"Quote of the Day"

"I used to think that the goal of bowling was missing both gutters simultaneously."

Dr. Bryan Alexander.

Funcast: The Origins of Volleyball According to the Oaqui

Today's FunCast, brought to you courtesy of the Oaqui, wends the winding ways of history for evidence of the origins of Volleyball.

See also this.

"Why Should I Play with My Kids?"

I found an article titled "Why Should I Play with My Kids? by Mark Brandenburg MA, CPCC (check your pop-up window prevention settings before opening links). It begins:

"My son came running around the corner of the house. It was just as I had hoped. I gave a wild, primitive yell as I sprang out at him. He hit the ground quickly, trying to avoid my grasp. I reached down and tagged him easily, and the burden of being "it" was transferred once again.

"As I searched for a new hiding place in front of the house, my wife called from the front door. "Mark, it's eight o'clock, the kids have to come in!"

"I was a bit dumbfounded. We'd been playing tag for two hours.

"In those two hours, I'd been unaware of time. There were no worries about projects at work, what time the kids needed to go to bed, or whether we had enough money to last the month. My focus had been on playing tag, and nothing else. And when your focus is complete, you've entered a state that has no limitations. Your joy and passion can come alive, and your children's can, too."

...and concludes:

"Research has shown that kids laugh about one hundred times a day, and adults laugh about six times. Our kids are showing us something. Isn't it time we started learning how to be playful again?"

And the neat thing is, we know exactly where we can find the best teachers.

Castle Keep - a Keeper

Castle Keep is a tile placement game of luck, strategy and significant fun, for 2 to 4 players, ages 8 and up.

There are 90 cardboard tiles (thick, colorful). There are three different kinds of tiles (corner pieces called "towers"), side pieces ("walls"), and central pieces ("keeps"). There are three different shapes of corner and side pieces (straight, zigzag and curvy), and three different colors. You start with any four of them. Your goal: build a complete castle of 9 tiles, with all the outside, adjacent tiles of the same color or shape, and a "keep" whose color matches any tile in the castle. Your other goal: destroy your opponent's castle. Accomplish either, and you win the game.

OK, so destroying an opponent's castle is a little harder than building your own. Well, it should be. You have to have a wall or corner tile that exactly matches (color and shape), and two Keep tiles of the same color as your opponent's Keep.

You might want to be careful about building a castle whose walls are both the same color and shape as their towers. Granted, it's a lot prettier. But there's a price for beauty: if one piece gets attacked, and adjacent pieces are the same color and shape, they are also, well, shall we say "obliterated?"

The two-player version is just different enough (you only build one castle, and try to be the player to complete it) to make it, well, different - different enough to make you have to find a different strategy in order to win. Which makes it like having two different games. And then there's a solitaire version. And then there are variations.

Designed by Richard D. Reece, Castle Keep has just enough strategic elements to entice the serious game player, just enough luck to keep everyone, adults and kids, from getting too serious to know when they're having fun, and is just long enough (around 20 minutes) to keep people deeply and happily engaged.

A definite keeper of Major FUN proportions.

A claimer (I was going to day "disclaimer," but it seemed too negative): rumors have it that Gamewright, the manufacturer of this certifiably Major FUN Award-Winning game, has contracted with Major FUN, him- (and my-) self, to produce a new card game actually designed by the aforementioned. Though these rumors are rumored to be true, this exceptionally good news for all fun kind has in no way impacted the impartiality and integrity of this reviewer. Castle Keep is a game worth keeping, no matter who manufactures it. And that's the troof.

Ping Pong Punk'd

I found this on the ever-useless repository of silliness known as "Milk and Cookies."

It might take a while to download, but it's worth every megabit. It's a video of two, evidently champion ping pong players going beyond, well beyond, the pale of tournament competition.

I have no idea what led these two to this ping pongly apotheosis. I think it might have been the guy in red who started it all. But the blue dude was there for him all the way, getting the ball back to him no matter where he went.

The announcers clearly thought it was funny. The audience seemed to be more than adequately delighted. Me, I found it downright inspirational.

I can tell you why, but I'd have to quote myself, which is always a questionable practice. The following comes from my article on CoLiberation:

The central experience that led me to write my book The Well-Played Game was, in fact, a game of ping pong between my friend Bill and myself. Let me describe it to you, thereby exemplifying the selfsame example of the kind of experience I hope you will also learn:

"My good friend Bill was and is so much better of a player than I that there was actually no reason for us to try to play a 'real' game. Playing for points was clearly pointless. So, we decided to just see how long we could keep a volley going. It was a perfect challenge for each of us. For Bill, just getting the ball to hit my paddle was an exercise worthy of his years of "pongish" mastery. After half the night of this, we managed to sustain an almost infinite volley. We actually lost count."

Know what I mean?

I Like Drawing™ - cont'd

Art Stevenson, the same charming fellow who has his playfully pictorial way with trash has developed an entire website of whimsy for our collective inspiration and amusement.

Of the many inspiring art-for-fun and fun-for-art exhibits described on his site, one of my favorites is the "pictoplasmic colouring and activity room. The artist explains: "Pictoplasma invited I Like Drawing™, Jon Burgerman and Dennis Tyfus to create a colouring and activity room experience! The drawings covered 70 square meters and for the duration of the exhibition the public were invited to colour it in."

Everything about it invites fun - the wacky drawings, all those people coming to an exhibition and finding themselves taking part in its creation, coloring between or beyond the lines, finding, in a museum, the genuine and unpretentious permission to play.

FunCast: Introducing the Oaqui

Today's FunCast introduces the mystical incantations of the mysterious Oaqui. The mysterious Oaqui communicate only by email. Is the Oaqui a male or female, a child or old person? Is there only one Oaqui? These are things we shall perhaps never know.

In this transmission, the Oaqui shares a short, exemplary myth, called "Two Players."

The rest, no matter how hard you try to eff, must remain ineffable, at least until the next FunCast.

Telephone Pictionary

Telephone Pictionary is a combination of the paper-and-pencil, graphic version of the Surrealist game known as "Exquisite Corpse," along with a bit of the story-telling version of the aforesaid - only much simpler.

The rules:

"...It's best played with at least 7 (no fewer than 5) people, and an odd number of people is somewhat better than an even number.

1. Every player takes a piece of paper and writes a sentence at the top, such as 'It's the end of the world.' Then every player passes the sheet to their left.
2. The next person reads the sentence to themselves and draws a picture of the sentence below the sentence.
3. Then that next person folds over the paper so only their drawing is visible and passes it to their left.
4. The next receiving person examines the picture and writes a sentence describing it below the picture.
5. Then that person folds over the paper so only their sentence is visible and passes it to their left.
6. Continue until you get your own paper back."

See, for example, "Six Penguins."

From Melissa D. Binde

"Play is our free connection to pure possibility"

In case you need yet another validation for the fun you're having, Hara Estroff Marano's article "The Power of Play" is a treasure worth cherishing. Here are some highlights:

"Most of us think of adult play as respite or indulgence, but having fun is no trivial pursuit. In fact, it's crucial to put mental creativity, health and happiness...

"But there is also new evidence that play does much more. It may in fact be the highest expression of our humanity, both imitating and advancing the evolutionary process. Play appears to allow our brains to exercise their very flexibility, to maintain and even perhaps renew the neural connections that embody our human potential to adapt, to meet any possible set of environmental conditions.

"...today we often use our leisure time not necessarily to play, but in performance of various sorts of work, whether it's time at the health spa or artists' retreats.

"...It isn't even clear whether we are playing more or less than we used to. If we're playing more, it doesn't feel like it. Just in the past 30 years, there has been a cultural shift reemphasizing work and getting ahead.

"...Through play, contends psychiatrist Lenore Terr, M.D., clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco, 'we get control over the world. We get to manipulate symbols, control the outcome of events.' Terr's own now-classic work with children traumatized by physical and sexual abuse demonstrates how clearly play is necessary to mental health.

"In the aftermath of trauma children lose their flexibility. They play, but their play is obsessive; they stay stuck, repeating the traumatic episode endlessly. 'Post-traumatic play demonstrates that if we don't find a way out of difficult situations, we will play much of our lives over and over again.'

