John Taylor Gatto’s article, The Curriculum of Play, is visionary in its scope, and deeply validating for anyone who believes in the kind of education that takes place when children are free and at play. Perhaps I am so drawn to it because I’ve spent so much of my life, since 1971 and the publication of my Interplay Games Curriculum, and the years of teaching and training that led up to it. Nevertheless, dear Deep Funster, I decided to assume that at least some of Gatto’s article would be as affirming to your beliefs as it was to mine. I am not in total agreement. But if I were, it probably wouldn’t be as much fun to read.

To give you a taste, I pith it, as follows:

• Organized play, the kind that happens under supervision on school playgrounds, misses almost all the values real play has to teach. It isn’t play at all; it has no danger, it has no unpredictable component.
• Whatever else it is, play is freedom. It expresses a wordless joy at being alive.
• All real play has a meaning that transcends the immediate needs of existence, almost as if it existed to remind us that rational calculations about the use of our limited time fall woefully short of what our spirits need to thrive.
• True play is easy to spot because the players are intensely involved, totally absorbed, displaying a high degree of concentration.
• Freedom is the first characteristic of real play, but rules play a larger part in play than in everyday life – without a dedication to the rules (even if those are self-imposed rules), the illusion of play is lost.
• Play teaches many other things we expect to find in the educated, things which strike one by their absence in common forms of schooling. Play teaches empathy, how to endure, how to have leisure, adventure, independence, self-reliance, and more.
• Notice that the tests of play are all performance tests; none are assisted by paper and pencil. In the most valuable forms of play – solitary play – these tests can only be graded by the player. Competition against oneself is the great secret to having a productive and interesting life. Those who learn that lesson become immune to boredom, armored against vicissitude. But the only way to possess this secret is by playing.

See also:

Of all the many flavors of fun I’ve so far tasted, there’s one that doesn’t seem to have any particular flavor at all. Plain fun is what you might call it. Just plain fun. Fun with no particularly redeeming quality: not necessarily community-building, or body-building, or brain-building; not especially spiritual or transformational or educational; not significantly rational, or emotional, or social, even. Just your plain, every day, ordinary. Just something you happen to enjoy, for the moment. The sun. The breeze. On your skin. In your hair. A joke. A story. A book. Running down a hill. Blowing dandelions. Finding a bird’s egg. Watching a flower. Trying to listen to the slow, serene, slime-smoothed slide of a snail. A child’s touch, a game of solitaire, a magic trick, stacking coins, flipping cards.

This kind of fun is common to all flavors of fun. It’s the medium in which all other flavors of fun gel. It’s just fun. It has nothing to do with anything else. And yet, like all flavors of fun, it heals, it brings us back from wherever we were to where we actually are. It brings us, as they say, back to our senses, to our bodies. It brings back wonder, awe, peace, fascination, love, stillness, harmony. Pure, plain fun.

This is the flavor of fun that, now that I play for life rather than for a living, I have come to savor. O, I love every taste of fun, every taste: the taste of fun when it’s loving, in deed I do; and the taste of fun of the healing kind, and the learning kind, and all those kinds of fun that build us into more completely human beings. But lately I’ve come to appreciate the gift, the simple presence of fun, the glorious wonder of being able to have fun, feel fun, of any flavor. Fun. Just fun.

“I don’t need to talk about serious games, and gamification, and the physical value of games, and games as releasing endorphins. I think that fun is enough. I think that if we have fun, allow ourselves to have fun, to define what is fun is for us, we don’t need to have another purpose. Fun itself is a guide to live fully in life; to bring your whole self into the world.”

Bernard De Koven

Elder Play. Around 41:40, track 02

I’ve been wanting to tell you about Havi Brooks ever since I bumbled my way to her blog, Fluent Self. I’m still fathoming her blog, so I really can’t say anything intelligent about her, except that she is unique, deeply playful, and playfully deep. Luckily, she’s written a page about herself.

