where I haven't been successful! - the aim would be to indeed devolve and "open source" the very strategic direction of the enterprise itself. In the private sector, my work with creative start-ups and arts/cultural organisations has been much more fruitful. They're aware that their best commercial moves are sustained and enriched by a hinterland of lifestyle and sensibility - which they have to devote time, space and resources to developing and nuturing. The worst experiences have been with large private corporations, for whom the play ethic is mostly regarded as a way to retain bright sparks in the 'war for talent'. Can an openness then driven through play break down certain hierarchies and borders? Because a major issue for every period according to its different features lies upon inclusions and exclusions. Who gets to play? Who gets to decide the rules of societies' games? If play can form tactics against games' strategies, if play can be political, could a new common decentralized playground arise for today's multitude? Possibly. For me the rise of play as a civilisational keyword, and as a mode of action and thought, in the developed West has been the result of two things: the persistence of post-Sixties counter-cultural values, and the rise of a communicational infrastructure - the internet - which provides tools for the realisation of those values, resulting in new kinds of groups, organisations, networks and movements. Play becomes the emotional overtone of the awareness that, as the 90's anti-globalisers put it, "another