Junkyard Sports Found Object Tabletop Olympics

Ask me what game - of all the wacky and sometimes profound works of play art that I've created in my 40-plus years of wacky and profound play art creation - I played with the top creative people at LEGO.

No. It was Found Object Tabletop Olympics.

Earlier this year, at the LEGO Design Conference, it and I reached some kind of apotheosis. It had a lot to do with our reaching the right audience at the right time. One of the participants, Lucius Margulis, took copious photos of the event. Here is his post, and below, a compilation of his photos and clips.

Found Object Tabletop Olympics event is based on the approach to play and creativity I described in Junkyard Sports. But it is the first Junkyard Sport I designed where the materials (junk) are truly "found objects" - totally random, collected from whatever the participants happen to have with them at the time, or can find in the room.

It was a big step for me, letting go of deciding exactly what junk people will get to play with. I had built the book and the concept around the art of assembling just the right collection of materials that would help get people to play and think together. And then discovering that without any special junk it was just as much fun and just as profound - and much, much easier to produce. I'm not saying that it's better - assembling a collection of the "right" materials is an art in itself - just that it works, that it's still fun, still meaningful. A different kind of meaning, though, because the "junk" comes from what people have, and what they are willing to share, and what the people who provide the room leave around.

So the whole thing takes on an extra meaning - letting people find their own junk helps them discover the wealth of what's around them, at their fingertips and in their very pockets. Helps them discover the wealth of resources they have to play with, and the people, too.


from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith

Theater of Games (Cont'd)

Near the end of my session with the Primary conference, we started a conversation about kids and theater. I had mentioned my background in theater a bit earlier and one participant was eager to talk about her experiences in getting her kids to put on plays. She described what great delight parents had in watching their kids perform, and how good the kids felt about being in the spotlight. She mentioned that she did have to work hard to keep the kids focused on learning their lines and especially how challenging it was for the kids to endure the rehearsals. But again, how it all paid off during the performance.

Unfortunately, we ran out of time before I could whip-up a semi-cogent response. A couple days later it occurred to me that we all had a similar experience, right after the end of playing Junkyard Olympics, as each team got to demonstrate their event - not only demonstrate, but actually engage the other team in a world record-setting trial - in fact and actuality experiencing the very benefits that were attributed to children's theater, without the pressure, without the supervision or directorial guidance or pained memorization, all for the fun of it all.


from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith

Hot Bread and Butter - the play

Among the Games Preserve Reports, you'll find my description of the performance of a game called Hot Bread and Butter. And somewhere amongst the vast collection of articles on the Deep Fun site, is a semi-lyrical Meditation, also about this game. Here's a part:

The children scatter like an exploded lightbulb, shattering into screams. Some stay close to each other. Others gallop into the frontier, probing the darkest secrets of the street. More screams. Someone has found the belt! There she is, rushing around, twirling the belt over her head like a lariat, hitting everybody who dares be near. Everyone races home. Until the last one herds himself into the cowering mass. Laughter. Finally silence. Eyes closed. Listening. She hides the belt."Hot Bread and Butter," among other things, represents an idea of power. To gain power, you must 1) take certain risks, and 2) be lucky. Alliances don’t seem to be of much help. Those who stay too close to home don't have much fun.

Whoever is brave enough to leave home behind, and lucky enough to find the belt, gets to hide the belt next time.

You gain power through risk and luck - not through direct confrontation - but only once the power has already been left for you to find. As a child grows towards adulthood, he ranges further and further away from home, approaching the time in which adult power is left to him - if he can find it. But it is the opportunity that he must seize, there is no person to confront. The power of an adult cannot be taken from an adult, it must be discovered within the person of the child.

See what I mean? 

Theater.


from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith

The Theater of Games

In my article, The Theater of Games, I begin to describe children's games as if they were a kind of literature, real literature, sometimes exceptionally profound literature, a literature like, if you'll forgive the implications, plays.

Recently, I've come to realize how central this insight is to most of what I've been teaching and doing for the last 40 years: how valuable and fun for parents and teachers and youth leaders to think of children's games as performances as significant and meaningful as theater pieces.

So, with this post, I hope to share my sometimes amusing musings, and invite you to do the same.

I first wrote about games (social games, board games, even card games) as a performed art in a series of Games Preserve Reports that I started writing in 1971. But it wasn't until four years ago that I actually realized I was talking about games as theater. Here's a part of it where I write about a game I've probably talked about several hundred times - "Duck Duck Goose."

I had to play it first. And when I did, I realized that the clearly silly game of Duck-Duck-Goose fully satisfied my criteria for a meaningful, kid-produced, kid-acted, kid-directed, theatrical experience. It was highly dramatic. It was something they actually wanted to do, actually could organize and become engaged with. Thus I began work on my “theater” curriculum and my lifelong exploration of the Theater of Games.

I soon discovered I was working within a global theater. Searching for more and more games, I found books of games from all over the world. The Games that are played out in the Theater of Games are in fact a form of literature – not written, maybe, not even oral, perhaps, but “enacted” – and thus handed down, from generation to generation, brother to brother, culture to culture. The literature of games can convey complex relationships, roles and consequences, issues of conflict and heroism.

See also Of Geese, Wolves, Games and Culture.


from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith