good method in further understanding the field. Currently, some prefer the term forecaster as more legitimate since it distinguishes them from "the wide-eyed futurists" of popular culture. The President of IFTF, Bob Johansen and Paul Saffo, one of the research directors at IFTF, prefer the term "forecaster". Saffo states that the word "Futurist" carries with it a:
"very unhappy history from the first part of the century, when it identified a sort of neo-Facist, Italian movement. More recently, it is a term that's more preoccupied with outcomes than processes, and people who describe themselves as futurists generally describe what the world will be like, not how we will get there. And what that flirts with is, in my business, the cardinal sin, which is prediction, because prediction isn't just hard, it's logically impossible. The truth is that at any given moment in time there is an array of possible outcomes-possible futures, if you will-and the whole point in forecasting is to understand the size of that array of outcomes.
(Educom Review, May/June:1998)

2. In EP Thompson, there is an essay by a person whose job it was to determine which Russian cities should undergo nuclear attack in which order and the importance of gaming and play in the prosecution of his duties – otherwise the responsibility would be too much
3. A now defunct new media incubator known as Interval Research was formed in 1992 (it was disbanded in early 2000) and specifically adopted play at work themes as a method of merging design aesthetics with engineering. One Interval researcher, Eric Dishman, coined the phrase “Informances” in creating scenario skits of imagined new media products. The goal was to engage engineers as performers of their own future designs while also inducing empathy with potential consumers. Bringing together an interdisciplinary mix of social scientists and software programmers, Interval used a number of bonding rituals (like the use of Taiko Japanese drummers at lunch events focused on work milestones) to foster cross-disciplinary ties and erase traditional professional barriers.

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Personal Conversation:
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