Share your LEGO genius

There's a photo-sharing site devoted entirely to LEGO creations. Given my late-life interest in all things LEGO, I was particularly struck by this instantiation of the extension of plastic play into the e-state. You make your LEGO thing. You take a digital picture of it. Upload it. And it becomes virtually permanent, a thing you made, for fun, out of LEGO - the very same LEGOs you are now using to make something else.

This connection between private and shared spaces redefines any form of art/play. Sandbox cityscapes, bubblebath buildings all can be collected, disseminated, documented, celebrated. It's a fundamental change in the nature and experience of fun.




from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith

Street games everywhere

Street Games are informal sports, adapted to environment, the materials, and the spirit of the people playing. They are played without adult supervision, without official people or equipment. They are games that you can take very seriously, sports with loose enough rules so that you can play with just about anything, anywhere, with just about anybody you want to play with.

Playing in the street is probably as old as streets themselves. Streets are a natural playspace, depending on the traffic. Just take a look at Breughel's painting of maybe 200 middle-age children (though they may look middle-age, they are in fact children at play in the middle ages) playing more than 80 different children’s games.

In the late 19th century, most of the games Street Games Culin reported on were played on streets that led into vacant lots or were surrounded by fields or crossed rivers and train tracks. By the middle of the 20th century, streets were bounded by houses and each other. Around this very time, most of the games that were still being played in the streets – especially in the streets of big cities like New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and London - became the very games most commonly cited as “authentic” Street Games: Wall Ball, Stick Ball, Box Ball, Hand Ball, Stoop Ball, Skully. Jacks, Marbles, hopscotch, and Double Dutch, too.

For the World War generations, Stick ball and Skully would be grow to be considered the archetypal Street Games. Stick ball would become an official sport, as much like baseball as possible, originally played with a stick for a bat, an old tennis ball for a baseball, a sewer lid for home plate, a car and a sign post for first and third. And frequently no second base at all. And now played on Stick Ball Fields with official Stick Ball Sticks and even Stick Ball Balls.

Skully is like marbles, only instead of marbles it’s played with bottle caps filled with candle wax, and instead rolling, you slide the caps, like little shuffleboad pucks, and instead of playing in a circle, you play on a big rectangular, chalk-drawn field of lines and boxes.

Skully and Stick Ball, like all Street Games, originated as informal sports, adapted to environment, the materials, and the spirit of the people playing. (There are games you can play with half a ball, for example, with just three people, if you have to.) They are played without adult supervision, without officials. They are games that you can take very seriously, just like real sports but their rules are just loose enough to let you can play with just about anybody you want to play with. Street Games can, and have, become formalized, and commercialized. You can buy official sticks for Stick Ball. Official Spaldeens and Half Balls, too.

Street Games are continuously changing and adapting to their environment, to the players and the evolving technologies of play. There are still kids who are playing in the Street Games spirit, but the streets they play in, and what they play, and whom they play with, are, for the most part, a far cry from the way we played Stick Ball. They still play their own Street Game versions of baseball and football, soccer and hockey, but they play for the most part in their private yards or on the sidewalk, and they have nerf balls and whistling nerf footballs and portable street soccer goals and hockey pucks that hover. And yet, as far as everyone’s concerned, they’re playing something very much like what we called Street Games. They are playing in a way so that everyone can play. They are all players. They are all officials.

Though played on Razors and skateboards and BMX bikes, modern Street Games, like all Street Games, are replete with intricate tests of agility, opportunities for invention, and performances of death-defying originality. Each, like the classic Street Game, remains somehow informal, adapted to the environment, materials, and spirit of the people playing.

Street Games have their virtual equivalents in video games, especially in games that involve physical movement, like the Wii, or, slightly earlier, Dance Dance Revolution, each with its many different game playing modes, where players get to choose to cooperate and compete, follow and lead.

In every expression, it’s the dynamics of Street Games – how they are organized and maintained, how they are supported by their community, how they engage players in learning, teaching, designing, and leading open-ended play contracts, where you can change the rules, where winning isn't the point, really, where it's all about getting to play - that are most instructive.

When you begin to explore how a Street Game is governed, how it empowers its players, and becomes redefined by the way they want to play together – you discover an almost perfect reflection of the social architecture of successful communities – neighborhood and national, physical and virtual.

Street Games are remarkably easy to overlook. Many parents who moan over their children's inability to play manage to ignore the Street Games being played all around them.

Part of the reason that parents overlook the Street Games they’re own kids are playing is that they can’t see them. That’s because Street Games are being played on a very different kind of street from those of their parents. Street Games take place everywhere, but most often in spaces noted anthropologist Victor Turner called these spaces "liminal" - spaces that comprise an unofficial, temporary, anybodyland; spaces that exist between buildings and sidewalks, steps and parking lots, between front yards, across fences, behind the library and garage. “In between” spaces. Like the Internet.

Street Games are governed, officiated over by the people who play them. Just like the, oddly enough, Internet.

And, like the Street Games of the past, Street Games of today are played mostly by children in their liminal years – not-yet-adults, too old to be seen as kids – and are played everywhere.

Even on the railing of the library steps. Even on the cell phone and in chat rooms. Even on the Internet.


See also:

Iona and Peter Opie's Children's Games in Street and Playground, Norman Douglas' London Street Games , and especially the Streetplay website.


from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith

iPhone, iBeer and Virtual Magic

From a recent Twitter:

majorfun iBeer is but a portent of what the iPhone brings to the virtual magician - Bernie DeKoven - http://tinyurl.com/6jxv6k



via Nothing to do with Arbroath

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith

Grand Theft Childhood: Who's Stealing What from Whom?

In the first chapter of Grand Theft Childhood, authors Dr. Lawrence Kutner and Dr. Cheryl Olson make the remarkably common-sense observation that:

"...the 'big fears' bandied about in the press -- that violent video games make children significantly more violent in the real world; that children will engage in the illegal, immoral, sexist and violent acts they see in some of these games -- are not supported by the current research, at least in such a simplistic form. That should make sense to anyone who thinks about it. After all, millions of children and adults play these games, yet the world has not been reduced to chaos and anarchy."

Tom Hanson, in his excellent Open Education blog, has been following issues surrounding "Shoot 'em Up Video Games" for a while. In his most recent post, he interviews Dr. Kutner about some of the public reactions Grand Theft Childhood has generated. I was particularly struck by Dr. Kutner's response to Susan Estrich's review of the most recent release of Grand Theft Auto IV:

She also engages in hyperbole in her attacks, stating that kids 'spend more time with [video games] than with real life.' Think about that for a second. It’s a dramatic statement, but is it true? Our study found that only 13 percent of boys and 2 percent of girls spent 15 or more hours per week playing video games. Assuming 8 hours/night for sleep, a child would have to spend more than 56 hours per week playing video games to meet her criterion. We’ve only seen that among an extremely small group of gamers not in our study whose serious emotional problems were manifest in other ways—it’s certainly not the norm!"

Such careful research and open minds marks them as true Defenders of the Playful. We are fortunate in having people like Drs. Olsen, Kutner, and Hanson to help us gain a mature perspective over mature games, and regain our trust in play, and in our kids.


from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith

Homo Ludens Ludens - of play and games

Exploring the relationship between play and games: discovering and affirming both the connections and distinctions - turns out to be ever more relevant to our understanding of the future of both play and games. In universities and art studios, in computer laboratories and workshops, investigations of game/play relationship are leading to a profound evolution of both. A goodly number of these leading-edge explorations can be found in the playful works that comprise the current Homo Ludens Ludens collection. See, for example, Stiff People's League, in the illustration accompanying this post.

In an interview with Daphne Dragona, of Homo Ludens Ludens, Ms. Dragona comments:

"...play reflects more the idea, the notion, the vivid and spontaneous basis for the action as well as its relation to fantasy, whereas games are closed systems and environments governed by rules which demand discipline and a constraint space and time. Play is in a way the presupposition for the games that are its expressions and forms.

"Play as a notion is much more open and therefore it may even embrace elements that come in opposition with a game's structure. For instance play has no death or end; but games do, otherwise there s no meaning into it. Or think of cheating. While it can destroy a game by breaking its rules, it is still a part, an act of play. On the same line, while any game forms hierarchies, play creates interrelations between them."

"...We can be playful anytime anyplace, not only through games. Games are basically a construction which is made possible because of this playfulness that already exists in any aspect of life."

People are doing some wonderful things in the name of play and games, art and technology. If you're interested in getting a taste, Homo Ludens Ludens is a virtual banquet.

via We Make Money, Not Art

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith

Where on Google Earth is Waldo?

Artist Melanie Coles has constructed a 2300-square-foot image of Waldo, of Where's Waldo fame.

She explains how she remembered the hours she spent with Waldo books, searching endlessly for his image, and made the connection between her childhood pastime and the delight she takes looking through Google Earth.

It is a brilliant connection. Coles creates a remarkably effective translation of a familiar, well-loved, print-based activity into the endlessly complex realities of the virtual world, adding a new layer of fun to our global vision.

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith

Magic Pen

Magic Pen. Quite magical. Puzzlingly so. Kind of like the computer puzzle of yore, "The Incredible Machine meets Line Rider.

