FunCast - Getting Paid to Play

While you're listening to this week's Funcast here, think about the fact that it was written by someone who makes something like a living designing games, teaching people how to have more fun, and stuff like that. It will make it perhaps a bit more useful to know that it was such a person who observed, perhaps a bit bitterly:

Here we are, play/creating along with the fortunate few who have also managed to be paid to play, making brilliance in the depths of conference rooms and kiosks, and it's not fun! We may be involved, heart, soul and might, in the depths of play and the heights of creativity, we may even have exceeded our wildest dreams, but, any attempts to share our ecstasy with our benevolent result in our being further patronized. The fact is, we are being paid to play by the very people who are being paid not to. We must bless our patrons as they bless us, for they derive their joy elsewhere. Though we delightedly sweat buckets of brilliance into the daily pale of commerce, our patrons are off playing a truly different game where fun is measured profit and the promise of a plenitude of plenty. (You can read the whole article here).

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith