Photo by J R Guillaumin

How would you like to work 15-20 hours unpaid overtime a week?

What about doing it for weeks on end because of unrealistic schedules?

How about a 65% chance of damaging your health from the stress of overtime?

And what if someone told you these were just occupational hazards, to be expected if you choose a career in the creative industries?

Earlier this year, Develop magazine conducted Quality of Life survey of 350 employees in the games industry. The results were published in the May 2009 edition of Develop, which you can download here.

The stats make pretty damning reading:

• 98% of respondents are not paid for the overtime they work
• 85% have to work ‘crunch’ – periods of intensive overtime before deadlines
• 60% have to work over 10 hours overtime a week during crunch — some as many as 25 to 30 hours per week
• 60% feel that they work too much
• 65% say that working crunch has impacted their health

As well as the statistics, the magazine published some very telling quotations from the anonymous respondents.

I am currently looking to leave the games industry, where I have worked as a programmer for seven years. The excessive overtime and minimal recognition is damaging my health, my sanity and my marriage.

Both myself and my friends have been forced to work a ridiculous amount of overtime, causing depression and bad physical health from lack of exercise and poor diet.

It’s no secret that prolonged workplace stress can lead to employee burnout, accompanied by symptoms of anxiety, depression, addictive behaviour, relationship problems and illness. Not to mention days off, sick leave, resignations, low morale and lost productivity.

Yet several of the survey respondents suggested that ‘crunch’ is normal and inevitable, not just in computer gaming, but in any creative industry:

Crunch seems to just be accepted as ‘the norm in creative industries’ — this attitude will only prolong the myth that it aids productivity, when in fact all it does is crucify morale.

Until we have fundamental changes throughout the industry … the only way to make quality games is to crunch. I don’t like it, but fundamentally I’m in the entertainment business, and a bit of pain is the norm in these.

Everyone is always aware why crunch is needed. No one wants to do it by choice, but in a milestone-oriented environment this is inevitable. It’s no different to film and TV, where creativity is integral to the product and boundaries are pushed. Especially now when we have a recession and so many small teams are on the brink of collapse.

The computer games industry does have a particularly bad reputation for overworking people (see: EA Spouse). It even has a special word for it — ‘crunch’ — which sounds as bad as it must feel. But it’s far from the only creative industry in which people are expected to work absurdly long hours to meet deadlines, often for little or no overtime pay or other compensation.

What’s going on here? Are crunch and burnout inevitable in the creative industries — or can anything be done to avoid them?

Should Creative Companies Do More to Protect Employees from Burnout?

Many of the respondents to the Develop survey were highly critical of studio management.

Specific accusations included poor planning and scheduling and unrealistic expectations:

• 65% disagreed that “projects are well-scheduled”
• 80% agreed that “crunch is caused by unreasonable or unrealistic expectations”
• 75% disagreed that “the crunch culture of games development is necessary to produce good games”

I would suggest another two management factors that contribute to burnout:

Poor people management skills. As we saw in my e-book on Motivating Creative People, it’s frighteningly easy to demotivate people through clumsy people management skills. Conversely, it’s possible to maintain morale under pressure (within reason) if managers are empathetic and supportive of their teams.

A cavalier attitude to competition. In some industries, where talent is plentiful and competition for jobs is fierce, managers sometimes adopt the attitude ‘Consider yourself lucky to be working here – there are plenty of people willing to fill your shoes if you don’t like it’. Which may be true on the face of it – but it’s also a brilliant strategy for demotivating people and making the least of their talent.

Reading through the Develop survey, it would be easy to paint the managers of games studios as the villains. But it’s only fair to remember that they are often under enormous pressure from publishers, especially regarding scheduling and deadlines.

And the survey results weren’t all negative. Respondents were fairly evenly split on whether they are “adequately compensated” for their work, and whether their companies have “a good attitude to Human Resources and keeping [their] staff happy”.

There were also signs of lessons learned by some games studio managers:

I am a manager and partly responsible for a hideous release and crunch period. I have personally made it my mission to do it better, and have spent the last two months studying different project management methodologies, practices and frameworks non-stop. My first child is due in five weeks: I have to do this better, I have no choice.

Are Creative Workers Partially Responsible for Burnout?

Two of the quoted respondents felt employees should take some of the responsibility for their predicament:

It’s a talented employee’s responsibility to leave an over-crunched studio. Let the good studios get the good employees, and let the poorly managed studios be staffed with the untalented.

The rank and file employees are also partially accountable on the crunch culture, because we agreed on the task and schedules and did not deliver it on time. It’s not only management’s fault that crunch happens.

While I’m not sure how much choice employees really have when they ‘agree’ to an unrealistic schedule, it’s worth considering how far employees contribute to their own burnout — and what they can do about it.

A few months ago I published an article on Lateral Action called Burnout: the Dark Side of Creativity, in which I looked at the elements of the creative process and the creative personality that make artists and other creative professionals particularly susceptible to burnout:

• Obsession — As we saw in The Joy of Work, creative professionals love what they do. Which is great, as long as we don’t overdo it and become obsessive, working more hours but becoming less productive.
• Perfectionism — Of course you need to be a perfectionist to do great work. But there’s a difference between high standards and nit-picky dissatisfaction and frustration. Do you know where to draw the line?
• Hypersensitivity — We put so much of ourselves into our work that any feedback can feel like personal criticism. Unless we learn to ‘let go’ and look at things more objectively, this can get very stressful for everyone involved.
• Control freakery — As with perfectionism, you probably won’t achieve much creatively without being a bit of a control freak. But you can’t control everything, particularly in a team situation – trying to do so will only make your life more difficult.
• The weight of expectation — High standards breed high expectations. No problem with that – as long as you remember that (a) you are only human, and (b) risk and failure are inevitable in any creative endeavour. If you’re feeling overwhelmed with expectation, maybe it’s time to go easy on yourself.

I’m not suggesting workers only have themselves to blame for burnout. But if you’re a creative worker feeling under pressure, have an honest look through the list and ask yourself whether any of them apply to you.

If so, maybe it’s time to ease up a bit and find some time for rest and relaxation. And talk to someone you trust about your situation. Workplace stress and burnout are sadly common experiences, and there are plenty of options for getting help if you need it – often the biggest step is acknowledging that you need it.

What’s the Cost of Burnout to Creative Companies?

Crunch is designed to boost productivity and meet deadlines – but ironically it can have the opposite effect:

this attitude will only prolong the myth that [crunch] aids productivity, when in fact all it does is crucify morale.

As we saw in the Motivation E-book, crucifying morale = crucifying creativity and productivity.

Some people argue that ‘deadline magic’ can have a galvanising effect on a creative team, giving them an adrenaline rush of energy and raising performance. There’s some truth in this argument, when applied to short bursts of energy, such as a musical concert, theatre play, sales pitch or other performance situation. This is because our ‘fight our flight’ stress response has evolved to help us reach peak performance instantly, to deal with immediate threats such as the proverbial sabre-toothed tiger.

But the ‘fight or flight’ response did not evolve to help us deal with extended periods of stress, such as spending weeks working unpaid overtime for a demanding and unappreciative boss. In this situation, stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol start to damage the brain, blood vessels and other parts of the body, eventually causing a range of mental, emotional and physical symptoms.

For example:

Stress and crunch have caused me to take several months off work in order to recover. There was no help from the company in question. I’ll never let it happen again, and I won’t let any person that working under me go through it, either. Utterly unproductive.

The human cost of a story like this is bad enough. But if you’re tempted to play the hard-nosed businessperson, stop and think about the cost – in time, money, productivity and morale – to a company of having an employee signed off for several months with stress and/or illness. And make sure you factor in the effect on the entire team, not just this individual.

What Are the Alternatives to Crunch and Burnout?

So can anything be done to eliminate crunch and burnout in creative companies, or should we just grit our teeth and get on with it?

Here are some of the options that emerged from the Develop survey, plus one suggestion of my own.

Fair Rewards for Overtime

Develop Editor Michael French highlighted two very different approaches to the problem of crunch:

Epic Games (which rewards staff generously for crunch, by all accounts) and Relentless (which claims to have never worked overtime) might appear to be on opposite ends of the spectrum given that one is pro and the other anti crunch.

Michael Capps, President of Epic Games, caused outrage in some quarters when he said the company expects people to work 60 hour weeks. But Develop Develop Deputy Editor Ed Fear points out in Capp’s defence that “while Epic does expect staff to work longer hours, it makes that expectation clear from the outset and rewards its staff with bonuses that exceed their base salary”.

Banning Overtime

Long-time Wishful Thinking readers may recall my interview with David Amor, Executive Director of Relentless Software, in which he described his company’s radical approach to management: employees have to clock in at 9 and work until 5, but are not allowed to work overtime! The Relentless website even proudly displays a counter showing the number of days/hours/minutes/seconds the company has been working without crunch.

Earlier this week I contacted David to tell him I was writing about burnout, and asked him to answer the question “Are crunch and burnout necessary evils in computer games development, or are there alternatives?’. Here’s his response:

I think that a lot of creative projects are hard to schedule and it’s easy for things to overrun, but that fact is often used as an excuse for poor scheduling and lack of planning. Worse than this are schedules that actually plan for weekend work; that suggests that the project scope could never be achieved within the budget.

Crunch and burnout are both avoidable with enough planning and contingency, but there’s a degree of tolerance and expectancy within the industry that seems to make them par for the course.

(David Amor, Executive Director, Relentless Software)

Tighter Regulation

In the Develop survey, 75% of respondents felt that “trade body organisations have a duty to monitor and restrict over-working of employees”. One of the respondents suggested that “we need an actual union for developers, not just something for companies to join”.

Better People Management Skills

With my background in stress management and managing creative performance, I naturally see a link between people management skills (often neglected in creative companies) and stress and performance levels. When the pressure’s on, a really good manager can act as a ‘buffer’ against external demands, maintaining rapport and morale, and supporting team members during the period of stress.

If you or your fellow managers are looking for some tips on how to get the best out of people in difficult circumstances, feel free to download my e-books How to Motivate Creative People (Including Yourself) and Creative Management for Creative Teams. Both are licensed for free noncommercial distribution, so you’re welcome to forward them to anyone who may find them useful.

What Do You Think?

Should we accept overwork and burnout as occupational hazards of working in a creative business?

Should creative industries companies be doing more to protect employees from burnout?

Is intensive overtime necessary to meet deadlines — or does it impair productivity?

Table of contents for Research: Perceptions of Coaching in the UK Creative Industries

1. Take Part in My Research – ‘Perceptions of Coaching in the UK Creative Industries’
2. Research Project: Definition of ‘Coaching’ for this Project
3. Research Project: Definition of ‘Creative Industries’
4. Questionnaire for Managers in the UK Creative Industries
5. Questionnaire for Employees in the UK Creative Industries
6. Online questions for UK Creative Industry Staff
7. Interview with Mick Rigby, Managing Director, Monkey Communications
8. Research Project Featured on ‘Better Business Blogging’
9. Interview with Ruth Kenley-Letts, Film Producer
10. Interview with Chris Arnold, Executive Creative Director, BLAC
11. Interview with Russell Davies, Advertising Planning Maestro
12. Interview with Chris Hirst, Managing Director, Grey London
13. Interview with David Roberts, Senior Project Manager, Creative Launchpad
14. Interview with Neil Youngson, Technical Director, Cabinet UK Ltd
15. Interview with Greg Orme, Chief Executive, Centre for Creative Business
16. Interview with Chris Grant, Consultant, 14A Conversations
17. Interview with Antonio Gould, Consultant, and Sara Harris, Screen Media Lab
18. Interview with Richard Scott, Surface Architects
19. Interview with Ben Demiri, Brand Manager, SIX Showroom
20. Interview with Sian Prime, NESTA Creative Pioneer Programme
21. Interview with Jill Fear, CPD Manager, The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising
22. Interview with Terry Childs, Creative Director, Silver Chair
23. Interview with Matt Taylor, Director, Fat Beehive
24. Interview with Mark Earls, Advertising Contrarian
25. Interview with David Amor, Creative Director, Relentless Software

Last week I travelled to Brighton to talk to David Amor, Creative Director at computer games developer Relentless Software, for the latest interview for my research on Perceptions of Coaching in the UK Creative Industries.

In an industry where, according to Gamesindustry.biz, “insane crunch times and endless overtime hours … are considered to be a standard part of working in the development sector”, David and his business partner Andrew Eades are remarkable for having had “the crazy idea of a development studio that works 9 to 5 with no overtime”. Not only that, they strictly limit internet and e-mail access during working hours, and recreational games are banned from the office. Their approach has elicited protests about such ‘draconian’ measures, mixed with incredulity when they explain that in 3 years of production they have never missed a deadline or asked their staff to work evenings or weekends.

David and Andrew founded Relentless Software in 2003 to make Social Games on traditional games consoles such as PlayStation2. Their first product, DJ: Decks & FX, was published by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE) in September 2004 to critical acclaim and was subsequently nominated for a BAFTA. DJ: Decks & FX is a music-mixing product that gives users a virtual DJ rig and a set of over 100 genuine dance tracks to play. It allows the user to perform live at parties as well as record their perfect mix for later sharing and playback.

In 2004 and 2005, Relentless worked on SCEE’s London Studios titles, EyeToy: Groove, EyeToy: Kinetic and SingStar. PopworldEyeToy and SingStar are SCEE’s internally developed social games that have collectively sold tens of millions of units. SCEE are world-leaders in developing and publishing this genre of products and Relentless is pleased to work closely with SCEE in this increasingly important market segment.

In October 2005, Relentless Software and SCEE released Buzz!: The Music Quiz, a music based quiz game set in a TV studio that includes four bespoke buzzer peripherals. Buzz!: The Big Quiz was released in March 2006 and Relentless continue to develop new Buzz! games for PlayStation platforms including Buzz!: The Schools Quiz and Buzz! The Mega Quiz. The Buzz! franchise has sold 4M units in its first year and continues to be an important brand in the Sony catalogue.

Relentless was honoured with Best New Intellectual Property and Best Innovation in conjunction with SCEE at the 2006 Develop Industry Excellence Awards. Later in 2006 it went on to win a BAFTA for Best Social Game. Relentless was also named 3rd highest UK independent game developer in the recently published Develop 100 which lists the top 100 developers by revenue generated in the UK. At a global ranking of 43 with a single Buzz! product, above Microsoft and Sega, this demonstrates the potential of social games and the ability of Relentless to achieve success in this area.

Relentless continues to make games that everybody can play and has developed considerable expertise in the new Social Games genre that allows people to enjoy video games without having the gamer expertise required by other products.

Talking to David, I was struck by his emphasis on the hard business value of ensuring his staff have a good balance of focused work and time away from the office. In his view this is not just a case of being ‘nice’ to people, but of providing the optimum conditions for efficient work and reducing some of the uncertainty inherent in creative production.

Relentless are currently hiring – e-mail David if you think his approach to making games could be for you.

Click the ‘AUDIO MP3′ icon below to hear the interview.

OK I might have made a mistake by promising to do Creative Links on a monthly basis – there are simply too many good creativity posts. Or maybe it’s like buying a new car – as soon as you decide on the model you want, you see it everywhere. In the interests of keeping up and keeping things fresh I’ll have a go at doing Creative Links weekly from now on. But first here’s the edited highlights of what I found in January, sorted into categories to keep it manageable.

Where do ideas come from?
Scamp takes issue with a piece of research that claims Where Ideas Come From is other people. Beeker claims it’s ethical to Steal Well, and Faris, true to his motto that Talent Imitates, Genius Steals, Couldn’t Resist the joys of plagiarism. Neither could I – here’s the picture he doubtless nicked from someone else:

If you’re looking for a balanced view, Doc Searls weighs up the pros and cons of disclosing your ideas vs keeping them secret in his post 10 Ideas About Ideas (via Creative Generalist); while Brian Lee advocates a middle way between plagiarism and the pressure to be original, reminding us that Creativity Is A Communal Act.

Tortured Artists
It may just be wishful thinking but I don’t see why artists shouldn’t enjoy themselves (and their work) as much as anyone else. I’m glad to learn that at least Douglas Eby agrees with me, in this great post on Pain and Suffering and the Artist.

Creative Partners
The subject of torture brings us neatly to relationships. Scamp continued his excellent series of Tips for Creatives with Finding the Right Partner and How to Have a Good Relationship with Your Partner – useful advice interlarded with (for me) flashbacks to my days as a couples therapist.

Synaesthesia
As a fan of creative synaesthesia and inter-disciplinary creativity I was pleased to see Mark Hancock catch the synaesthesia bug when he ventured out of the advertising world and spent time with videogame creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi. Noisy Decent Graphics did a brilliant piece on What I see when I listen and Russell played around with Electroplankton, which looks a bit like an online, affordable version of the Reactable.

Creative Flow
Speaking of altered states of consciousness, Steve Pavlina wrote a great description of My Experience of Creativity, prompting my inner Creativity Trainspotter to tick off Csikszentmihalyi’s Nine Elements of Creative Flow – can you spot them all? Steve followed up that post with 7 Rules for Maximizing Your Creativity.

Planning
Adliterate hosted a cracking debate on the question Is Blogging Killing Planning? I’m not a planner so I’m not qualified to answer the question, but reading through the comments on that post and judging from the general quality of blogs in the plannersphere, I have to say planning is doing wonders for blogging.

