It’s funny, I remember sitting at a press conference many years ago and having some Adobe guru demonstrate for us the various things they were working on for Flash, which at the time was nothing more than a plug-in that played animation. It seemed so far beyond what the Internet as we knew it could do and it seemed like yet more vapourware, something we saw every other day at the height of the dotcom boom. I’m so glad this one has become a reality. We need more ways to make art and beauty in the world.

Having him here was grand, despite my emotional turmoil around personal issues. There were a couple of observations I made though.

The first is complicated: he noticed that I have Lego from the castle range, the town range and space stuff. He decided that meant we could build a whole civilization. I’m sure it’s straight out of some video game but he grasped the concepts and details really well. In the mediaeval times, we had to be attacked by armies whose technologies were more advanced than ours in order to learn and advance ourselves. By the industrial revolution, we could advance through training scientists. The more scientists we had, the faster we could invent things. (I invented coal mining and electricity. He invented factories. I charged him gold for the electricity and coal he needed for factories and then invented banks. He invented petrol and then started to take over the world with cars and air flight…).

This is all great, but he was very adamant that anything other than war was boring. When we got to space, he wanted things to fight again and he wanted to race through the industrial revolution as fast as we could because there were no wars and it was boring (oh, really? Needless to say, I didn’t tell him about the various wars…). We had infinite resources, he said. I started explaining that war sounded pretty unnecessary then, as it had mostly been about access to resources, but he said it was about getting more land. That’s a link I wasn’t ready to explain yet.

So, how to address this one? He’s right historically. Competition and war have advanced our ‘civilisation’ insofaras advanced means getting bigger and better weapons and technologies. And for that matter, I was using capitalism as a historical learning tool rather than playing my ‘ideal’ world.

When I said I didn’t want to play war any more and could we do something else, he said “what else is there?”. Everything I came up with was competition-based: races and games. I have the Lego movie set, but even that involved the dinosaur stomping on the buildings and the people — something bigger that we needed to fight. Mind you, I kept the ambulance running back and forth when he stomped on crew members rather than ‘actors’. Wasn’t it fun just to build, I asked? No, what’s the fun in that? I was told. So I built the space station and the science lab while his ‘men’ were out fighting Jar Jar (don’t ask, it’s hawk_eye’s fault, I’m sure). I need to come up with interesting non-competition-based play for my Lego people.

The other issue is gender. When we were playing with the hospital, I found ‘girl’ hair and put it on the doctor. Kyle informed me that girls can’t be doctors, they can only be nurses. You can imagine my reaction! I said I knew many girl doctors and that boys can be nurses too. It really saddens me that these sorts of attitudes are still prevalent.

In the end, when there was only one space helmet left and my scientist didn’t have any weapons, his ‘leader’ offered to give it to her so she could return to Earth. I said she didn’t need it, as she had found her life’s work and there was enough air in the recycling systems of the space station to last her a lifetime. He said she needed someone to protect her. I said that wasn’t true at all! But I did acknowledge that she might get lonely, so when the wandering hacker who’d broken into the alien robot’s programming sequences turned out to still be around, she was quite happy with that idea. Kyle wasn’t so sure. A big, strong soldier was what she needed, surely?

At the same time, he was happy with the idea that my “leader” in the mediaeval times could have been a woman, presumably again a hangover from video games, where there are scantily clad female fighters and adventurers. How media influences culture!

How obvious it is that children rehearse sociality and norm-testing in play.

Any great ideas for how to handle these sorts of situations? What sorts of non-gender, non-competition play can we come up with that isn’t boring?

The notes describe in detail some of the most astounding and outlandish scientific thinking from meetings of the society between 1661 to 1682. There is the very earliest work with microscopes, confirming the first sightings of sperm and micro-organisms. There is correspondence with Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Christopher Wren over the nature of gravity, with the latter’s proposal to fire bullets into the air to see where they might drop. And there is a page that lays to rest the bitter controversy over who designed the watch that would eventually lead to the first measurements of longitude.

How cool is that?