"Play is an opening to our very being, Terr observes in Beyond Love and Work: Why Adults Need to Play. It permits us emotional discharge, but in a way that carries little risk. In fact, she says, play is not just an activity--it's a state of mind, and 'all the mental activity of play comes at you sideways.' Therein lies its value: the mental activity is never the direct goal. Terr uses play therapy as a way to allow children--and adults, who often remain frozen in patterns of play originating in fearful experiences in childhood--to create new endings for their experience.

"...Play, argues Brian Sutton-Smith, Ph.D., is more than an attitude. And more than an action. While it encompasses development, it's not about that--it's about pure unalloyed enjoyment. Professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, Sutton-Smith is still the ranking dean of play studies. He considers play an alternative cultural form, like art and music.

"...We play because it reflects the brains we have and the cultures we live in. By and large, he points out, 'the connections in the brain fade away unless used. We know that early stimulation of children leads to higher cognitive scores. Playful stimulation probably hits all kinds of synaptic possibilities. It is all make-believe and all over the map. The potentiality of the synapses and the potentiality of playfulness are a beautiful marriage.'

"When adults play, notes Sutton-Smith, citing a series of Dutch studies of video-game playing, their memory is better. They are cognitively more capable. And they are happier.

"...How we play is related, in myriad ways, to our core sense of self. Play is an exercise in self-definition; it reveals what we choose to do, not what we have to do. We not only play because we are. We play the way we are. And the ways we could be. Play is our free connection to pure possibility."

Archery Golf

Archery Golf is, apparently, currently played in Italy and Cuba. Go figure. It is in deed and in fact a combination of archery and golf, and hence the descriptive name. It is also, at least in essence, a paradigm of the Junkyard Sportly mind. As explained so vividly in the following:

"Scottish many years ago enriched the pleasure to go for a pleasant walk in woods by carrying under their arm bow and arrows, which had been already used with not actually playing aims, stopping sometimes to dart an arrow: to a grass lump, a tree log, a root or only aiming high trajectory in the next of a grassland.

"This play was named "roving" (literally "to wander") and Archery Golf takes inspiration from this ancient activity adjusting little the quality of targets but keeping the spirit intact: living and enjoying the environment that you can find without leaving unpleasant tracks of your passage.

"Archery Golf is a play made by darting arrows towards original targets, which have been distributed along the path that has been adapted following territory characteristics. Bows and arrows are rigorously simple and wooden. Arrows have a garish fletching with the aim to brake and make the trajectory predictable, above all for what it concerns parabolic darts towards a centre, which is marked by a flag: just a bearing-pole with flag, such as for the classic Golf, where instead of a hole in the ground in the centre is marked a circle with a diameter of some meters."

Clearly, Archery Golf is not one of your casual, play anywhere, nobody could possibly get hurt, kind of sports. On the other hand, for any group that has ever wandered with long bow and loaded quiver amidst the rills and meadows of a sufficiently vast and clearly unpopulated land, Archery Golf is an invitation to significant play and many pure flights of delight.

Pronoia

"Pronoia," explains Michael Quinion, "is the suspicion that the universe is a conspiracy on your behalf, the opposite of the popular sense of paranoia. It seems to have been invented by the sociologist Fred Goldner in an article in Social Problems in 1982, in which he defined it as 'the delusion that others think well of one,' the unreasoning belief that your superiors think you are indispensable, that your colleagues adore you, and that you are doing brilliantly in your work."

The term was taken up by Rob Brezny in his book Pronoia is the Antitode for Paranoia: How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. Rob takes the idea of Pronoia seriously. And beautifully. See his descriptions of Unabashed Pronoia Thereapy. Here's one of his 19 suggestions:

"18. Those who explore pronoia often find they have a growing capacity to help people laugh at themselves. While few arbiters of morality recognize this skill as a mark of high character, I put it near the top of my list. In my view, inducing people to take themselves less seriously is a supreme virtue."

Yes, even though pronoia might be as unfounded and irrational as paranoia, if you have a choice of irrationalities, I say, go pro. Now.