Creative Collaboration
Staying with planning for a moment, John Grant argues the case for Planning as Mediation – between the (potentially conflicting) interests of the client, creatives and customer. Simon Darwell-Taylor bemoans the lack of inter-disciplinary communication in ‘the typical ad agency’, as opposed to the more collaborative approach of TV production. Yet the grass is always greener – Richard Wilson has started a wonderfully dour blog called TV Grouting, where he says:

TV and the internet don’t seem to me to be natural partners. The internet is based on the principle of sharing information and ideas and making everything cheaper. TV is about owning and jealously guarding ideas and extracting as much money as possible from them

He contrasts this sad state of affairs with the world of advertising, where planners like Russell are ‘willing to share their ideas ‘with any number of people who might be prepared to nick them’. (As if they would…)

So what can we conclude about creative collaboration?

• Creative people need to share to be creative
• Creative people get scared of sharing because someone might steal their creativity
• Creative people sometimes need someone around to get them to share a bit more
• Creative sharing looks terrific fun from a distance, it’s a bit messier close up.

For the pitfalls of creative collaboration, see Kathy Sierra’s brilliant The Dumbness of Crowds.

Creative Think
It’s almost impossible to single out individual pieces by Roger von Oech, they are all so consistently and variously creative, you might as well pick some at random – which is exactly what you can do if you click his picture on the Creative Think homepage. A couple of blog posts that stood out for me in January were Set A Deadline to Goad Your Creative Juices, countering the received wisdom that creativity is all about freedom from constraints; and his invocation of the God Janus to usher in the New Year by thinking something different.

Enterprising Blogging
Hugh McLeod knows a fair bit about blogging and being an entrepreneur, his random thoughts on the subjects are more memorable than most people’s considered musings.

Making a Living as an Artist
The online opportunities for creative producers can be bewildering – Jonathan Bailey clarifies the strategic options available in an excellent post on The New Content Economy.

Writing
Delve into the voluminous archives of Liz Strauss’ blogs and you’ll see she’s no stranger to Unblanking the blank screen so it’s worth listening to what she’s got to say about it. She’s got loads more great posts on writing, but 10 Ways to Start a Blog Post should keep you going for a while.

For What Not to Write, look at Claudinho’s post about 20 Words Most Used in Press Conferences. ‘Best of breed’ anyone?

And just when you’re relieved that the words are finally starting to flow, up pops killjoy Brian Clark to tell you Why Creativity Can Kill Your Copy. Brian’s a master of the headline that draws you in – admit it, you’re itching to know what’s so bad about creativity, aren’t you?

If you remember my post about Tim Wright’s amazing Playtime event in October, you will no doubt be concerned to hear that the Russians have joined the golfing space race.

Not to be outdone, Tim is stepping up his plans for his mission to play gold on the moon with David Bowie – he’s registered www.golfonthemoon.com and (ahem) ‘launched’ a competition to win an iPod Shuffle. The prize will go to “the best moon/golf/Bowie image submitted by Xmas”.

Tim has also posted links from some of the Playtime presentations – by Gavin Stewart, Tom Hume and Rob Bevan. See my previous Playtime post for more about the presentations.

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I had an amazing day earlier this month at the Playtime event organised by Tim Wright at 01zero-one as part of the London Games Fringe. I first came across Tim’s work at Warwick University when he was one of the guest speakers on the MA in Creative and Media Enterprises, and showed us his amazing games combining books, websites and mobile technology. It’s hard to explain how they work, but if ‘imaginary total fulfilment’ sounds like your cup of tea, check out Tim’s XPT site.

For Playtime Tim assembled an excellent lineup of speakers covering a range of disciplines and meanings of the word ‘play’. And refreshingly for an event involving computer games, there wasn’t a console in sight.

Pat Kane set the scene by talking about the social and cultural context of play, based on his book The Play Ethic: A Manifesto for a Different Way of Living, which argues that in rich countries the work ethic that has governed societies since the industrial revolution is now giving way to a ‘play ethic’ – so work is becoming more like play (particularly in creative industries) and playfulness pervades business, the arts, education, politics, education and family life. So far so fluffy – but his talk got really interesting when he highlighted the dark side of play, in the ‘addictive’ quality of computer games, the coercive behaviour of crowds at football matches, and even the treatment of war as a game, in the rhetoric of US officials who have frequently talked about ‘changing the rules of the game’ in the war on terror.

I couldn’t help thinking about my first experience of paintballing on a recent stag weekend – at the beginning of the game, we were just a bunch of hungover thirtysomething blokes lumbering around sheepishly (and getting wiped out by a squadron of 12 year old boys), but by the end we had all somehow become possessed by the spirit of the game and were hell-bent on using all our aggression and cunning on taking out ‘the enemy’.

