Speaking of the flavors of fun, one of the sweetest that has come to our virtual world is often conceptually packaged as "Eye Candy."
Of the various manifestations of the endlessly alluring varieties of eye candy, the kaleidoscope predates, and yet somehow anticipates the visual confections of the virtual world.
This is an image I made with the aid of a site called "make your own kaleidoscope." It was all I needed to be reminded of the dessert-like pleasures of visual delight.
Like kaleidoscopes a lot? Perhaps, as the Make Your Own Kaleidoscope people suggest, you should consider joining the Brewster Kaleidoscope Society, Sir David Brewster being the actual inventor of the optically delicious kaleidoscope. Should you desire to commune with some kaleidoscopic artists, the society has an impressive list (with email addresses) of said same. Amongst the impressive resources therein, you will find a detailed history of the kaleidoscope, and an overview of some of the different types of kaleidoscope.
Want to make a non-virtual kaleidoscope? Here's how.
The Pipe Cleaner Dancer. Play it long enough and it turns you into a choreographer with good keyboard skills.
Silly little game. But it's fun, too. Fun enough to make you want to learn it - learn which key makes the Pipe Cleaner Man do what, learn how to create moves, so to speak, so it more and more appears like the Pipe Cleaner Man is dancing. Even though it's your fingers doing the dancing. And especially because it's your fingers doing the dancing that it gets more involving, more fun, more instructive. Just as challenging as you want to make it.
And it's simple. Simply understood. Simply made. With a pipe cleaner and a camera and a smattering of programming. And a very good sense of fun.
Many are the delightful varieties of the Falling Sand Game. Thisissand is the prequel. It takes the experience of being at the virtual beach, dropping sprinkles of sand, pretending to no one that you're artistically engaged in the creation of a Sand Painting, and interprets it into the virtual world - just dropping sand, of different colors, just that. And it turns out to be just wonderful fun. All by itself.
When you click on the link, it takes you to a gray screen. There's a little, even grayer box somewhere near the left corner of the screen. If you have any questions, click on the little grayer box, and all will be answered. Like if you want to change colors all you have to do is press C. The screen turns multicolors. You drag across as much as you want, and you return to your painting with sand of a new color gradient. Note the word "gradient." Therein much of the beauty lies. Also, beauty-lying-wise, there's the virtual sand itself, which acts like you'd think virtual sand should act if it was being serious about being sand-like.
Then there's an entire gallery of virtual sand paintings to be impressed, challenged, and humbled by. And of course you can add your virtual art piece to the virtual gallery, should you feel virtually so.
While you're in the virtual neighborhood, you might as well take the time to visit the Thisissand blog. Here, from their blog, is some insight into their reason for being:
"We are...experimenting with perceived connections between everyday artefacts, intermediality, art and play. There is no such thing as a linear plot or a particular set of expectations on thisissand.com: it is a place for recreation and fun, and an eternal work in progress."
Bomomo is my jeut du jour - a sweet invitation to mouse artistic whilst bemusing myself with the graphic splendor of it all and simultaneously pondering the connections between mystery and mastery, between mouse and movement, chaos and control, and line and color and things.
Designer Philipp Lenssen writes:
"I live in Germany and maintain and create my websites full-time, since 2005. I'm especially interested in the intersection between art and programming.
"Here are some other sites I did that might be interesting:
All interesting, each deep, but none explains Bomomo, the invitation to play, to learn, to make something beautiful. Perhaps not such a giant leap for the likes of Mr. Lenssen, but clearly one more small step for Playkind!
Many, many, many years ago, when I was in high school, in Omaha, actually, I had the amazingly good fortune to participate in an experimental physics class that was experimental in every way possible. The course itself, developed by MIT, was just being tested, and the whole program centered around what seemed to me to be very much like fun (see this article for a teacher's perspective of the program). I probably learned a lot of physics in the process, but for me the biggest learning was that learning itself can be fun (I was in high school, where I went from classroom to classroom, discovering over and over again that fun and learning were supposed to be two very different experiences). In many ways, this whole program was a validation for everything I hoped would be true about education. We played. We made our own instruments out of, basically, junk (a micrometer out of two mirror slides, a toothpick and rubber band). We learned. We learned not just about physics, but our world and ourselves.
This was 50 years ago. Today, thanks to computer technology and a few illuminated science educators, we have physics simulations - virtual playthings that allow us to explore the interdependence of all things physical. For the most part, they are refreshingly fun, immediately accessible, inviting hours of observation and experimentation.
I don't think they can effectively replace experiences like making your own micrometer, but they can ignite the curiosity and playfulness that are native to all scientific enterprise. The best of these physical simulations are the most game-like, igniting wonder, inviting play.
There are many such resources available online. Here's one more example, called "My Physics Lab."
One of these days, educators will learn this lesson. One of these days, the distinctions between play and learning will no longer be so obvious.
It's a game called Filler. It's a simple game. With deceptively minimal graphics and space elevator music. The rules, as illustrated: "Big ball=good, bouncy ball=bad."
Not a shoot-em-up. A fill-em-up, actually. One big ball at a time. Put it anywhere, except where it'll hit a bad bouncy ball. And if you hold the button down, the ball'll get bigger. And that's it. Gamers call these kinds of games "fillers." Easy to understand, inviting to play, fascinating, fun, challenging. Filler maybe the archetype of all filler games.
There's a certain flavor of fun that can be tasted only when making something for someone else - someone in particular. I call this "personalized fun."
And so we find ourselves at Festisite, a modest collection of well-made tools for making fun things, each with an intuitive-enough interface to ease our entry into a world of computer-assisted personalized momento-making.
I have taken very few pains to represent a small segment of my first project in the image accompanying this article - my face on a dollar bill. Which, of course, could be your face, on a Philipine peso, or a Malaysian Ringgit, or even a Ukranian Griven.
I had fun making it, partially because it was very easy, partially because it is always amusing to find one's face depicted on the local currency (in my case, also somewhat ironic), but mostly because I had a great deal of fun just thinking about all the people for whom I could be making fake, personalized dollar bills.
Festisite is a treasury of essential tools for making fun, personalized things. I must admit, I found myself having even more personalized fun with something called the Party Printer. Especially with that which led me directly to the speedy creation of a most amusingly novel sentence maze and also a most graphically splendiferous rebus.
Remembered Fun is the taste of fun you get when you are playing something you used to have fun playing. It's a complex, many-layered taste, this particular flavor of fun, because the fun you are having tastes different than the fun you originally had, when it was all new, and that's fun, and at the same time, it's remarkably delicious, using our sophisticated online access to play these comparatively casual, naive little games that we once thought to be the ultimate and most profound statements of the art. nintendo8.com serves up a delightfully varied buffet of Remembered Video Fun.
It is one of those quite lovely, webidipitious events, the continued evolution of the Falling Sand Game, the community of programmers and players that urges it forward. There's a version called the "Powder Game" that seems to have a plethora of both bells and whistles. To get a sense of the marvels awaiting, look on the bottom of the page for some of user creations at the bottom of the page (the one in the illustration is called "volcano" - it's a blast!).
If you haven't experienced the Falling Sand Game or explored its more recent variants, I suggest you begin with the Falling Sand Forum. And then continue here.
This is not an image of the Moon, Fish, Ocean game, but rather of a variant of the aforementioned - Pearl, Lotus, Bowl. I'll explain in a moment.
Developed by Craig Conley, the same Craig Conley, author of, amongst other significant scholarly works, the Magical Dictionary, about whom I've waxed so enthusiastically; Moon, Fish, Ocean is actually Rock, Scissors, Paper, only with different gestures. It's also, as described above, as Pearl, Lotus, Bowl, as well as Bridge, Stream, Boulder, and equally Candle, Incense, Fan, and even more equally Brush, Circle, Paper.
But is it, you might ask, actually, as Conley implies, a Zen game, as played by Zen masters to help acolytes to Zennish wisdom? Claims Conley, perhaps tongue-in-cheekily:
"Zen disciples play Moon * Fish * Ocean as a form of mindful meditation, or to determine who will chop wood and who will carry water. Disciples typically sit in either the full or half lotus position, upon round cushions atop square mats.
Zen Masters use the game as a test of a disciple’s reflexes and non-attachment to outcomes. The Master holds a pebble in his palm. The pebble remains hidden when the Master plays 'Moon' or 'Fish.' It is revealed only when the Master plays 'Ocean.' If the disciple can snatch the pebble quickly enough, he automatically wins the round."
It is, upon further retrospection, probably not an authentic Zen activity. But, on the other hand, as it were, what is authenticity other than illusion?
Point is, it's almost worth believing, and it's definitely worth playing. Learning the different hand motions is a good enough challenge to add interest to introspection. Appreciating the art, and the humor of it all, is a path to enlightenment, at least.
Craig comments: "First, I must confirm that you were correct that my tone is tongue-in-cheek. It is a whimsy that Rock Paper Scissors is a Zen game, and I set out to 'prove' my imaginative quirk with 'evidence' from Zen poetry. (This rather exhaustive research is more evident in the book version of the game than on the website.) HOWEVER, a distant relative of mine wrote that he has a friend in Taipei who confirms the legitimacy of 'Moon Fish Ocean,' though a better translation would seem to be 'Moon, Water, Fishes.' His friend also confirmed that the game is of Japanese origin and is studied mainly among Buddhist priests. His friend assumed that I am a Zen teacher or scholar. This is all beautiful confirmation that 'You can't make it up.' I suppose it's a lesson that if humor goes too far toward the deadpan end of the scale, it becomes cast iron! Perhaps it's also evidence that sincere playfulness, freed from ulterior motives, can lead one directly to the honest truth."
Should you still require further instructions from the cosmos, take a spin on Craig's Follow Your Bliss Compass.
"The net.art generator automatically produces net.art on demand.
"This version of the net.art generator creates images. The resulting image emerges as a collage of a number of images which have been collected on the WWW in relation to the 'title' you have chosen. The original material is processed in 12-14 randomly chosen and combined steps.
"The net.art generator was programmed by Panos Galanis from IAP GmbH, Hamburg, and was a commission by the Volksfürsorge art collection."
Here's something else to be thankful for. Torus Games is the latest of Jeff Week's wonderfully playworthy, genuinely educational, free, downloadable Geometry Games (both Mac- and PC-compatible).
Jeff explains: "Eight familiar games introduce children ages 10 and up to the mind-stretching possibility of a “multiconnected universe”. Games include: tic-tac-toe, mazes, crossword puzzles, word search puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, chess, pool and apples. While playing the games, kids develop an intuitive visual understanding of a model universe that is finite yet has no boundary. Players who master the games on the torus may move on to try them on the more challenging Klein bottle. Even though the games were designed with kids in mind, adults interested in topology, geometry and cosmology have also found them enjoyable and enlightening."
It is a gift, supported by the National Science Foundation and people who seem to care about kids and learning and believe in the educational value of play.
It is find one's way to a conceptual cornucopia of cunningly contrived conundra. It to read the misleadingly brief instructions many times. It is Blackflip, a virtual puzzle, a plethora of puzzles, participatory, too, because you can make your own puzzles and leave notes on the ones you solve and stuff.
Start anywhere. Draw a continuous line through the tiles you want to flip so that the tiles in each row, when flipped, match. There is continuous music.
You can play all you want. There is continuous music. Of a space-time-continuum probing sort.
My space-time got tired of the music long before I got tired of the puzzles. Ah, the puzzles! Oh, the puzzles! I say to myself and now you. Such a simple premise. So well-presented. Sometimes so elegantly devious. So subtle. So many puzzles.
Blackflip is a tribute, the designers say, to Nintendo's game Polarium. That, in turn, explains everything.
Well, all right, it explains one thing - that the cross-over between game system and Internet definitely goes both ways. And what a welcome cross-over it can be.
If you happened to find yourself in such a position, and you wished to express, materially, in a virtual-sort of way, your personal appreciation for my ongoing existence, you might very well wish to send me a gift of some sort - especially if it didn't cost you anything. The question remains, however, what to get me. I've narrowed it down to: Pottery Classes, a Digital Camcorder, and a dress-up outfit. As an added incentive, if you happen to choose the one I really, really, really wanted most in the world, given only those three choices, you'd get three thumbs-up points and so would I! So, see, I really do want you to guess the one I really want, because then we both gets thumbs-up points. So the game is about giving each other things, things that'd be nice to be able to give each other, virtual, no-cash-value gifts that nonetheless are genuine acts of thoughtfulness.
This is GiftTRAP Live, Virtual GiftTRAP, yes, the MajorFUN award-winning GiftTRAP of that very same name. Only, it's online now, and it's all grown-up into a game for online social networks, if you know what I mean.
On the one hand, it's a kind of an eCard, so to speak, a nice virtual thing you can send people. Way more personal than a joke. Just as much fun. On the other hand, it's a great way to start that "what do you really want for your birthday, or holidays" conversation. So it's like Web 2.0, see, interpenetrating virtual and actual space. Now that you know that I'd actually prefer the dress-up outfit, you know where to shop for me. And you can shop online, even. And it's like one of those Mass Multiplayer Online Games you sometimes read about, like Second Life, only the life on GiftTRAP's stage is kinder and gentler and more fun.
It behooves me to admit to a personal interest in this project. It was a comment I made back to the Nick from GiftTRAP that kicked off this whole project, and I've been lucky enough to kibitz on various iterations of this game as its evolved.
Which is why I get to be the first to blog about it going live.
Dr. Lana Trick (honestly) is actively engaged in researching the mechanics of multiple-object-tracking. To get an almost immediate understanding of what this is all about, take a moment or two to experiment on yourself. Should you wonder about the fund-worthiness of all this eye-challenging fun, consider the military applications of machines that can track multiple objects.
I was first made aware of the play value of Multiple Object Tracking when I reviewed a children's game called Scoops Surprises. It's like a kids version of the shell game, only with three different color "peas" (small cylinders of different colors representing ice cream flavors). I was amazed at how fun it was to play. Of course, I never got beyond two different ice cream flavors, and the kids won every time.
It will make you laugh, and there will be much poking of the fun kind.
You could think, if you wanted to, about the secret joys of bean-smushing, and how it even more secretly appealed to that previously hidden bean-smushing part of your essential reptilian psyche. But that'd be missing the point. The point is: it will make you laugh. And there will be much fun poking. The first time you play.
You're not going to play this a lot, so it's not exactly what you'd call a game. Not like what you'd call these, really. More of one of those interactive flash-like things. Pointless, in a way. Except for two things: it will make you laugh, and the fun poking.
It's called Aninote. "Aninotes are musical animations that are customized to display the name of the recipient in the animation. Customized Aninotes will allow additional content to be modified for the recipient. Another important feature of an Aninote is that the web address for the Aninote (e.g. http://Robert.Blake.YouAreMyFriend.com) contains a summary of the overall message contained in the Aninote."
A far more important feature is how much fun these are, and how wonderfully silly you can be to let yourself believe, upon receiving one, even for a moment, that it's really all about you.
"Aninote.com was created, and is maintained by Robert 'Gunny' Blake from Toronto Ontario Canada. Robert, an Information Security Specialist by profession, created Aninote.com during his free time, and continues to support it as a hobby."
Return with me now to the game of Chapay, as so faithfully and lovingly described heretofore. From thence, shuffle forward to a flash game, serendipitously, and yet mysteriously known as "Shuffle."
Perhaps I should say no more, relying, rather, on your own personal musings, as you muse about the perhaps not-so-subtle connections between this obviously amusing amusement and the perhaps more mysterious joys of its lineage. Clearly, the similarities are beyond coincidence. Even more clearly, a game with beauty is a joy forever.
Surely you remember that which was at one time called Line Flyer? And more than likely you now know it equally as well as Line Rider. But how aware are you of the fact that there is now a Line Rider Beta 2? And what about the significantly amusing and intriguingly different Freerider, arrow-key controlled game-like version, I ask you?
Oh, I could go on. I could mention, for added example, the Lineboarder, snowboarding-like variation. But, then again, perhaps I've said enough.
It's been what you might call a pervasive theme of this blog. You might call it "new games from old" is what you might call it. As so clearly exemplified by this simple crossword puzzle.
First of all, there's that Wheel-of-Fortune-like interaction with the puzzle, where instead of filling in each blank, the letter you select goes in every highlighted blank. So, for example, in the illustration - all the squares highlighted in yellow take the same letter - one of the letters in the panel on the right. Is it an "A"? No, because then you'd get AUB. Hmmm. Maybe a "P" - that'd give you PUB, but it would also give you CP_W. What, oh what could it be?
Well, you get my drift. It could be a new kind of crossword puzzle. One unique to computers. Faster to play, and as inviting as even the best of crossword puzzles - challenging, perhaps, one might say, even fun.
I'm not saying that this is the ultimate crossword puzzle, nor that it is the best, but rather that it represents what much of this blog is about.
There are times when silliness, creativity, technical mastery, and the love of children coincide. And among those times, there are moments of surprising delight. This is one of those moments.
It looks like one of those photos of a kindergarten class. One of your typical collections of runny-nose darlings. It is definitely that. It's also a musical instrument, allowing you to create a kind of music out of a collection of tunefully rhythmic rheums. Once you've composed your sweet suite for serendipitous sinuses, click the "play" button on the lower right of the screen to hear your composition.
It will warm the cockles of your virtual heart.
It will make you want to see what else you can make it do.
Sprout is the winner of the Second CasualGamePlay Design Competition. This is news of some significance. First of all, there is some significant significance in knowing that there is an effort underway to acknowledge what a fellow named Jay calls "Casual Gaming." You gotta love that term: "Casual Gaming." So descriptive of the kind of gaming to which we who seek the light-hearted depths of fun find ourselves most inexorably drawn. Next, there is at least equally significant significance in learning that not only was there a CasualGamePlay Design Competition, but that also this is the second one already. And, significantly enough, that Sprout was the winner of the design award and the audience award.
But all significance aside, there's the game itself, Sprout, in all it's elegant, artfully simple, innovative, gentle, point-and-click-worthy glory. Drop a coconut. Plant another coconut tree, or perhaps an apple tree, or take your chances on floating a seed or two, and make your casual way across an imagined world, towards some real fun.
Zoomquilt is a "collaborative art project," more than faintly reminiscent of the surrealist game Exquisite Corpse. One image zooms to reveal another which zooms, seamlessly, to reveal another, and on, and apparently on. Many of the images are a bit, shall we say, macabre - all of which contributes rather exquisitely to the corpse-connection.
You control the speed and direction (back and forth) of the zoom with a slider that appears when you mouse towards the left of the screen.
Did you press "play" yet? This dancing fun guy took me about 13 seconds to make. You gotta love this. Reminds me of a wireframe version of a scene from Happy Feet
OK. Time to make your own. Click on Pictaps. It will make you happy.
Jenova Chen's Master's thesis was called "Flow in Games." One result of Jenova's explorations of Dr. Csikszentmihalyi's concept of Flow was a remarkably gentle, sweetly meditative, eat-everything-in-the-universe game called flOw - which is now, can you believe it, available for the Playstation.
There is something worthy of celebration here - the development of an innovative game, based in no small part on a similarly innovative way of thinking about fun, embraced in some significant part by the commercial world, all in the pursuit of a Master's degree.
Rejoice in your accomplishment, Jenova Chen, as we rejoice in it, your fellow followers of the Playful Path.
For all those times when you have spent a countless number of hours playing one of those little online games or watching stupid videos on the web, and stopped for a second to think to yourself, "Man, I really should do something more useful with my time...," and then kept wasting time anyways...
Playing the games is useful in two ways. First, the games adapt and improve based on what people have typed. For example, the taboo words are generated based on the most popular past guesses for each word. Second, we collect the guesses, which gives us information about the relationships between words. For example, if you are playing Categorilla and type "George Washington" for the category "Presidents", we have now learned that George Washington is a president.
There's Draw Toy (and a gallery of drawings made with said same). And there's Byokal, a significantly amusing, easy-to-use, yet truly virtual kaleidoscope.
And today, from the website of the prolifically playful Ze Frank we have what can, oddly enough, only be called "Draw Toy vs Byokal."
Pianographique converts your very own computer keyboard into a virtual busybox. Virtual busybox. That's right, you heard it here. Or actually, you'll hear it here, and watch it, and compose remarkable things with it.
After Pianographique's shockwavily lovely and lively front page finishes downloading (you need Shockwave 8.5 - Intel-Mac-users, etc., if you have problems, be sure to check the link that reads "click here to download"), click on any of the pre-defined "graphic pianos" in the list that appears in the bottom half of the splash page, and get busy right away.
Or get even busier and make your own visual-graphic synthesizer (a.k.a. Virtual Busybox), assigning each letter key of your keyboard a sound and image from a significantly vast collection of the same.
I don't know if you caught this article. It's been a few years since it was posted. But it talks about art and play and how the Internet is bringing us more and more opportunities to do those very things at the intersection of art and fun. Which, had you continued to search for more examples of the said same, would have eventually lead you to a site called Visual Acoustics, to which I hereby most happily invite you. Play. Watch. Listen.
"Layers of different brushes can be built up, resulting in a stunning performance of improvised musical vision." Just by mousing around, here and there, skitter scatter, for no particular reason at all.
Visual Acoustics. For faster, more immediate amusement, select one the presets on the right.
Ever since I wrote about the playlike joys of Line Rider, I've been looking for more of the same. I am pleased to announce that there is now a minor gaggle of Line Riding experiences available to the play-seeking multitudes, all to be found on one site, eponymously described as: LineFlyer.com.
Speaking of the flavors of fun, one of the sweetest that has come to our virtual world is often conceptually packaged as "Eye Candy."
The Pipe Cleaner Dancer
Many are the delightful varieties of the 
Bomomo
This
It is find one's way to a conceptual cornucopia of cunningly contrived conundra. It to read the misleadingly brief instructions many times. It is 
If you happened to find yourself in such a position, and you wished to express, materially, in a virtual-sort of way, your personal appreciation for my ongoing existence, you might very well wish to send me a gift of some sort - especially if it didn't cost you anything. The question remains, however, what to get me. I've narrowed it down to: Pottery Classes, a Digital Camcorder, and a dress-up outfit. As an added incentive, if you happen to choose the one I really, really, really wanted most in the world, given only those three choices, you'd get three thumbs-up points and so would I! So, see, I really do want you to guess the one I really want, because then we both gets thumbs-up points. So the game is about giving each other things, things that'd be nice to be able to give each other, virtual, no-cash-value gifts that nonetheless are genuine acts of thoughtfulness.
Sprout
There's 
Pianographique
