More questions? Read the Toccer Times, a weblog that chronicles the development of the game and even more important, the spirit and energy of Ron Bronson, Jr., its inventor, wherein Ron explains:
"I love hockey, because at any given time the puck could be down the ice and two players could combine for a one-timer or one players will break away for a goal.
I love football, because of the physical play and the awesome feeling of scoring a touchdown - or intercepting a player and running it back for a score.
I love baseball, because chicks dig the longball.
I love basketball, because the skill it takes to make no-look passes or the confidence that your shot halfway down the court is going in, keeps us tuning it for more.
I love soccer, because nothing is more awesome than seeing a player get stuffed on an awesome save by the keeper.
I love lacrosse, because its physical - yet requires amazing skill to control the ball and to score.
I love tennis, because of hard serves and the years it takes to learn how to place the ball right where you want it to go.
But most of all, I love TOCCER because it COMBINES ALL OF THEM but has a style and a feeling of its own."
The rules? Well, they're evolving, as is probably everybody who gets to play the game. Here's part of the most recent version: "The ball can be dribbled on the racquet or kicked. Generally, players are not allowed to pick up the ball out of the air. Instead, they may only pick the ball up when it is dead or they make the ball dead by placing their racquet on top of the ball while it is on the ground to make it dead. The exceptions to this rule are players known as the rover and sweeper. Each team has one of these players apiece. Sweepers are defensive specialists, who may use their hands at will - but may not carry the ball for more than three seconds at a time. Sweepers are also prohibited from crossing the line that divides the field down the middle. (Called the mid line) Rovers are subject to the same rules, except they are not restricted to just the defensive end of the field."
However it evolves - how complex or elegant the rules become - as long as there are sports to be combined, and rules to be invented, and its inventor is around to share his energy and delight, Toccer is a unique invitation to play and grace, and a vivid manifestation of the art of junkyard sportscraft, and all therein implied.
A few years ago I helped evolve a game that’s a natural for anyone with a mismatched bunch of stuff lying around the house – certainly a snap for most American households. I began by wandering all over my own mismatched home, garden and garage earlier in the day, collecting a pile of both ordinary and not-so-ordinary household items; i.e., light bulbs, clothes hangers, unused electrical and plumbing supplies, yard décor, odd clothing, shoes, plastic bags, intriguing looking kitchen utensils (colanders and wire whisks are especially useful), assorted odd containers, various pieces of cords, ropes, hoses and other household items, basically anything that looks like it might be worthy subject for what’s to follow.
I then divide the objects into various piles of approximately the same size – one pile for maybe every 5 or 6 people you’re expecting – and put each pile into a bag. When it’s time for the activity, I find a creative way to get folks into groups of the approximate size and give each group one of the bags of stuff. I tell them their mission is to get together with their collection of junk and figure out how to use all of it for a new invention which solves a basic need of humanity or whatever. Only rule, if it is one, is they have to use everything. Or I suppose they could throw what they don’t want out a window when I’m not looking. I give them 30 to 60 minutes to work out their challenge - depending on how much fun they’re having doing it - and provide them with pens, tape, string and anything else they want that I can locate.
I also invite them to devise a skit showing off their invention to the rest of the group .. this may take the form of an “infomercial” or trade show display or street huckster or whatever scenario they want. I suggest leaving it as open as possible to allow the creativity and humor to flow. It’s always amazing what ideas the group devises and the humor that comes especially through their sales efforts. Oh, and the “audience” can vote unofficially for their favorite skit with their applause and other sounds of support or criticism – which pretty much happens naturally. This is always a hit with all age groups – usually a highlight of gatherings.
I do find it’s more fun for me collecting the stuff and visualizing how it may be used than it is putting it all away the next day, but it’s worth it all the while. Shows you how much junk you have lying around the place, too. Maybe the next logical step is the nearest donation drop – except you may want it again next time. I’ve even been known to keep the stuff in its own boxes in the garage awaiting the next party.
Topobo is "...a 3D constructive assembly system embedded with kinetic memory, the ability to record and playback physical motion. Unique among modeling systems is Topobo’s coincident physical input and output behaviors. By snapping together a combination of Passive (static) and Active (motorized) components, people can quickly assemble dynamic biomorphic forms like animals and skeletons with Topobo, animate those forms by pushing, pulling, and twisting them, and observe the system repeatedly play back those motions. For example, a dog can be constructed and then taught to gesture and walk by twisting its body and legs. The dog will then repeat those movements and walk repeatedly."
Yup. Another wonderful, wacky toy from those endlessly playful folk at the MIT Media Lab. You know - high tech, experimental, looking like a lot of fun, only you can't have it.
This one, the invention of Hayes Solos Raffle and Amanda J. Parkes, seems to border on the exceptional - even for the Media Lab. Don't get too distracted by the exceptionally clear and entertainingly scored video. And don't get confused by all the wires (after all, it's a prototype). Focus rather on how remarkably easy it is to figure out how to make it work. Note how inviting it is. How it makes you want to experiment and fool around just so you can see things locomote. How what you're doing is something very much like programming, but so elegant, so intuitive, that it doesn't matter what else it's like at all at all.
This is not just the future of toys we're seeing. It's a glimpse into the future of childhood.
"The physical features of a primary school playground - dimensions, textures, furnishings, etc. - are incorporated and adapted for their own purposes by children in their free play. Youngsters create an intricate network of usage, play-lines invisible but known to every child at the school. Unfortunately, the general adult indifference to children's playlore often results in a lack of consultation with the playground's users when well-meaning but ignorant 'landscaping' of a school playground is undertaken."
Aside from the various implications about playground design and supervision, I was once more reasssured to be reminded how, given opportunity and necessity, inspringly junkish kids' play can get.
"Although she [Dorothy Howard] noted that ‘adult supervision of school playgrounds had increased’in the 1950s (Howard, 1960a: 166), it is clear from Howard’s research and from the accounts of those who were children at the time that youngsters were permitted considerable freedom to play as they chose, within certain minimal limits of order and safety. Playground equipment was almost non-existent, but children made use of trees, benches, the corners of shelter-sheds and the hard asphalt – the latter advantageous for knucklebones, ball games, skipping, hopping and endless varieties of chasing and hiding games."
Snorta is even simpler than the rules make it out to be. And more fun. There's a deck of 100 animal cards. The deck is divided equally between 4-8 players. Players take turns exposing the top card in their pile. When cards match, the first player to make the sound of the other player's animal wins.
Other player's animal? Well, see, there's a bag full of plastic animals. Really nicely sculpted and painted cartoonishly funny-looking animals that live in a cloth drawstring bag. Each player picks, and that becomes the player's animal. And that animal gets hidden in a similarly nicely sculpted barn-like, doghouse-looking thing. So you have to remember everybody's animal. Which isn't so easy - especially when you're looking at cards with other animals printed on them.
If you lose, you have to pick up all the cards that the other player has already turned over. Depending on how long it's been since a match has been drawn, that pile can get punishingly large. So the tension builds. And the excitement mounts. And the laughter frequently turns into something approximating hysteria.
And then there's these occasional "swap" cards hidden in the animal card deck, which let you draw a different animal from the animal sack. Just in case people actually get too good at remembering the animal you used to be.
The mechanics of the game are subtle enough to make you want to play again and again. Even though a match can only involve two players at a time, all players are engaged. If you're not one of the players involved in a match, your pile just grows one card larger - making the possibility of success next round even that much more enticing. If you have a match fight with someone with a large pile, and you lose, it makes the loss that much more punishing. Combine the visual and memory challenge with the sheer silliness of people making animal noises at each other, and you get Snorta - a MajorFUN Award-winning party game that's competitive enough to take seriously, and silly enough not to care. Snorta is an ideal family game - one that adults can enjoy (our Tasting group ranged in age from 7-63, including a couple of advanced teens) as much as their kids.
I taught elementary school in the 60s. During a brief few months, when I was more free from supervision than I knew, I developed a sixth grade curriculum where everything was taught through play. I mean everything: math, reading, science, social studies, you name it. We made up our own arithmetic. We made machines that measured thickness and softness. We created our own "foreign" language. For me, most of the kids, and a few of the parents, it was learning as it was meant to be - fun, experimental, creative, playful. For the "high achievers," and especially their parents, who were worried about things like getting into the academic stream in high school, not so much. Near the end of the term, the principal explained this to me rather vividly. It was the only time in my career that I received a negative evaluation. And I'm still proud of it.
Which maybe explains why, almost 40 years later, I find myself feeling so significantly smug when I discover sites like Project Interactivate, which offers children a collection of Java-based virtual toys that are designed for experimentation and, well, play. For example, there's this delicious spinner that allows you to change the proportion and number of targets.
The amount of fun varies significantly from activity to activity. Like the spinner activity, those that are most intuitive and simple tend to be the most fun. Others, like the "Rabbits and Wolves" activity where you can play with the parameters of a simulation of an ecological system of rabbits, wolves and grass; are more complex, but once you really start playing with them, prove to be exemplary invitations to fun and learning.
Yes. And again yes. The sseparation between learning and fun is artificial and unnecessary. Vindication is sweet. The increase in the use of conceptual toys for learning even sweeter.
They call themselves Cyclecide. On first glance, they're a bunch of clowns riding around on tricked-up bicycles. On second glance, yup, they're still a bunch of clowns.
"The Bike Rodeo is a touring, punk rock bicycle amusement park and showcase of modified bicycles, such as the tall bike (two bicycle frames welded together), the bicycle chopper, the fire breathing Chupacabra, the bottle rocket armed Homeland Security bike and many more..."Too dumb to die!" is the motto of these heavy pedal maniacs."
Quote from Laughing Squid
Their goal in life? Spreading the "...message of the Reconstituted Bike with freakish 'alter-cycles', messy klown makeup, and beer. Lots of beer."
Things are not always fun or easy for the Cycleciders. A blog from Summer Burkes shares both the nitty and the gritty. Sometimes, grittier than you'd think, like "...this little thing where a truck driver fell asleep at the wheel and we got rear-ended by a semi and it put the brakes on everything. Everyone's mostly OK so don't worry. OK?"
OK. Not worried. But appreciating. Definitely appreciating.
Best played outdoors, but can be played in a large hall with obstacles set up.
Several people are blindfolded, form a chain by putting hands on shoulders of player in front of them. The last player in the chain is not blindfolded, and must guide everyone by giving directions "right", "left", "forward", "back".
Have them go around an obstacle course, up and down hills, around trees, and so forth. You can also have caterpillar races, with two or more teams.
I've played something similar, only with partners. The caterpillar variation provides a rather delicious opportunity for spiraling chaos.
The Party Directory, wherein the Party Games collection can be found, is an admirably deep resource - especially for baby showers and, oddly enough, relay races. I haven't figured out the connection, yet, but I have several fascinating conjectures.
Probably one of the clearest, earliest, and most obvious manifestations of the playful human mind can be found wherever you find the unnecessary - the unnecessarily beautiful quilt or the unnecessarily intricately carved knife handle or the unnecessarily multifunctional can opener. It's as if we're not really giving in to necessity, but rather going it one better. As if we're saying "OK, if I have to do it, I'll do it, but I'll do it better than I have to, I'll make it more beautiful than it needs to be. I'll make an art of it. I'll add needless functionality.
Hence my fascination with this collection of shoe lacing methods." Shoe lacing. I mean, how many ways are there to tie shoes, really? There's the one you're taught. And then there are the 22 described on Ian's Shoelace Site. And then there are, "As an example, take a shoe with 6 pairs of eyelets. Feed through the top left eyelet from either top or bottom (2 ways), then through one of 10 remaining eyelets from either top or bottom (x 20 more ways), then 9 remaining eyelets (x 18 more ways), and so on until the top right eyelet (x 2 more ways). This results in 2 x 20 x 18 x 16 x 14 x 12 x 10 x 8 x 6 x 4 x 2 x 2 ways, a staggering total of almost 15 BILLION ways of running the lace!"
Alas, I cannot hide myself from the allure of drinking games. It's not the drink, don't you know, that drawns me ever thither. It's the silliness. And the repeatedly delightful discovery that much fun and insobriety is to be had from these games, even (and perhaps especially) when sober. Thus my joy at having discovered The Webtender Index of drinking games.
I link my way over to "collections" to the first site, apparently called "Beer Drinking Games, and from thence to the game of Beirut, as depicted herein, is a case in significant point. At first blush, the rules are deceptively simple. Until you read them or someone tries to explain them to you. This seems to be a common and much-beloved characteristic of drinking games. Here are a few exemplary:
BOUNCE RULE - You can bounce a ball into the other teams cup, however once it bounces they can swat it away. If the ball lands in the cup it counts as 2 cups. Possession goes to the receiving team.
GOAL TENDING - Swatting the ball. If you swat the ball away before it hits the table or a cup the other team gets another shot or a cup is taken away, depending on how close the shot is. Usually decided by both teams at the time of the foul.
RICOCHET - If a ball bounces off an object other then the table (i.e. a player from the other team) while trying to swat at it AND goes into a cup, it counts. Sucks when this happens!
And the deleriously sexist, unabashedly adolescent:
BLOW RULE - ONLY WOMEN CAN BLOW! If a ball lands in a cup and is spinning around, a girl can try to blow the ball out of the cup and it won't count if it comes out. Yeah!
Scoff you may. But fun it is. Fun of what one might even call a junkyardly sort.
For a significant collection of the aforementioned, see also Drinkity
Q: What would happen if you combined soccer with tennis, hockey and basketball, and maybe lacrosse, with a bit of football thrown in and around?
Topobo
Snorta
Alas, I cannot hide myself from the allure of drinking games. It's not the drink, don't you know, that drawns me ever thither. It's the silliness. And the repeatedly delightful discovery that much fun and insobriety is to be had from these games, even (and perhaps especially) when sober. Thus my joy at having discovered