It's a Funcast already at last! From my keynote address at the Atlanta NASAGA conference. FYI. Thinking about games and magic, I came up with Half-Belief. And said something like:
Like magicians with their tricks, we, with our games transform reality – changing a group of business executives into a Polynesian choral society, or to a group of egg-safety engineers, trapped in a burning spaghetti factory with thirty minutes to get two dozen eggs safely out the third storey window.
Masters of illusion, you ride the line that separates the two halves, the believing from the doubting. We get people to half-believe in the truth of what they’re playing. While helping them separate the magic from the miracle, play from for real, contest from context.
We are artificers of shared illusions, architects of half-belief. Masters of jocular inscrutability.
"We can find new ways to have fun. We can make it our goal to have nothing else but fun. Only fun. Just fun. We can abandon even the agreement to find a game we can all play together. The trust we have established with each other is so profound that we need no longer to aim at anything.
"And so we continue, pursuing this convention of having fun together, until any attempt to decide ahead of time what game we're going to play or not, even an attempt to decide what rules we are going to have fun by, becomes too much of a hassle - unnecessary, in fact contrary to our purpose, in fact impossible."
This week's FunCast is the first part a chapter in the Well-Played Game called "The Fun Community." It has become an increasingly central part of everything I teach, and, for some, has become very useful in understanding how to design games for mass, multiplayer, online communities.
Here's a bit:
"...The only real assurance we have about the "fun" we can have together is the one we give each other.
The need for community holds true whether we are players or spectators. As a spectator, I want to be able to scream for my team. If the spectator sitting next to me wants to scream for her team, and if she insists that I also scream for her team, the likelihood is that we will wind up screaming at each other. We have to spend more of our time resisting each other than enjoying the game. I want the game to be important. She wants the game to be important. But we both lose our opportunity to relish this importance when the game becomes more important to us than we are to each other."
(image found in Lee Stranahan's weblog) Today's FunCast is inspired by a quote from Dr. Brian Sutton-Smith, my friend for over 30 years now, and, as all of my friends, my personal mentor. A play-advocate who has brought more understanding, compassion, scholarship and original thinking to the study of play than Piaget or Huizinga, professor emeritus of the University of Pennsylvania, and author of, among other things, The Ambiguity of Play. The quote: "The opposite of play isn't work, it's depression."
You have to be just a little bit of a rebel if you really want to have fun. You have to be doing something you're really not supposed to be doing. Nothing really bad or hurtful or even really dangerous. Something slightly naughty. A little bad maybe. A tiny bit illegal.
Like playing where you're not supposed to be playing, when you're not supposed to be playing, with people and things you're not supposed to play with. Or playing in a way you're not supposed to. With maybe not exactly the "real" rules.
For some reason, no matter how old you are, if fun is something you really want to be having, you generally have to be doing something you shouldn't be doing, really. That's how you get to the liminal spaces, at the edges of acceptability, predictability, respectability.
So when people talk about bringing fun into the workplace or places of learning, it's always just a little bit threatening, a little bit disturbing of the status of the quo.
And in places where such play becomes so threatening that it is rigidly, thoroughly disallowed, where this minor expression of playful illegality is systematically suppressed, you get depression. Deep, thorough, mind- and brain- and soul-numbing depression. In those places, work places, learning places, living places, you get the opposite of play.
This week's FunCast is called "Dying with Laughter." It's a potentially depressing, yet hopefully uplifting contemplation of how we might embrace both death and life, simultaneously.
Most of the text for this FunCast can be found here
This week's FunCast is about a game that some kids and I created together when I was working at the Intensive Learning Center (actually), in Philadelphia, on my way towards compiling an actual curriculum in children's games. It's called "Human Spring." It is what one might call the apotheosis of cooperative games. Or what another might call "vertical push-ups."
Spurred by a conversation with Janine Fron of Ludica, I found myself writing an article about the connections between competition and cooperation, in games and everything else. My perhaps most quotable and easily misunderstood quote: "Cooperative games nurture diversity. Competitive games, uniformity."
I hope you have time to listen to today's FunCast. I know how busy you are, and I hate to intrude. But if you can find the time, you might find yourself amused, if not bemused, to hear me say things like:
Busyness is one of those primal problems ground into our very adult and grown-up identities by the way we used to play house and school and now get to do for real.
Remember when you were a kid playing you were not a kid? Remember when you first learned to look busy, and then learned again, and then over and over, since you were a kid growing up, in playground, classroom, office?
Remember how utterly convincingly busy you became?
Well that's the problem. Not time. Not deadlines. It's that we've all become too good at it.
Today's sending, apparently from the Oaqui (him, her or them)selves(f) - ostensibly about a game of Oaqui Pong, which, according to the Oaqui, is the progenitor of all games pongish, contains a curious comment. And I quote:
"Then, when we arrive at the idea of the Serve, well, Table Tennis, bound as it to its OneBalledness, begins as a game in which one player has to Serve to the other, trying, can you imagine, not only to get the ball over the net and hit the other side of the table, but to make the other player MISS! It's beyond odd, when you think about it, that a game would arise in which one player, in the name of SERVING, would try to make the other player lose! These are the consequences of UniBallistic thinking: SERVING each other by trying to make each other LOSE!
Which, of course, leads inevitably to the way they keep score. Here, Table Tennis, merely because of its MonoSpherical premise, makes the oddest of all leaps. Where as you, being sensitized to the Oaay of the Oaqui, would think BOTH players would LOSE a point every time the ball goes out of play, well, need I/we say more?"
I need, apparently, to say it again in today's FunCast, fortuitously titled: "Oaqui Pong."
I was reading an article called "Happiness 101." So I found myself thinking about doing "meaningful" things. Things like being engaged in meaningful work and doing meaningful deeds and having meaningful relationships and making meaningful nises such as those contained in today's FunCast.
Thinking about all this meaning because the article described a connection between meaningfulness and happiness. And, after significant intro- and extrospection, I came to a natural conclusion: meaningful stuff is fun. Saying, doing, thinking, acting, working, learning almost anything actually meaningful, is always fun. Really fun. Deep fun.
Almost anything meaningful is fun. Even if you're cutting potatoes in a food kitchen for the poor, it's fun. It's a feel-good fun that comes not from what you're doing but who you're doing it with and for.
But when the thing you're doing is itself fun, like, for example, batting a balloon around, and you're having fun batting the balloon with the people you're batting around with, and they're having fun, with you, with each other, and they are people who need to have this kind of fun almost desperately - children, the hospitalized, the institutionalized, the people of countries at war, the less-abled, less-skilled, less-lucky - well, that's a unique kind of fun, a life-fulfilling fun that really needs it's own name.
For the time being, I'm suggesting calling this specific kind of fun, and equally specific kind of meaningfulness, "Major fun."
"But," you everso rightfully exclaim, "Major Fun is a whole nother thing - an award, see, given to, if I'm not mistaken, 'games that make people laugh.'," you right-as-rainedly observe.
"Precisely," I respond, quoting myself, "When a game makes you laugh, whether you're playing alone and laughing or playing with others and laughing with them, it's not just a game, it's an event. And at the moment of the event, the fun you're having is as meaningful as breathing. Deep Fun. Meaningful fun. Major fun. If you know what I mean."
