FunCast: Interview with Kris Bordessa, author, Team Challenges
Today's FunCast is an all too brief telephone (hence the poor sound quality) interview with Kris Bordessa, author of Team Challenges.
Kris impressed me a great deal during our short telephone encounter, and even more as I read her book. People who acknowledge the importance of helping kids develop social skills are all too rare. Even more rare, are people who, like Kris, are able to acknowledge the value of making team building fun.
Team Challenges is a rare gift - for children, youth groups, homeschoolers, families, and even for the few people in public schools who are able to rationalize the relevance of social skills to the development of academic skills. On behalf of the whole, Ms. Bordessa, I thank you.
Mozart was 250 on the 27th. To those of us who know him as "Wolfie," it is not so surprising to stumble across this abstract of a paper by Peter Presic. Here's a taste:
"Plato considered play as fundamental to art, and the leap as the primoridal form of play. Among Mozart's near contemporaries, the philosophers Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, Christian Gottfried Körner, and Hans-Georg Nögeli reflected on the importance of play in art. Though he does not mention Mozart explicitly, Schiller's description of the play-impulse is particularly important and has not before been fully mined for the insights it can give into musical practice. The concept of 'deep play' discussed by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz in the context of Balinese gambling is also helpful in this musical context. Play is dynamic and must "deepen" itself or cease. These insights are the starting point of a close discussion of the finale of Mozart's Piano Sonata in B-, K. 570."
Today's FunCast called "Computers and Toy Horses," is a kind of meditation on what I played with and how I played 55 years ago, and what I am playing with now, and how.
I dipped, momentarily, into the "Programming Language JOY" and quickly decided that, rather than unraveling the mysteries of this new code, I'd rather spend my quiet time imagining what I would like JOY, the programming language, to really be about.
Then I found myself looking at the sweet young internationally competitive jumprope team, "Jumping for Joy," who just happened to have an equally sweet collection of jumprope games.
This image is a painting. It's on a building in downtown Marion, Ohio. And it fools the veritable eye with its wonderfully intricate, three-dimension-seeming, Trompe d'Oeily illusions. Here, take a look for yourself.
Take a closer look, at, say, this part of the mural, with the young lady sitting on the globe hanging, gravity free, in an archway. It's just on the serious side of totally Oaqui! It's not just an artistic triumph. The artist's name is Eric Grohe. It's something you should know, if only to add one more person to your list of Defenders of the Playful.
It is a victory of no small significance. There are a lot of people who don't like to have their eyes played with, even for a second. Especially those who have strayed too long and too far from the Playful Path, if you know what I mean. They just can't seem to find delight in it all, in their eyes getting played with like that, their very vision, their understanding of what they are actually looking at, redefined. It says alot aboout the artist, but also something about Marion and whatever mysterious civic forces were engaged to pay for the whole thing.
Here is a version of a my Ricochet game, programmed by Bryan Monosmith for the HP calculator. Ricochet was my first computer game, and I was determined to create a computer-unique, two-person strategy game, just like checkers, except not at all. Jim Connely was the program designer, and we wound up making versions of the game for the TRS-80, and the Apple II, and Atari VCS, and even PC Junior. Oh, so many years ago.
I don't know if you can tell from the image - there are "canons" on all 4 corners of the grid. The ones on the right or the ones on the left are yours. On your turn, you can either move one of your pieces or shoot one of your canons. If a canon ball hits a piece, it ricochets off that piece, and turns that piece 90 degrees. If it hits another player's canon, you're one canon away from winning, unless it hits your own canon, in which case you're not.
Reflex doesn't have the two-player strategic canon blowing-up aspects of Ricochet. But it does play with the same basic fascination that led me to Ricochet - the whole bouncing predictably around thing.
There's even a board game called Ricochet Robot that plays with this very fascination. I mean, it's not even a computer game, and it's fun enough. And, just to complete the circle, there's a board game with lasers. Remember? Called "Deflexion."
Ricochet. Just one of those ideas that keeps on coming back.
Hugh McNally, from Street Play sent me a link to this article by Ana Veviana-Saurez of the Miami Herald. The article begins:
"The street is empty. Even on a balmy winter weekend, exquisite in the way only South Florida days can be at this time of year, the children are nowhere to be seen. There are no bikes, no scooters, no skates, no balls and gloves and pads, none of the toys I've long associated with the first weeks of a beginning year."
"But don't blame the kiddies...."
This article isn't just one of those "where are the games of yesteryear" laments. It is an astute observation of a fundamental change that has gone deep into childhood and the very roots of society. She continues:
"Post-Christmas playtime isn't what it used to be. The change, of course, didn't happen overnight. Playtime's move indoors was gradual and maybe, at least initially, imperceptible. But it was also as steady as the spread of kudzu, and now our children are about to become, if they're not already, the generation of muscular thumbs.
"Tree climbing? Who does that anymore? Hide-and-seek? I can't remember the last time I saw children play what was an all-time favorite game for me when all the cousins got together. Hopscotch, jump rope and stickball -- I suppose these have gone the way of eight-tracks and black-and-white TV shows.
"U.S. factory sales of consumer electronics rose to $125.9 billion, an 11 percent increase over 2004, and while this figure includes much more than stuff for children, it remains a good indication of where we're headed. More and more kids want scaled-down versions of adult cell phones, video cameras and digital cameras.
"No doubt this has the potential to send parents into paroxysms of worry, and for good reason. Hours in front of the screen mean less time in social interaction. Pushing buttons on a control translates into fewer push-ups and exercises. And constant visual stimulation -- well, that can only exacerbate our already short attention spans...."
I especially liked her conclusion:
"Toys reflect the culture, and we are a juiced-up society that can't unplug itself. We've forgotten how to be quiet. We don't know what it's like to be bored. We hate to be away from the constant stimulus that promises to keep us connected 24-7.
"And in the end it's that loss, that inability to be alone with ourselves, that should concern us most."
"Hacking is a playful act. In a primal sense, play is the investigation and experimentation with borders and combinations. It is how children establish a model of their surroundings and how animals explore relationships and social dynamics...Despite early, highly structured approaches to the sociability of computing in mainframe laboratories, computing has evolved a culture of iterative experimental hacking that is essentially playful."
And this, regarding playsh: "It is a narrative-driven 'object navigation' client, operating primarily on the semantic level, casting your hacking environment as a high-level, shell-based, social prototyping laboratory, a playground for recombinant network toys."
From the introduction to Mark Pesce's The Playful World, where we are awakened to the 21st century world of children's toys
"Although the Furby seems to have come from nowhere to capture the hearts of children worldwide, in reality, it incorporates everything we already know about how the future will behave. The world reacts to us - interacts with us - at a growing level of intelligence and flexibility. A century ago people marveled at the power and control of the electric light, which turned the night into day and ushered in a twenty-four hour world. Today we and our children are amazed by a synthetic creature possessing a dim image of our own consciousness and announcing the advent of a playful world, where the gulf between wish and reality collapses to produce a new kind of creativity.
"Toys can serve as points of departure for another voyage of exploration, a search for the world of our children's expectations. As much as a spear or wheel or astronaut figurine ever shaped a child's view of the world, these toys - because they now react to us - tell us that our children will have a different view of the 'interior' nature of the world, seeing it as potentially vital, intelligent, and infinitely transformable. The 'dead' world of objects before intelligence and interactivity will not exist for them, and, as they grow to adulthood, they will likely demand that the world remain as pliable as they remember from their youngest days. Fortunately, we are ready for that challenge. Just as the creative world of children has become manipulable, programmable and mutable, the entire fabric of the material world seems poised on the edge of a similar transformation. That, at essence, is the theme of this book, because where our children are already going, we look to follow."
I don't know really what this says for the children of the less affluent, or the more informed, or of non-participating cultures. I believe they will make their own toys - out of broken Furbys and bits of cell phones and last year's handheld computer games. I don't know if they will find a more responsive or more forboding world. But I do agree with one thing. As Mr. Pesce says so clearly: "where our children are already going, we look to follow."
Rushkoff on play, the workplace, fun and organizational transformation
Here, courtesy of Douglas Rushkoff, are two more pieces of playful pith. In the first, he talks about how following the Playful Path at work leads to revolutionary change in the nature of the workplace.
Establishing a playful career or company isn't as easy as it looks. It doesn't require expensive consultants, trips to the woods, or the reinvention of a company's culture based on some abstract ideal. But it does mean going against much of what we’ve been taught about competition and survival - not just in business school, but for the past five centuries! Still, just as people have stopped relating as individuals to their brands and opted instead to become members of brand cultures, producers in a renaissance era must come to think of their companies as collaborative minisocieties, whose underlying work ethic will ultimately be expressed in the culture they create for the world at large.
In the next, Rushkoff talks about the fun of work. The inherent fun. And why, for example, a "...foosball table is not the sign of a fun place to work."
In their crude efforts to make work more fun, however, most companies are missing the point. Employers are busy installing foosball tables, hiring chefs, and building gyms for their increasingly disgruntled employees, but these are just ways of trying to make a bad situation more tolerable. (or to coax employees into spending long hours away from home) A foosball table is not the sign of a fun place to work; it's a glaring symbol that work is not fun and employees need a break. Why would they rather be playing foosball than doing whatever it is they've been hired to do?
Today's FunCast is an all too brief telephone (hence the poor sound quality) interview with Kris Bordessa, author of Team Challenges. 
This image
Take a closer look, at, say, this part of the mural
Here