DeepFUN

adventuring

March 26, 2013

There’s a certain sense of adventure that seems to accompany you when you are on the playful path. Not all the time. It is yet another flavor of fun, that taste, that feeling of being on a journey through uncharted (at least by you) territory. Territories of the imagination. Hidden territories. Unexplored, dangerous territories. Aboriginal [...]

some thoughts about play deprivation from Morgan Leichter-Saxby

March 25, 2013

In her brilliant article On play deprivation and our fear of one another, Morgan Leichter-Saxby reflects on a conversation she had with a reporter while she was in Bogota. She writes: A reporter, who is also a single mother of one young daughter, asked me what I thought the greatest barriers to children’s outdoor play [...]

Heather Logas on experimental game design

March 22, 2013

Googling for “coliberation,” I eventually found this. It led to much nachas, finding my ideas taking root in the very fertile minds of young artists and game designers. I wouldn’t mind if it inspired you to invent something or other. Logas’s current interest is what she calls “physical interfaces for digital games.” She’s not talking about joysticks. [...]

Hand pile Ouija

March 21, 2013

You get a small bunch of people together – say from 3-9 (no, you don’t have to actually say it). They stand in a circle and make a hand pile. You know, a pile of hands: everybody just piling one hand on top of someone else’s until they run out of hands. And then someone [...]

Yvan Pestalozzi and the Lozzi Worm

March 20, 2013

Behold, the Lozziworm, a “Playground stabile consisting of straight and curved elements which are connected with coupling rings” found in “about 110 playgrounds, parks and schoolyards all over Europe.” Elegant. Inviting. Inviting climbing on and in and out and under. Inviting fantasy. Inviting play. It is the work of a sculptor names Yvan Pestalozzi, who, it turns [...]

eine kleine toy music

March 19, 2013

The connections between music and play are so integral that it’s almost scurrilous to suggest there should be a distinction. On the other hand, the connections between music and playfulness are a bit less evident. Enter Giuseppe Acito, chief impressario of Factory Sonico, with the manifestly playful performance of his Toa Mata Band of electronic-music [...]

Jacksonball

March 18, 2013

“My son Jackson and I invented the sport, hence the name. There is a picture of him working out rules with his toys and the boundaries drawn in chalk, “a picture of an example referee uniform he made, “and also a picture of him busking to raise money for supplies, such as referee whistles, orange [...]

braving the game

March 15, 2013

One of the things I only managed to hint at when I wrote about the playfulness/trust connection: it takes bravery to play a game. Like it takes bravery to love someone. Bravery, because the more deeply you do either, the more completely you give yourself over to the other. It’s what you have to do [...]

your self in play

March 14, 2013

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” This, reportedly, from Plato. I don’t think the self you are when you are at play is any more “who you really are” than the self you are when you are not at play. I think the [...]

Five lessons of informal games

March 13, 2013

There’s a section in Peter Gray’s Free to Learn that elegantly and intelligently reflects the very core of what I’ve been teaching about games and kids and adults and life. It’s core to the message of The Well-Played Game. It’s core to what New Games represents. It’s core to what I represent. It’s in Chapter 8, “The Role of [...]

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