"Sustainable Play: Towards a New Games Movement for the Digital Age"

My involvement with the USC School of Cinema Television Interactive Multimedia Division began last year with an invitation from Professor Tracy Fullerton to make a presentation about New Games, etc., to students and faculty. That has led to a closer and closer affiliation, especially with Tracy and her cohorts at Ludica. Which, in turn, led Celia, Janine, Jacki, and Tracy to author a most remarkable paper, called: "Sustainable Play: Towards a New Games Movement for the Digital Age." Here's the abstract:

"This paper suggests a revisitation of the New Games Movement, formed by Stewart Brand and others in the early 1970s in the United States as a response to the Vietnam War, against a backdrop of dramatic social and economic change, fueled by a looming energy crisis, civil rights, feminism, and unhealthy widespread drug abuse. Like-minded contemporaries, R. Buckminster Fuller (World Game), Robert Smithson (Spiral Jetty), and Christo and Jean-Claude (Valley Curtain), responded in kind to these environmental and sociopolitical quandaries with their 'earthworks.' As digital game designers and theorists embark upon developing new methods to address the creative crisis in mainstream game production, against a similar backdrop of climate change, a controversial war, political upheaval and complex gender issues, we propose a reexamination of the New Games Movement and its methods as a means of constructing shared contexts for meaningful play in virtual and real-world spaces."

Making the connection between the nature of the Fun Community as manifest by New Games, and the multimediated communities described in the paper, is extremely powerful: virtually packed with potentiating implications for people and media and play. And thanks to this revisioning of New Games, I am delighted, honored, and downright hopeful.