Come Out & Play Festival 2010: Get Your Play On (bring your handheld gadgets)

Come Out & Play has been running since 2006. At the time of this post the 2010 weekend event includes 40+ different events and games; the variety and creativity and fun is spectacular. I’ve tried several times to write a sentence that somehow captures it; I got nothing. Go. Look through the list. Then shake your head a little and note the smile on your face.

What I can easily highlight is that a number of the games and events require handheld personal technology like GPS units and smartphones. This is further evidence to me that we are on the cusp of a new trend of technology-infused play that will be both very social and intimately linked to real world settings.

Come Out & Play Festival 2010:

We’re very excited to announce that the Come Out & Play Festival is coming to Brooklyn in 2010. The festival will run June 4-6, 2010…

Come Out & Play helps people rediscover the city around them through play. The festival offers a chance to explore new styles of public games and play. We show how much fun can be had by combining elements like GPS, sidewalks, chalk, smartphones, kickball, SMS, capture the flag, bluetooth, and treasure hunts in a dramatic urban context like New York City. Best of all: the games we feature are not just for kids (though kids are of course welcome)!

Why street games? Why a street games festival, you ask? Fair questions. Well, we like innovative use of public space. We like games which make people interact in new ways. We like games that alter your perception of your surroundings. But most importantly, we think games are great way to have fun.

Each year the Come Out & Play settles in a different neighborhood and explores the limits of play and games in that space. We’ve played among the galleries of Chelsea, played amidst the thriving nightlife of the Lower East Side and navigated the throngs of tourists in Times Square. This year the festival lands in Brooklyn to explore a new set of challenges. We will explore the potential for play in a converted 100-year old bathhouse. We will find ways to engage a residential neighborhood like Park Slope with games. We will discover the playful uses of a post-industrial swath of warehouses and canals like Gowanus. And we’ll make games from the rich texture of a historic public cemetery like Green-Wood.

(via Bernie DeKoven)

Where Work Is Play: The d.school’s Play Class

The Institute of Design at Stanford offers a play class “From Play to Innovation.”

Where Work Is Play: The d.school’s Play Class: [slide show]

At the Stanford d.school From Play to Innovation or “Play Class” is a design course that teaches students to integrate play into their everyday lives. Play is a natural state of behavior in all animals that involves movement, fun, and collaboration. With its large open spaces, the d.school offers an ideal environment for play. Students are able to dance, move and interact with each other which is a vital part of play. — Matt Sullivan

Play Class is taught by Brendan Boyle of IDEO, Stuart Thompson a Stanford professor of Neuroscience, Stuart Brown of the National Institute of Play, and myself, Matt Sullivan, of the Stanford Graduate Design Program. In true design thinking form, Play Class brings together students from all backgrounds ranging from philosophy to electrical engineering to business. This rich mix of backgrounds is perfect for stimulating innovation.

In Play Class, integrating movement into everyday life is a big part of what we do. Students actively investigate the human “state of play” to reach an understanding of its principle attributes and how important it is to creative thinking. The d.school offers a space where doing things different and acting silly is not only accepted, it is encouraged.

Design the Phone of the Future was an exercise where students used the design process to come up with ideas of what the future of cell phone technology would look like. The d.school offers students the ability to rapid prototype out of just about anything whether it be straws and aluminum foil to wood and vinyl to computer animation. Ideation through rapid prototyping is a big part of Play Class and the d.school.

Huizinga’s “Magic Circle” & Thoughts on Gameplay Information Feedback Loops

The Playful and the Serious: An approximation to Huizinga’s Homo Ludens:

According to Huizinga, the consciousness of play as a separate and self-contained sphere is often reinforced by the pervasive tendency to enclose the players within a spatiotemporal frame, the so-called “magic circle”, which isolates their game from the more serious tasks of daily living. The separation often consists in a literal physical precinct: a chessboard, ring, arena, field, stadium, stage, altar, etc. There are also sharp temporal boundaries, a clear beginning and an end, which clearly mark the game off as a temporary interruption of ordinary life. The game unfolds within a temporarily closed world. Moreover, the existence of the magic circle is closely related to the existence of artificial rules or conventions that hold only within this enclosure.

There is No Magic Circle (in Video Games):

Video games have no magic circle, but board games do. The difference between these two media is, essentially, one of reaction and proaction.

… I want to address Huizinga’s famed “magic circle.” Recent scholarship agrees (seemingly unilaterally) that the magic circle is porous at best.

… I propose that we should view the magic circle as the information feedback loop maintained by the players of a board game. The magic circle implies that something special and distinct from ordinary reality is occurring during a game. When we play a board game this is exactly what happens: the objects we play with are imbued with a special significance. Paper money is “worth” something, flat discs can “jump” over each other, placing a token in a certain place earns “points.” The meaning and information we attach to these objects belongs to the other half of the information feedback loop, a loop drawn between the players-as-players and players-as-processors. This loop is the magic circle, a circle that transforms random cubes of wood into bits of information that we are then somehow able to act upon in a meaningful way.

With video games the feedback loop is fundamentally different. We do not need to attach any special meaning to Mario, the computer provides it for us. We see and interact with the objects in a video game without any special manipulation of our own cognitive processes. There is no magic circle here, only reaction to a state that is just partially under our control.