Games, Magic, Half-Belief

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.

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith

World's first Junkyard Sports® Tabletop Olympics

It was 2007. October 11. The morning of. Let's say mid-morning. In Atlanta. At the North American Simulation and Gaming Association conference. During my workshop, during which I had planned to spend 90 minutes exploring the various learning ramifications of what I somewhat blithely referred to as: The Junkyard Sports Paradigm.

Because it was NASAGA , and because the people who had registered for my workshop had listened to my keynote and were still planning to come, I found myself inspired enough to want to try something brand new - something I had thought about for many a month, but hadn't as yet actually tried.

And thus was held the world's first Junkyard Sports® Tabletop Olympics.

We had three groups of about 5 players each. Each group was seated around a banquet-worthy round table (officially called a "round").

Their assignment: using whatever you can find in your pocket or purse or elsewhere, create a miniature, tabletop, Olympic-like event.

What you are seeing in this photo is one such event - the High Dive Ski-Jump. The Jumper/Diver (a.k.a. "quarter") is being coached by participant Dave Matte to roll between the two blockish objects (hence kept on edge, so to speak), down the notebook-like ramp, hopefully to land in the glass of water. Yes, some points were awarded for hitting the glass or chair, even. A second team-member, the Jumper/Diver retriever, stood off camera, waiting to catch the rolling quarter before it reached the floor, for that critical extra point.

This was, as you have so intuitively grasped, but one of a minor Olympic myraid of tabletop events, such as, for example, the High Cup Jump, depicted here. Unfortunately, so enraptured were we with our collective cleverness and so deeply impressed by our finger-powered feats of athletic prowess, that we forgot to take any other pictures. And so, the memory fades. The world's first Olympic Croquet game, for example - played with many coins and paperclips and things, simultaneously, in the round - now, despite lingering echoes of all that laughter, partly remembered, partly imagined.

Yes, yes, I wax poetic. Because the Junkyard Sports Tabletop Olympics is everyrthing I had hoped it would be, more than I could possibly have dreamed it would become. An invitation to laughter and teamwork, to creativity and sharing, to surprise and appreciation. Regardless of position, age, gender, family, nationality. And all you need is whatever you have. Pocket junk. A table. People to play with.

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith