Bar Crawling as a Gateway Event

Funspotter Noise E. Piranha and I were chatting as follows:

Noise: Last night, at Santarchy, my nephew, dressed as Old St Nick, proposed to his girlfriend, dressed as an elf.

Me: fantastic! did she accept?

Noise: she did. when santa proposes in front of 40 other santas, an elf dare not say no. here's a less-than-perfect photo. a landmark event, santa proposing to one of his elves. mrs. claus wasnt too happy about it

Me: bar crawling seems to be a great platform for many games - I think Urban Golf has that as its central premise (here, oddly enough, is a computer game version of Urban Golf, in which one, apparently, brings one's own)

Noise: i'm not a big fan of bar crawls in general... i only like the cacophony ones because we focus more on the crawl and less on the bar. i think we actually spent more time doing stuff in public than hanging out in bars.

Me: but the bar part is the excuse that keeps the party going

Noise: indeed it is... and the excuse to get many people involved who might otherwise consider it "too strange" i see the bar crawls as "gateway" events to get people comfortable with the idea of finding nontraditional ways to have fun and see how much fun they really can have.

Me, half-hour later, in retro- and intro-spect: the more you drink, the harder it is to see how much fun "you can really have." Because the drunker you get, the less connected you are to the "real you." In fact, for many of us, that's precisely why we get drunk - so we can get away from ourselves for a while. Most games do that for us, too - let us loosen the connection to our "real," mature, grown-up, selves.

Loosen, but not lose. That's the key difference. Loosen the connection, but not lose it. Loosen so we become larger than the selves we have come to think of as real.



from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith