Bring Back Play.

I still have my third guitar, a Hofner President circa 1958. I know that because I scrawled the date through one of the ‘f’ holes when I was fifteen. It was the result of “If you learn to play we’ll buy you a good one” and several hundred hours practice on my part. It was £34 and cleaned out my parents bank balance. It still plays perfectly well and is currently worth more than £500. Since then I’ve acquired seven more and played tens of thousands of hours and still love it. Ditto motorcycles, woodwork, art and writing. Last week I did a big clean up throwing out a massive Betamax vid camera, large tape vid camera, mini disc player, 4 track cassette recorder, OM10 film camera, umpteen power widgets from stuff I've already thrown away, all ‘must haves’ at the time, all pristine but now worthless. I'm even clinging onto XP not wanting to 'upgrade' to Windows 8 whose only virtue is you can use it with an indiscriminate poke from a gloved hand! And all these made by under-age over-worked Chinese who go home and commit suicide. And in a way it’s all my fault. I was a toy designer. One of the major tenets of toy design is to create the maximum results from the minimum effort and skill. As an example Spiro-graph, if you’re old enough to remember it, produced beautiful patterns by just winding a handle. I designed a kiddies record player that even a reasonably intelligent dog could use, and got offered a job on the strength of it. I now of course consider designing toys on the criteria of “can it be used by a reasonably intelligent dog?” isn’t a useful environment for young humans. Over the years play as in ‘exploring one’s abilities’ has been replaced by ‘getting stuff that does amazing things for you with the minimum of skill and effort on your part.’ It’s like becoming a baker by buying a bread-making machine. Yes it’s not as rewarding as learning to bake but also one can become trapped in the ignorance of one’s own potential and entrapped by what’s available to buy. And when the next best thing comes along and the next you want it because it will do even more amazing things for you. That’s why I’ve had to throw all that stuff away and why I’ve still got my guitars that I love to ‘play’.