Another one of those just right kind of casual intensities available to the fun-seeking computer-user, similar to that of the Filler. Available, did I say? Perhaps a better word would be "essential" - because such games bring a needed balance to our everso serious quest for sanity, challenging our intellect while celebrating the joy of having one.


via Neatorama

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith

The fun that tastes as good as it tastes when you figure something out

There's a taste of that fun you get when you're doing puzzles - solving them, completing them, breaking them back into pieces, putting them back together again, putting them away - a complex, varied, many-textured taste.

The computer has proven to be a highly nurturing environment for the flowering of experiences that taste like that. Puzzles built on puzzles, fantasy, logic, art, music all put together to serve us that particular kind of puzzle-solving fun, over and over again.

neutral provides a good demonstration of the state of that particular delicious art of puzzle-solving, for those who can taste the fun of it.

from Metafilter

by way of Bernie DeKoven, funsmith

Ze Frank's Virtual Color Wars

As you know, I am a great fan of Ze Frank's work. No, make that Ze Frank's play.

As you might also know, I am a Twitter dabbler. Recently, Ze once again launched something new into the cybersphere. Something oddly like a giant, world-wide game of Virtual Color War. I'll let Ze explain:

We used to play color wars at summer camp. Near the end of the year the entire camp would split up into colors, red, green, black, blue, etc... and compete in a series of events: tug of war, egg toss, basketball - sort of like the movie Meatballs, except all within the same camp.

During the summer we were divided into discreet units, older kids here, younger kids there, Hiawathans by the lake Tawasenthans by the ropes course, etc... But when it came time for color wars you had no idea who would be on your team. It was a release, and it was viciously fun.

So, for a while I've been thinking about how a color war might look online. How would you play tug of war, or other group games that were silly, time limited, and awesome... and more importantly how could you create teams within an already functioning environment to have that same people-mash-up effect that we did at camp.

Twitter seemed perfect. So yesterday AM I posted this tweet, this tweet, and this tweet.

And now it has gone haywire. I regret having caused a day of spam...but...

There are dozens of teams, some of which are hundreds of players deep. Many of the players don't really know what they joined or why, but for me and the wonderful coders that are working on this, it is a perfect implicit structure that can be used to start setting up the colorwar events. And beyond this, it is an idiom that can be used to create rapid affiliation and action models in the future.

For more virtual Colorwar stuff, see Colorwar 2008 and this collection of ideas for color wars.

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith

The socialization of virtual

Clive Thompson, a contributing writer for The New York Times, writes:

...By the looks of it, we're entering a new golden age of social, face-to-face game playing. Consider that in the last year, the biggest breakout hits have been music games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, and the Wii's sporty and casual titles.

Each of these games explicitly encourages social playing -- people hanging out together. (Here's a revealing cultural moment: I was walking down the street in the East Village last month and overheard two female college students complaining vociferously that they hadn't been invited to their friend's Rock Band session.)

Perhaps we're simply going back to the roots of gaming. Though you wouldn't know it from the perennial hysteria about games turning kids into walleyed, anti-social zombies, videogames were originally a social pursuit, because the best games were available only in arcades, and those places were as convivial as Irish pubs. You'd watch one another play, you'd share techniques, you'd talk trash, gossip.

In the late '80s, the rise of home consoles broke up that sociality, making gaming a more solitary pursuit -- something you pursued alone in a basement or a bedroom. But 10 years later, the rise of multiplayer gaming brought the public vibe back to games. That was particularly true of world-games like World of Warcraft, where players log in often for the sole purpose of chatting.

So maybe it's no surprise that we're coming full circle. We don't want to play alone. We want play dates.

Playing alone is fun. There are puzzles and solitaire and running around trees and stuff. Playing together is funner.





from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith

More kids/games/violence research

I received the following email from Tom Hanson, editor of OpenEducation.net

I see where you recently discussed kids and video games on your site (see: Are Video Games Ever Good for Kids?). At OpenEducation.net we did an in depth review of the topic of violent video games that included an interview with one of the authors of the book. We broke the topic out into three posts:

Shoot-em Up Video Games - The Cause of Greater Anti-social Behaviors in Teens?

Author Reveals "The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games"

Experts State: Do Not Banish - Instead, Manage Violent Video Game Play

The research of Kutner and Olson has caused one critic of such games, this writer, to rethink his thoughts on the topic. If you think the posts would be of interest to your readers I would be grateful if you would share them.

Grateful? No, no, I'm the one who's grateful for this great resource. Someone's been doing a lot of clear thinking, in the name of education and play - the series, and in fact the blog itself, is a gift to all of us: designers, players, families and especially kids.




from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith