Dan Phillips is an engineer and founder of the SEA, an innovation company based in London. The SEA has developed a number of services that explore new ways of interacting with the world around us. For example Weglu (pronounced 'we glue'), a converged social network that brings together the benefits of mobile phones with the benefits of social networks. Dan studied interdisciplinary design at Cambridge University and engineering at Imperial College and has published a book in the UK, France and the USA on ecofriendly homes. "Playing for friendship" is his look at social networks and playfulness.

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THE SEA

Artwork for this article by Sebastian Ziegler

Introduction

Our friends are on messenger, Facebook or MySpace, in Second Life or another online game. They could even be around the corner or on their mobile phone. How is technology changing what we mean by friendship and what does it hold in the future?
Friendship is the glue that binds the human world together. It exists in our minds and is evident in the actions and efforts that we make with each other. Friendship comes from sharing things with each other, from helping each other, from the way we support each other every day but also in times of crisis.

Is the only difference between a virtual friendship and a real one that we don't meet in the physical world? I personally hope that virtual friendships will become physical friendships – that I meet the people I play with in virtual space. Even if I don't meet them, I will still learn from them and they can help me to have better 'physical' friendships too.
And what will happen in the future? Will we have a more playful physical world? Or will the physical world become more fearful as we spend more and more of our time within the relative safety of virtual environments? It all depends on how the physical and virtual worlds meet our desires – for health, for friendship, for love, for family, for wealth, for self-realisation.

When we were young

I remember with a smile the games we used to play at junior school. The girls skipped and sang, while the boys chased and climbed. We were all playing for friendship. In our simple and straightforward world, we showed each other that we were great people to be with.
A little later, I became pen-friends with someone I met on holiday and I'd happily spend time writing a letter full of things that I'd been doing or telling her how I was feeling. And then, in my teenage years, other things became important. What bands do I like, what clothes do I wear, what books do I read? I became known for the groups and tribes I belonged to. I'd grown up.
As we move to an ever more connected world, it's interesting to think about how digital services will evolve to help us 'play for friendship'.

Some simple definitions

So, friends are people that we like to hang out with, people who we trust and admire, who we really care for. And play is having fun with no serious outcome. But, playing for friendship is one of the most important things that we do in our lives. It affects our happiness and sense of well-being, so it's probably worth looking a little harder at what we mean by these things.
Play includes everything from competitive sports to acts of theatre, physical activity and mental intelligence, from puzzle solving to story telling. But play can also be introvert or extrovert, based on individual skills or on communal relationships. While there are many types of games, they all sit within a spectrum, from open-ended and social experimentation (young children playing in a sandpit together or older people playing together on Second Life) to organised, rule-based and goal-oriented games (chess, football or online strategy games are good examples).

So what's this all about?

Play and communication technologies both help us to develop deeper relationships with each other. They help us to create bonds of understanding, stimulate our minds and examine the many possibilities that we have in life. Play gives us the potential to act out our fantasies in a safe environment, while communication technologies help us to connect with each other while we are apart.
And on the internet, play and friendship form one of the largest areas of interest. Are they merging? Are they different? What does it mean to have a virtual friend in a virtual world? And are our physical friendships changing as more and more of our communications and experiences are sent and recorded via 'social' platforms?
Social software and gaming software are merging around communities. Habbo Hotel, Bebo, MySpace and Facebook provide platforms for relationships through friendship, while World of Worldcraft, Second Life and Barbie Girls support relationships through play.
Interestingly, both social networks and playful networks are 'designed'. They are full of pathways and opportunities that have been carefully scripted by their designers. They are interactive, they have 'holes' in for customers to fill, but they are not as open-ended as the physical world. In the past, games had very linear structures. Today, they give the appearance of openness but they still guide us to achieve certain 'gaming' goals.
But, it does seem that people are using games and social networks in similar ways: and the designers are responding. Consequently, games are becoming more social and social networks are becoming more playful. While some people I know are exploring Second Life to see what it's all about, other friends find themselves stuck in Facebook and feel unable to get out! So where do Alice's Adventures in Wonderland begin and where will they end? In one project we worked on, we investigated how 'the view' was the thing that transformed a social network into a game.

What is the difference between a social network and a game? The view?

Are the only differences between Second Life and Facebook the way in which information is presented to the user? And beyond this, where does the physical world begin and the virtual world end? I have a friend who has become so interested in virtual environments that he sees things in the physical world and he is not sure if it's him seeing them or his avatar! Will people tire of the virtual world or will designers and players continue to develop features and fantasies that make these spaces more and more compelling? Will commercial pressures turn the wide blue vistas of these virtual territories into the dull shopping centres of the suburban mall or will they provide the financial support to create even more surreal and beautiful experiences?

This brings me to the big gap that exists in both games and social networks to date. Where is the physical world in all of this? Where are the close knit social activities like seeing a band together or hanging out in a pub? Are we really playing for friendship? Or are we playing at friendship, or, worse still, playing with friendship? Is the virtual replacing the physical because we lack the social skills to meet people in the physical world? Or is the virtual world going to slowly bleed out into our physical spaces as we start to engage with Second Life characters and Facebook friends via our mobile phones? Will real games of the future straddle physical and virtual spaces? Will our children ride bikes through the local park, but with Lara Croft giving them instructions via a Bluetooth headset so they can find virtual treasures hidden behind real oak trees? Will social networks start to map more closely to physical communities as the tools for interaction make our towns and streets more playful spaces?

Ookl

At the SEA, we're betting that the physical world will play a larger and larger role in both games and online communities. We've built a learning service for children that helps to make the physical environments of museums and galleries more playful and collaborative and we're about to launch a social network that will allow people the opportunity to engage with their friends in more social ways through their phones as well as through their PCs. We think that web 3.0 will be more than 3D, more than immersion into virtual worlds. Web 3.0's call to action should be 'Welcome to our three-dimensional world'. It will happen when the tools for interaction and play that we find on PCs become embedded in the objects that we carry with us every day and in the fabric of the world that surrounds us. It will happen when we can play with each other in the physical world, wherever we are.

This article was written for receiver

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