Listening to Pat speak, I had the sense of recognising an idea that was very obvious, yet which I hadn’t noticed until he pointed it out. I could also see parallels with creativity and flow – on the one hand flow can be a liberating experience, but Mihahly Csikszentmihalyi has pointed out that “It is important to realize that the flow experience, while personally rewarding, is socially neutral. Like physical energy, it [psychic energy] can be used for productive or destructive ends” (1978 essay on ‘Intrinsic rewards in school crime’). Pat also spoke about his experience of blogging, on the Play Ethic blog. I’ve bought his book and will post a review when I’ve had a chance to read it.

Next up were two online games developers – Jamie Cason from the BBC, talking about the corporation’s online games such as Jamie Kane and the forthcoming interactive soap Wannabes, which look to be spearheading the games side of the BBC’s web 2.0 transformation. He was followed by Dan Hon from Mind Candy, who talked about a ’story/game/puzzle hybrid called Perplex City that is “played” simultaneously by thousands of people around the world’. I haven’t yet got my head round Perplexcity, partly because I’m terrible at puzzles and missed the ‘how to play’ session in the afternoon, but I’m definitely intrigued. It’s hard not to be curious about a game that involves an online city, beautifully printed puzzle cards, a board game and 300 players taking part in a real-life conga around Trafalgar Square. The photographic evidence backed up Dan’s claim that it’s a game for players of all ages, with kids joining hands with twentysomethings and pensioners. Apparently the police were the only ones who weren’t amused.

As a poet I was delighted to see a section of the day devoted to ‘playing with words’ – and even to find a poet on the bill! Gavin Stewart showed us some of the interesting things he’s doing with with poetry and ‘computer-mediated textual art’ online. Then Tim Wright talked about his ‘90% true’ interactive story Oldton and his ambition to play golf on the moon with David Bowie, complete with some hilarious spoof Bowie videos. ‘Don’t leave space to the professionals’ says Tim – if you want to join him on his mission, take your protein pills and go to Golfonthemoon.com.

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The next section was about ‘playing with pictures’ with Tom Hume of Future Platforms and Rob Bevan of XPT. By this stage my mind was definitely starting to boggle, but I managed to grasp that both companies are doing some very unusual things with mobile phones and social software online, and I scribbled down lots of interesting-looking sites for future investigation. Rob has written a book with Tim Wright, Unleash Your Creativity: Secrets of Creative Genius (52 Brilliant Ideas) – if the results are anything to go by, their approach to creative thinking must be worth investigating, so that’s another book for my reading list.

After lunch I regressed about 25 years when Stuart Nolan gave us a chance to play with Lego, as a sample of his approach to Lego Serious Play. Once we’d got over the excitement of rediscovering the feel of Lego (and made a mental note to Santa), Stuart introduced us to the metaphorical possibilities of Lego, asking us to build a metaphor for ‘a journey’ and showing us examples of people who have built metaphors for their job, their life, their organisation etc. Have a look at this Flickr group for some pictures. The process reminded me of the work I’ve done using metaphor in hypnosis, based on David Grove’s work – with the obvious difference that the Lego externalises the metaphors that are experienced internally in hypnosis. And I can testify that Lego is definitely trance-inducing!

I had to leave at 5pm, so was disappointed to miss the final sessions, including one from Stuart Nolan on magic. The last sessions I saw were both theatrical, with Tom Morris of the National Theatre giving a fascinating talk about play and improvisation in the theatre, and Tassos Stevens taking us on a mini adventure with Rabbit. If you don’t know who Rabbit is, I’m not at liberty to tell (all very hush hush) but if you’re feeling adventurous go to irabbit.org.

It was a shame to miss the end, although in another way it was almost a relief to emerge from the rapid flow of ideas and applications. The day has given me a lot to digest and to explore. As well as the links on this page you can find out more via Tim’s Post-Playtime post and del.icio.us bookmarks. Others who have blogged the day are Tom Hume, Frank Boyd, and Shrinkwrapped.

Overall then, a mind-expanding day and I met some very nice people. I was also interviewed at lunchtime by Steeve Laprise of Le Lien Multimedia – but as the site is subscription-only I’m not sure whether I’m Big In Canada yet.

Enjoy the links and play nicely…

PS – One thing the day inspired me to do was set up the Creativity Group on Squidoo – feel free to join and make a lens about your creative project or company. Here’s your invitation.