Learning to have fun - part five - creating fun

The easiest way to develop the art of making things fun is to start with things that are meant to be fun in the first place. Since games and toys are purportedly for that very purpose, they are the best tools to use in your exploration of fun-making. I concluded The Well-Played Game with a semi-poetic, long-winded, in-depth exploration of that very process, and called it: "A Million Ways to Play Marbles, At Least."

A next step would be to make games from things that aren't meant to be either games or toys. For example, you can make a game you know out of things that really have nothing to do with that game, as in Found Object Crosswords. For yet another example, see what I consider to be one of my conceptual masterworks in that very area: Found Object Olympics.

Then there's making games out of things that aren't games at all. This is close to the ultimate way to create fun, generally engaged in by those who find themselves on what I seem to be calling the Playful Path. For an especially tasty example, there's dessert-sharing, which is actually a game-like, playful thing friends and families might do together at a restaurant, ordering a bunch of different desserts, and then giving each other tastes, as requested. Which could lead one almost inexorably to a game of Dessert Roulette.

Then there's making something fun out of something that isn't necessarily fun at all, as in the Piano Stairs experiment which launched this whole series of posts. To my knowledge, one of the finest examples of this is a device called the Play Pump, which beautifully blends the dizzy delights of the playground roundabout with the more arduous and basic need to bring clean water to the village.

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith