You know: those draw-a-loop-around-the-word puzzles, where the word you're looking for is hidden in a forest of letters and might be there backwards or forwards or diagonally, even? Also called "Word Find." Want a more interactive illustration? Click on over to the Fundamental Physics of Space Word Search and Find for a quick taste of this rather remarkable game - considering all the educational uses it gets. Give yourself a few minutes, then come back here and click this.
This is a game called "Letter Lasso. And it's a word find/search puzzle, all right. And it's undoubtedly interactive. More interactive than you'd expect. So interactive that it redefines the whole word seagoing-finding experience. Because after you find a word, the word disappears and the adjacent rows and columns shift to fill in the space. So almost the whole puzzle changes every time you find a word. And it's timed. And the sooner you find the word, the higher the score. And if you wait long enough, you get a hint. So you can't play exactly like you'd play a paper word search and find. Which is what's really new and playworthy about this game. And you can choose different subjects, like: philosophy, nutrition, rock climbing.
After playing it a while, you may begin to get intrigued with the whole art and science of solving word find/search puzzles. In that case, you should definitely try this "Take Ten online, make-your-own-search-and-find-word-puzzle tool. After you enter your words, be sure to look at a lot of the different possible arrangements of those words the computer can devise. You will be enlightened and amused, in a word-search-findish way.
Apple Crate. You can think of it as the coffee table edition of Out of the Box Publishing's innovative, no-right-answer game Apples to Apples. But it's more than a new edition, it's a lesson in the art of packaging: Put a good game in a fine, wooden box, and suddenly you have something worthy of your most respectable company. It's the very same game that you've played in the kitchen, with the kids. Well, actually, it's the "core" game (get it? Core, as in apple core) plus the first two expansion sets. And there is a certain je ne sais quoi about having all those cards in one box....But having them in one box, and a finely crafted wooden one, at that, puts the whole game in a different context. It becomes a fine thing - even in the sophisticatedly jaded eyes of the discriminating adult - a collectible.
Take heed, Defenders of the Playful. Apple Crate is more than Apples to Apple in a box. The Crate is one great leap for grown-upkind.
Crate creates the needed dignity; gives the necessary permission. It makes Apples to Apples seem grown up. It looks like something worthy of the upwardly grown. And yet, it's still Apples to Apples. Still as funny and irreverent and inclusive and as fun as it has always been. Only now, just because of a nice wooden box and a more cards, we who Just Want to Have Fun have an new invitation to a wonderfully silly game that could intrigue even our guests, even our parents, our bosses and secretaries and leaders and neighbors, even our in-laws.
The "party industry" - you know, the manufacturers and suppliers of entertainment for everything from birthday to corporate parties - has become a steady source of new, and often deeply wacky play technologies. Witness, Hose Hockey, one of the tamer examples of inflatable silliness, where players use air hoses in the attempt to blow a ball into the opposing team's goal. For all its wackiness, it is a safe, non-contact invitation to competitive hilarity, which can be compared quite favorably to the sport-like thrills of Human Foosball.
For a perhaps purer form of innovative wackiness, take a look at the Velcro Wall, where players put on Velcro suits and take turns bouncing off the inflatable floor and sticking themselves to the wall.
This virtual toy is demo from the BioMotion Lab. While you're playing around with it, think about this: "This tool demonstrates that biologically and socially relevant information about a person is conveyed in biological motion patterns. It allows you to manipulate a number of parameters controlling the characteristics of human walking. You can interactively change biological properties, personality traits and emotional expression of a point-light walker. " Personality traits! With a bunch of dots!!!
Which made me very much want to check out the collection of "Favourite Links," which led me to the puzzling delights of George Mather's Motion Perception - a collection of 14 different animated illusions. After which I found myself wandering in something close to visual glee in Michael Bach's collection of Optical Illusions and Visual Phenomena.
It's a strange kind of fun, this journey through animated optical illusions. You wouldn't think the eye would have a sense of humor. But fool the eye enough, and it can make the whole mind laugh almost out loud.
Most inventors are deeply familiar with the potential profitability of playful thinking. The creative necessity requires them to open their minds, to toy with things and ideas, to suspend judgment and basically muck around. As necessity is the mother of invention, playfulness is its father. Every now and then, something gets invented that is so obviously a product of the playful mind that it becomes something close to an icon for the whole invention family. Today's embodiment: the Pringle Thingle."
Inventor and artist Bud Wall includes his Letter to the Pringles People with his gallery of Pringle Thingle images. Here's part:
"Years ago, when your company was first formed, I was inspired by the shape of the Pringle Potato Chip. I immediately saw the possibility for a worldwide promotional item. But, like a lot of my ideas, I just filed it away for another day. I've always envisioned this toy in the public domain. I can see the Thingle as an advertising prop on television, in the movies, on the internet, in offices, under the Christmas tree... everywhere. When I carry three or four Thingles through campus to a photo shoot, every student I pass smiles and has a comment. One said, "That reminds me, I need to pick up some more Pringles at the student store." I now carry them in black bags so as to minimize the attention. The production model would be molded from a much stronger, lighter and more permanent polyurethane foam or could even be an inflatable vinyl with internal perforated cells to hold the Pringle Thingle shape. A small plastic hand pump would be included."
This was three years ago. I'm thinking Mr. Wall has not yet achieved the commercial recognition his inventiveness so clearly deserves. Which explains why playfulness is so prized and difficult to maintain.
My message to Wall: Take your Thingles out of the bag. Share them relentlessly with the Pringle-appreciating world. And, above all, play on.
eudemonism , eudaemonism
noun
(Philosophy ) an ethical doctrine holding that the value of moral action lies in its capacity to produce happiness
eu'demonist , eu'daemonist noun
eu"demon'istic , eu"daemon'istic , eu"demon'istical , eu"daemon'istical adjective
eu"demon'istically , eu"daemon'istically adverb(ial)
According to this site: "4-Way Volleyball requires 4 teams of 6 to 16 players simultaneously competing against each other. Four regulation volleyball nets extend outward 20 feet from a common center pole to 4 outside poles. Ways of scoring points can vary, depending on program design. For example, if a team fails to return the ball, the other 3 teams may gain a point. Two different color balls may be used simultaneously throughout the game to increase the challenge, and one color ball may score higher points than the other. Using beach balls makes the game easier and fun for everyone. Each round is comprised of a set number of consecutive serves, 4 per team. Otherwise, the rules are the same as the traditional game."
Exactly the way we played it 27 years ago at Philadelphia's celebration of the Bicentennial. Except we used a 6-foot-diameter Earthball. So getting it across the net, no matter which way you were trying, was something of a feat in itself, and frequently required the cooperation of two adjoining teams.
It could be said that stories and games and humor are all exercises in the ability to shift perspective - a key survival skill if ever there was one. In a good game, you constantly have to imagine what it is like outside of your perspective: how the other player sees the board, the other team the goal. In a good joke, the fool turns out to be the hero, the victim the perpetrator, the prince the pauper.
Note, for example, the curiously fun experience generated by the Powers of Ten as you shift the perspective of scale: "View the Milky Way at 10 million light years from the Earth. Then move through space towards the Earth in successive orders of magnitude until you reach a tall oak tree just outside the buildings of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. After that, begin to move from the actual size of a leaf into a microscopic world that reveals leaf cell walls, the cell nucleus, chromatin, DNA and finally, into the subatomic universe of electrons and protons."
As macro becomes micro, our whole way of understanding who and what we are changes and changes again. It fascinates us. Almost endlessly. It tickles something inside us. It makes us feel a little more alive, a little more mysterious, a little more fun.
The Powers of Ten is one feature on a gloriously perspective-shifting site called "Molecular Expressions." I found the microphotograph that accompanies this story in the Soap Bubble Gallery.
When you play with some of the stuff you might find clicking your way through a site called "Stanza," as much fun as you think you're having, you're actually playing with art. Mousing from one interactive, Shockwavey weirdness to another, you discover that what you're playing with isn't games, and isn't toys, and clearly has no use at all. Sure, you can make it do things. But there's never a purpose. Because it's art.
And Stanza, the person responsible for this site, makes it perfectly clear that what you are playing with is a work of art. Award-winning, even. Stanza explains:
"This main stanza site features lots of work, including the internet art project 'The Central City' as well as lots of soundtoys, interactive movies and the gallery of fine art. The intention is to make an interesting, interactive, multimedia website, with sounds, pictures and artworks. The site also contains multimedia work and electronic music; cd players are built into the site so that you can listen to my music as you browse. You can navigate around from each of the cells on the home page and you can go to to various experimental interactive audio visual pieces. Also online are paintings, photos and conceptual pieces from 1984 when at Goldsmiths', to the present day. Within the site are generative areas, areas where you can mix sounds and interact with images. There is a jukebox on the stanza main site and a karoake machine in the central city area."
Art? I exclaim in a questioning manner. It feels like fun to me!
Ever since I first facilitated a business meeting, I knew that my appreciation for a good toy would prove a powerful tool for increasing participation and productivity. Over the years, part of my facilitation service became a kind of Toy Therapy. I knew how to give people the right toy at the right time. When I first learned of a company called Office Playground, I realized that I wasn't alone in my appreciation for toys and the playfulness of adults and predictability of social dynamics.
As a case in point, I take four different toys, each of which is available from the abovementioned Office Playground, each of which having a different impact on the productivity and creativity of the group effort. Taken together, these four toys span a range of social engagement, from personally pensive to collectively wacky.
We begin with the Velvet Slime Anenome. Give everyone a Velvet Slime anenome and you give them enough to do with their hands so that they can actually focus on the meeting, engaging the touch with something quietly yucky, yet kinda fun.
When a bit more participation and expressiveness might be needed, we distribute Bendable Clowns. These small, rubbery figures have a wire core that allows them to be bent into different positions. One might say that having your own clown to bend helps you from getting bent, as it were. The fact is that they occupy the fingers, like the Velvet Slime Squishy Beads, but are also expressive, engaging the psyche like they engage the hands. Further, people can make their clowns appear to interact with others, creating scenes and stunts, building clown pyramids. So here we have a toy that sets the stage for personal and collective interaction.
Wishing to engage the mind a bit more actively, and to open the possibility for perhaps even more pointed social discourse, we give everyone two Boinks. Boinks are nylon finger cuffs - flexible open tubes that you can stick your fingers in and forget how to pull them out. They are also flexible enough to flick as well as fling. Thus inducing either a contemplative state whereby one is attempting to free and imprison oneself more or less simultaneously; or a semi-manic social engagement during which time participants strategically sproing at each other.
And then, when push has clearly gone beyond shove, and you need people to get beyond social and personal barriers, it's time to bring out the Snapper Hands - stretchy like rubber, sticky like stick-to-the-wall sticky highly-flingable little hand things that can grab things, like sheets of paper and people's attention.
You'll find yet more examples of Toy Therapy for Business Meetings in my collection of "Toy Stories."
Bonving is the Swedish game of shoe tossing, invented, apparently, by members of the Swedish music group Eggstone. The goal of the game? I quote: "To throw a classic men's shoe size 9 or 10 into the opponent team's field. Your rival team will then try to catch your throw in their garbage cans. If you as server, succeed to land the shoe on their square, you will award 1 point. If the opponent team catches your shoe, they will get the point."
To discover that such sports are being created and played is music to this writer's conceptual ears. It's the spirit of Junkyard Sports epitomized. Using found objects like shoes and garbage cans, the sport, at least until official shoe size and garbage can properties are determined, is an invitation to playfulness as much as it is an invitation to play
You know: those draw-a-loop-around-the-word puzzles, where the word you're looking for is hidden in a forest of letters and might be there backwards or forwards or diagonally, even? Also called "Word Find." Want a more interactive illustration? Click on over to the Fundamental Physics of Space Word Search and Find for a quick taste of this rather remarkable game - considering all the educational uses it gets. Give yourself a few minutes, then come back here and click this.
Apple Crate
This
Four-Way Volleyball
But of course.
