As I might have heretofore mentioned, I have spent what others might deem an inordinate amount of time playing, talking about, teaching, thinking about, inventing, exploring, researching, writing about games: games of just about every possible description for every possible audience for every conceivable purpose. I’ve spent so much of my life doing this that I can’t name anyone else alive, or not institutionalized, who has devoted him- or herself so thoroughly and for such a long time to games.

During my earlier years, I devoted much of my time to looking for permission, corroboration, sanity checks, opportunities, paid opportunities, offers of support, like minds – and now, at the age of 71 and-a-half, having achieved by virtue of nothing more than the years I’ve spent, an almost tangible aura of venerability. I have arrived at a certain elder perspective on this game thing. And, just recently, I have achieved the significantly institutional validation that comes from having a book that I wrote and published 35 years ago on the very verge on being republished by M.I. T. (yes, that M.I.T.) Press.

All the aforementioned, lumped together, has inspired me to share with you the singlemost profound insight that I have been apparently placed on this planet to achieve:

A) Games are for fun.

2) The more fun, the better.

One could easily extrapolate that observation to apply to phenomena far beyond the purview of mere games. The more fun, the better. One could say that about education. One could say that about love. And one, such as this one, could say that about life.

Those varied ramifications, however, go beyond the scope of this particular and personal exposition, insofar as my field of recognized expertise needs must remain within the clearly defined confines of the things we actually call games.

Games, I say, are for fun. And the more fun a game is, the better the game.

True, verily, many and varied are the reasons for games and playing them. More varied now, I dare say, than at any other time in recorded, and perhaps even unrecorded history. There are games for learning, games for building community, games for building the body, games for healing, games for growth, games for solving complex problems, games for communicating; there are board games and computer games and serious games and role playing games and pervasive games.

But of all the purported purposes, what I am here to teach is this: the most substantial and consequential benefit of a game is the fun that you create and share playing it. The more fun, the more deeply you learn, the stronger you become, the more complete the solution, the communication, the community, the greater the growth, the more totally you heal. And yes, you could also say that about life.

Talking to strangers about their pets or their babies, you get to talk to their very heart, the very place where they keep memories they no longer have words for; memories of love, play, joy, pain, joining.

Touching a stranger’s dog, you find yourself invited in. Like touching a common core. You get smelled. You get permitted. A story, a history gets shared:

A rescue dog. Had been abandoned. Very shy at first. Frightened almost always. Then, slowly, we became friends. Got to know each other. Until we became family. We walk together every day. Twice a day. She likes to go to different places, though. An adventurer. An adventure, this dog.

Touching, touching: this readiness to share, this love laid bare.

It is indirect, this playful path.

To get from point A to point B, you frequently find yourself having to go through point C.

Sometimes it’s fun. Sometimes it’s funny. Sometimes it’s transcendent, transmogrifying, transubstantiating, trance-like. More often, it’s dance-like, like finding yourself in a free form dance where everybody is your partner, or a square dance where everyone is a caller, with music so live that the musicians are as finely tuned to their instruments as they are to each other as they are to the dancers.

Sometimes it’s seriously playful, like the way an artist plays: totally focused, utterly devoted, and yet, always listening, yielding when the medium seems to push back, released from expectation, from judgment, released into the moment of play, of playing with, of being played with, playing along and along, playing until the work itself stops playing.

Other times the path gets very narrow, and to keep from going off into what appears to be chaos or oblivion or endless boredom you have to pay very careful attention to every step or glide or leap.

But most of the time the path is wide – so wide it doesn’t matter where you go, and the music, and the joy takes you everywhere.

These kids are demonstrating a game that for some reason has been promulgated for generations, mainly in youth organizations and camps. Here’s a description from a site called Boy Scout Trail:

Have everyone stand in line, shoulder touching shoulder.
Explain that we are going to complete the new Bear Warning training.

Tell everyone we need to crouch down so the bears can’t see us so good. Everyone should be crouching on their heels.

Leader takes his place to the far left of the line.
Leader: “Thar’s a Bar!”
Then, the leader tells the guy next to him to say, “Whar?”
Guy A: “Whar?”
Leader: “Over Thar!” (and points to the right with his left arm)
Leader: OK, now you need to pass the warning down the line. Go ahead.

A: “Thar’s a Bar!”
B: “Whar?”
A: “Over Thar!” (and points to the right with his left arm)

B: “Thar’s a Bar!”
C: “Whar?”
B: “Over Thar!” (and points to the right with his left arm)
… and so on to the end.

Everyone keeps their left arm extended.
Repeat the sequence, pointing to the left with the right arm.
Repeat again, pointing to the right with their left leg. Make sure they stick their leg far out – this is the important part.

For the final time,
Leader: “Thar’s a Bar!”
A: “Whar?”
Leader: “Over Thar!” (and pushes his shoulder into Guy A which should cause a domino effect of everyone falling down the line.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

When I first learned the game, I didn’t like it. It, in a way, plays with the very trust you’re trying so hard to establish. It fools people. It makes people fall. And if you’re the leader, you make people fall. But I was curious about it, because it seemed so popular. So I tried it out with some kids. Before I told them, I said: “look, this is a silly game. You don’t have to play it. On the other hand, it might be fun, and if you want to try it, I’ll teach it to you, even though it’s really silly and it’s kind of, well, not nice.” So we played it. And everybody laughed. And then the kids wanted to play it again. Go figure.

Recently, fun correspondent Sheila Stone told me of another game very much like That’s a Bar, only called “Old Granny Wiggins is Dead” I guess it’s testimony to the perversity of play that such a game would be fun enough to be reinvented with a completely different narrative. It is described by Pearl Bates in the Foxfire 6 Book

You get as many players as you want sitting or standing in a circle. We usually sat outside in the grass. The the lead person says, “Old Granny Wiggins is dead.” And the next person says, “How’d she die?” And I say, “She died this way,” and I do something like wave my left hand up and down, and keep on waving it, and that next person has to start waving his or her hand the same way. I repeat the same sequence with every person in the circle until they are all waving the same hand. When we’ve come all the way around the circle and they’re all waving. I start a new round and add some motion this time like waving the other hand the same way. We go all the way around the circle until everyone is waving both hands, now. Then we used to add patting one foot and go all the way around, and then add patting the other foot, and then bobbing our heads. When everyone in the circle then is waving both hands and patting both feet and bobbing their heads, I give a signal and we all fall over dead on top of each other. We’d get a big laugh out of how we’d fall. We always did pretty much the same sequence with the hands and feet and head, but I guess you could add other signals like wagging a shoulder or something if you wanted to.

This says a lot for the popularity of this kind of silliness. And the durability. And the folklore of children’s games – how a game can get transmitted from one culture to another, its name changed, its theme changed, and still be the same game. It says something about fooling and getting fooled, about trust and kids. And it says even more for fun.

Musicians, actors, and athletes have developed unique uses for the words “play” and “practice.”  For them, play means performance. Actors don’t practice, they rehearse. Musicians and athletes practice more than they play. Children and people of my ilk think that play means fun, and practice is as much play as play is practice.

In this post, musician Gerald Klickstein shares some redefining insights about what he calls his “playful practice.”

I quote:

To keep the creative juices flowing in my practice, I toy with problems. I’ll try one solution, then another, learning and laughing as ideas hit dead ends. I enjoy the process because I know that I’ll find rewarding solutions in the end.

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With every repetition of a phrase, I create something new – a subtler dynamic curve, a smoother legato, a creamier tone. My ears are wide with wonder at the possibilities that each musical gesture contains.

Of course, we rely on repetition to instill mental maps of pieces, but with a playful approach, we can navigate those maps in near-infinite ways. Then, even the titles we’ve performed for years stay fresh.

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I’ve made countless such errors, and I find them quite funny, almost refreshing. Not that I like messing up. What I mean is that when I miss something, the error helps me recalibrate my playing.

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Transcendence is a core feature of deep practice, and I think it’s a pillar of playfulness.

When I practice, I imagine dramatic scenes, dancers moving through space, whatever. I feel an irrepressible flow of imagination no matter what I work on, be it a scale or a masterpiece.

That playfulness begins as soon as I unlatch a case and lift a guitar in my hands because I never know what I might conjure up.

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.