Filled with good intentions, and thoughtfully making it possible for you to read what she says about herself without having to go to the extremes of clicking on a link, I only partially abashedly copy and paste below:

Trilingual. But silent! On permanent email sabbatical. Obsessed with patterns. Eccentric. Smart-ass.

Things you believe in.

Love. Love is awesome. And it’s inside you which is kind of weird but also really liberating because it’s there whenever you need it.

The generosity of strangers.

The often hard-to-access inner ability to really, truly get to know yourself — with all of your stuck and pain — and like yourself anyway.

Things you don’t believe in.

Mt. Hood.

Things you wish you believed in.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster. Pastafarianism has a certain appeal.

One thing people might not know about you.

I am extremely passionate about beer.

One thing people probably don’t want to know.

I dislike the word “diphthong” with a passion. In fact, even typing it is creeping me out.

One thing no one should know.

My filing system used to be organized by chakras.

How long have you been doing this?

Oh man. March, 2005. In Berlin. This site went live that August.

I started regularly posting my writing here in June 2008 — see the outrageously packed archives.

In 2010, we opened a secret playground in Portland, and now we’ve expanded into a march larger space called Stompopolis which is the MOST MAGICAL PLACE IN THE WORLD, and that’s where I work/play.

I have no idea what you’re talking about most of the time!

Selma is my business partner. She’s a duck.

The Schmoppet is a schmoppet. He’s purple, charming, and as extroverted as his vocabulary is limited, which is to say: very.See the video of him up at the Frolicsome Bar (Facebook).

Hoppy House is my house. It’s extra-hoppy. Like an IPA. Or a trampoline.

Guns N Rollers is the roller derby team that we’ve sponsored for several years.

Because mindfulness and knocking people down is such a winning combination.

I make up a lot of words. See the glossary for a partial list of Havi-isms.

Life philosophy?

1. Napping is good.
2. So are pretty much all forms of quiet, intentional, guilt-free navel-lint-contemplation.
3. Use your powers for good. Live by what you teach. When you can’t, forgive yourself.

I like it best when laughter hits me “accidentally on purpose.” I like to teach silly games – games that make people laugh. I like the sound of that laughter, how it seems to take people by surprise even though the whole reason they are playing together is so that they can laugh like that together. I like funny fun – the fun of being funny together – that comes when people try to sit on each other’s laps, and don’t quite succeed. That laugh that releases us from the fear of failure because we do fail, and we don’t care, because we fall into laughter. Not laughter at. Laughter with. With the silliness of the game. With each other.

Sometimes, even when we play silly games, the laughter takes on a different tone, like, well, love. We’re playing a game like Hug Tag (where to be safe you have to be hugging someone) and amid all the screaming glee there’s a laugh that sounds like a celebration of the discovery that we are, in fact, safe in each other’s arms. Even when we’re playing hide and seek (my favorite variation being Sardines where when you find someone you hide with them) there’s a laugh like that, a laugh celebrating community.

Lately, I’ve been exploring what you might call “spiritual laughter,” but it is actually no more spiritual than any laughter that springs from joy and love and community. I play a game where the whole idea is for people to bless each other. Each blessing is supposed to be as heartfelt as a blessing can be, but, at the same time, even more of a blessing than the previous blessing. Someone says something like “may the fruits of your labor never spoil.” And then the next person says: “may the fruits of your labor not only never spoil, but may they be available at a grocery store near you.” And then the next: “And may they be non-GMO.” And people laugh. Meaningfully.

There are a lot of us – a lot more than you’d guess – who are devoting our lives to helping to make the world a little more fun. Some of us are loud mouth performers – actors, clowns, speakers, writers, teachers, innovators, motivators – who spend enormous amounts of energy to lead people into play. Then there are artists and designers, scholars and philosophers, therapists, social workers, youth leaders, occupational and recreational therapists, playground leaders and designers, playworkers, nurses, clowns – all of whom, in their separate, self-invented ways, deeply devoted to the one, improbable purpose of making the world just a little more fun. Some are content to make just one person’s world more fun (and they are often the most effective). They joke with the cashier, smile at babies, or just walk around singing or humming – casting an aura of happiness that they may or may not be actually experiencing – just to make things fun. Others are not happy until they’ve made their entire neighborhood, their community, their companies, their culture more fun. Even if it’s only a little more fun. Many of them remain not so happy, not having made enough change, not having brought fun to enough people. And there are those of us who don’t even dare to think of what we do as professional. We play. We are playful. We like to make people smile. We like to help people have fun.

Thing is, we are, most of us, ignorant of each other’s efforts. Because of the way fun is, and the way our societies typically think fun is, and the way our professions or non-professions are so defined, so distinct. So we all think of ourselves as the only people who are fighting the good fight, so we all find ourselves confined to some obscure profession (hospital clowns, fun therapists, laughter leaders) or even more obscure corner of more recognized professions (caregiver, landscape architect, administrative assistant). So we don’t even recognize each other, don’t even realize that we are each totally devoted to bringing more fun to the world, to making some little part of world a little more fun. So we don’t learn from each other, we don’t share visions, tricks of the trade, hard-gained experiences, wisdom.

But what if we did? What if we really looked outside of chosen professions, of whatever path we have beaten or been beaten into taking? What if we recognized each other’s gifts, each other’s commitment, each other’s accomplishments? Might it just be possible that we could really succeed? Really make the world more fun? A lot?

“…this intimate exhibition of author and motivational speaker Kevin Carroll‘s personal travel memorabilia…focuses on Kevin’s collection of hand-crafted balls from across the world. The balls’ materials, construction techniques and various states of wear are provocative and beautiful but the resourcefulness of their creators—often children in dire conditions—is the real subject and inspires the viewer to pursue their own can-do path of DIY self-sufficiency. The collection makes tangible our undeniable human need for play and the motivating power of passion.”

The Art of Sport + Play
Mercy Corps
Portland, Oregon
11am – 5pm, Monday–Friday
Now through July 31

And my two cents:

Click here to view the embedded video.

“Leela,” writes Shava Nerad (in an inspiring conversation we’ve been having on Google Plus about the differences in the way we play as children, adults and elders)

“is literally play.  But if we use the word “love” in English to mean many things (love of a mother/child, love of ice cream, love of country, making love, brotherly love, selfless love,…),leela can have similarly nuanced and scoped meanings in Sanskrit.

“Most simply, leela means childs’ play — kids playing with each other, alone, with toys, knocking a ball with a stick, whatever.

“Leela can also mean a story or myth cycle.  Not only a specific set of stories, but the idea of stories, the fabric of stories-as-they-exist.  That stories can exist.  Teaching stories.  ”Ah, that is leela.” one might say of a particularly apt metaphor.  It teaches you something, it transmits meaning.

“Leela also refers to the connection between the world of the mundane and the world of the divine, by prayer, ritual and correspondences.  In Hinduism, Ganesh is the diety of this, rather corresponding to Hermes (but differently to my mind, unless we’ve lost a mystery associated with Hermeticism).

“And leela refers to the playing out both of history, the aeons of time, and of the vastness of the non-history of the eternal being of the atman, the godsoul, where time is not, but which is the origin of all story which plays out into time as we perceive it.

“If you chase it down, it ends up playing out (you should excuse the term) a great deal like string theory, with parallel worlds and possibilities all over the place.”

See also, of course, the Wikipedist, and, perhaps, this:

In answer to the question

What does it really mean to be a puppet maker, a puppeteer?

Brigitte Dörner replies:

I can only speak for myself, though I could imagine that other puppeteers might share my opinion–for me it means the license to play! The license to stay young, to create all possible worlds existing in my head, to dream, to bring joy, to make friends all over the world, to never be bored by routine, to educate without pressure or even punishment, to encourage, to not take things too seriously, to enter a world of its own…to be happy.

She explains:

I have a very intimate relationship with everything that has a face. I can’t eat chocolate Easter bunnies, chocolate Santa Clauses. They always grow old and grey in my cupboard, and my family stopped giving them to me. I believe in a soul in almost everything…even a computer. So a puppet for me is more than the material it is made of. It has a face, therefore it has a soul. The moment it looks at me, I’m lost. And the world of puppets is something I dedicate my time and my heart to. I’m experiencing it as a very friendly place, full of creativity and playfulness, full of wisdom of the heart and full of the most wonderful people I could ever imagine.

Here’s more, from her self-description (computer translated, human edited).

Dark Smile Studio: Character dolls, puppets and table-top puppets. All my life it has made me happy to create beautiful things with my hands. My great passion is dolls and puppets building. I use no prefabricated parts in modeling, no print forms or the like. The clothing is tailored to the dolls in elaborate handwork on the body. Every one of my puppets, sculptures and artist dolls is therefore an absolutely unique piece. My personal holidays are flea markets and medieval markets. When I kiss the muse my first love always goes to the vampires but also all other forms of mysticism. Mythology, fairy tales and the world of fantasy inspire me to create my little creatures, puppets and dolls. My main focus is to create puppets that are a bit bizarre, sometimes a little dark, but always adorable.

via Pam Spence

I led what seems to be the first in a series of Google Plus Hangouts on the idea of playfulness and the playful path. Aside from myself, there were: +Chris Saeger (one of my Simulation Game friends), +Bruce Honig (a seminarian who attended my seminar at Esalen maybe, what, 15 years ago), and +Myles Nye (whom I met at IndieCade). Later, +Aristotle Bancale (Gamemaster Ari, that is) joined us.

After a few minutes of happy mayhem and techno-stuff (playing around with Google Hangout effects, me wearing a halo and monocle, etc.), I more or less introduced the focus of the hangout (forgot to introduce the people to each other – decided we could save that for an after-play moment) and taught a game. I called it “9.” I would have called it 15 (click the link to read how the game is played), but there were so few of us, and I also didn’t want the game to last longer than our allotted hour (which, I learned from Chris, should have been 40 minutes, tops).

Anyhow, about the game (not how to play it – you have to click on 15 to figure that out, like I said before), but: 1) how much I began to appreciate the way the game works, and 2) what we learned from it about the playful path.

So, every round the game gets a little more complex, a little more challenging to play. Playing 9, you get up to 8 rounds, though we did spend a minute or two conjecturing about the 9th. By the 5th round, the game gets significantly challenging (“I thought five was “smeck, smeck”). This is a result of there being more rules (one new rule being added each round) and an implicit need to make each new rule a little sillier, or more challenging, or both. This was the time that Ari joined us. He decided to observe (well, it was around midnight by Phillippinesian time).

We were all fairly delighted that this game actually worked in the Hangouts environment. And when we started talking about what the game might have revealed about fun and play and the playful path, Ari was in the perfect position to note how intimidating it could be to people who joined in late, because he, poor soul, didn’t join us until the game had complexified itself nigh unto impossibility.

Thing was, we who started from the beginning had by that time established what you might call “permission to fail.” We’d forget it was our turn, or what to say if it was. And somebody would remind us, and we’d laugh and go on. But Ari never had a chance to be a permitter or a permittee. So, for him, trying to join the game was like trying to climb a ladder, starting on the fifth step. I mean, like, what a thing to find ourselves learning from this stupid game! And then Myles, who seems to know a thing or two about games in deed, mentioned how some games aren’t fun unless somebody fails. Like, for example, baseball.

So, OK, we should have recorded the whole thing. And maybe been a little more, shall we say, focused. And we decided that it would have been a lot more focused if everyone had at least had a copy of the prelude and table of contents to A Playful Path. Which is what you’d have, too, if you clicked the link.