Play and Game Communities

There are at least two different communities that form in support of playing together - one is what you might call a "game community," the other a "play community."

Every game and sport that becomes a cultural institution forms a community, a game community, and members of that community have only one thing in common, but very much in common – the particular game being played.

When you are part of a game community that comes together for a poker night, a game with the girls, or a cockfight, to some clear degree, it’s the mastery of that game that keeps you involved. At some point, your proficiency at the game, or at what you do in support of the game, determines your place in the game community. Winning is good. Winning a lot is better. In other words, to some clear degree, it’s the game that determines if you’re good enough to be part of that community.

In a play community, it’s the players, you and everyone you’re playing with, who determine whether the game is good enough. If it’s not, you change it. You change something about the rules, or you discover a hitherto unknown variation, or you play something entirely else. It’s you who determines if the game is good enough.

Most informal games - street games, pick-up games, playground games – are played by a play community. Most formal games, like Little League and Lawn Bowling, are played by a game community.

Commercial and historical forces tend to embrace game communities, and vice versa. Little League and Lawn Bowling are not just games, they are cultural events, they are sports.

Ultimately, the majority of people aren’t good enough to participate in the kinds of games played by game communities, especially when compared to the skills of the masters and grandmasters of the game.

Ultimately in the play community, everyone is good enough. Because it’s not any particular game that people have come together to play. Because the reason they have come together is to play, not necessarily to win, or even to keep score, but to play together, and be part of an event in which anyone can play, in which everyone is a master.

In the play community it’s mystery, not mastery that draws people together – it’s the mystery of shared imagination, of spontaneity and synergy, of generalized laughter and much mutual admiration, of shared fun.

When children are young, they first form play communities, and usually, if they can avoid formal intervention, they’ll continue expanding and diversifying the play communities they support and that support them well into adulthood.

It is no coincidence that the Internet, though it serves both kinds of community (play and game), is so easily characterized as a play community, dependent on openness and trust shared by its players, succeeding to the degree in which it can respond to their constantly evolving, individual and collective interests.

Most often, game communities share characteristics with play communities, and vice versa. In both, members show mutual respect for play - for supporting fantasy, keeping rules, observing boundaries…

People who come together for a "friendly game" - the weekly mahj game with the girls - are not about winning. What, you can win maybe $2.00. They’re about being with other people who know the game just about as well as they do, well-enough not to take it too seriously.

Once you've identified the principle members of a game community, it becomes more and more like a play community. Even to the point of changing rules. It’s not about the game any more. We’re all good enough.

The same is true at chess clubs and bridge clubs. Those community members who are good enough get together to play for fun.

The rewards of participation in a game community are often highly tangible – statues and money even. Those for a play community are the experience of community itself, of affinity, membership, acceptance, mutuality, respect, appreciation.

Christopher Alan Raynolds (paraphrasing Huizinga) writes: "The sense in a play community…(is) so powerful that the community outlasts the game."

Florence M. Hetzle and Austin H. Kutscher, in their book, get this, "Philosophical Aspects of Thanatology," write: "the primary interest of a person in a play community is in each other as persons; they are concerned to affirm each other in the uniqueness of one’s existence."

See also Patricia Anne Masters, "The Philadelphia Mummers: Building Community through Play," Temple University Press, 2007






from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith

Talking about fun in Jerusalem, cont'd

Charlie Kalech arranged for me to meet with some of his clients and colleagues today to conduct a short symposium on The Fun of Work. Needless to say, a fun and deep dialogue ensued.

The highlight, naturally, was when we played a game. The game: Tabletop Biathlon, of course. (What you might call "Tabletop Olympics" when played with two teams. I've come to regard this game as one of my personal best. Every time I play it, I learn something else about fun and work and people and life and stuff.)

Pictured here is Charlie, sitting next to a waste basket, holding a paper airplane and a paper ball - the key elements of one of the two sports developed for the Tabletop Biathlon. Both events (the other, business card bowling) were exactly what I had hoped they would be - innovative, a bit silly, and most definitely fun. The paper airplane game involved trying to throw a paper airplane into the basket, whilst opposing athletes tried to knock it away with paper balls. It is today's featured game because it was developed in Israel. The connections to current Israeli events are too obvious to point out. And the subsequent laughter too profound to convey.

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith

Talking about fun in Jerusalem, part one

This is not an easy time to talk about fun in Jerusalem, especially now, given Gaza. Nevertheless, like most Israelis, there's an implicit agreement - not to ignore the war, but to go on with life as usual, given what passes for usualness here.

So I've been meeting with a rather random collection of people who responded to my son's posts appearing in several local social networking sites about my Israeli sojourn. In these posts my son mentioned that I'd be in the area, without any particular agenda, ready to talk with anyone who was interested in fun.

Last week, I gave a brief presentation at what I was to discover was a remarkable Coworking environment called "PresenTense" - remarkable, not only because it was a genuine Coworking environment (a well-equipped facility in which high-tech nomads can get connected in as many ways as they see fit, online and off), but even more remarkable because it is the same organization that also publishes a magazine devoted to bringing together the stubbornly fragmented poles of the Israeli community. And even more remarkable because of my involvement with something alo called Coworking, and my ongoing commitment to building community through play. The connections were too many and too profound to ignore. We had a wonderfully challenging conversation about fun - spontaneous, responsive, surprisingly deep - talking about things like the psychology of flow, the connections between the play community and the work community, and how to deal, in a fun way, with a boy friend who won't help with the dishes.

One of the participants, a man named Charlie Kalech, wrote a blog post, reflecting on our conversation. His post is wonderfully reflective, and sensitive, and I leave you with it, for the fun of it. I meet tomorrow with Charlie and a group of executives for further explorations of fun and work, via a game of Junkyard Olympics. More about that later.

P.S. - that game that Charlie played with his employees, I remember playing that before at NASAGA - it was really a remarkable experience. Do you happen to know where that game comes from?



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

Defeats the Car

I was in Chicago O'Hare, waiting for a plane. We wanted desperately to call our daughter and couldn't find a pay phone that worked. Can you imagine. So we asked an iPhone-possessing young man if he could let us use his i- for a quick call. He obliged, and after we had finally contacted our daughter, we introduced ourselves.

Jon Lind, it turned out, is involved with a company called Defeats the Car, which, it turns further out, is a Dutch bicycle company named De Fietsfabriek, which kinda sounds like Defeats something. He just happened to have on his iPhone some rather delightful photos of their rather delightful creations. I was more than rather delighted by this bike, in particular. Jon writes: "The headlights...are battery powered LED lights. We went away from using the generator lights as they typically require more maintenance than we want our customers to have to deal with plus they create drag that can slow you down. Our customers are typically young families who want to have an alternative to driving their kids around town for local trips. Their reasons for desiring such a bicycle may come from concerns for the environment, saving on gasoline or avoiding the stresses of driving everywhere and having fun. We also have a large base of customers who get one of our city commuter models and they again have similar motives for getting things done without the dependence on automobile transportation. In addition to the practical purposes for purchasing one of our bicycles many people love the unique designs and styles plus the opportunity to personalize with either their names in the frame...or the sides of the cargo boxes can be used as blank canvasses with limitless opportunities for artistic expression."

Amazing what a chance meeting and a little kindness can lead one to.

Lovely. Fun. Pragmatic. Inspiring.

Consider reading their brochure even.


from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith