100 Days of Play – Blog
A Blueprint for The Playful Society
With CounterPlay, the Danes are providing a blueprint for the Playful Society. The annual conference / festival of play takes place in Aarhus (pron: ore-huss), 2017 European Capital of Culture. It brings together play practitioners, academics, followers and thinkers to explore every aspect of play, in all parts of our lives.
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Five Favourite No-Equipment Games
The most admired quality in ‘play people’ seems to be when they have a game for any occasion. I think everyone has this in them, however, and you rarely need anything special to hand to play. Here are five of my favourite activities to play with no extra equipment required.
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Hooray for… Escape Rooms
It feels like art mimicking life mimicking art. A new series of The Crystal Maze has been announced, after nostalgia prompted the building of a crowd-funded experience. And I think that this (momentous) event owes a lot to the craze for Escape Rooms.
If you’ve not been to one of these the concept is straightforward. You’re locked in a room and have an hour to figure out the puzzles and escape. Generally this is framed around some fantasy / sci-fi / mystery / espionage narrative, where an unseen antagonist hinders your fight for freedom.
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Hooray for… the Board Game Renaissance
Maybe you’re aware of it. Maybe you’re not. But a board game renaissance is currently happening.
These board games – aka ‘tabletop games’ – are showing an unparalleled level of innovation in terms of both topics and dynamics. You might be exploring a forbidden island or conducting a seance to find a killer; identifying your hidden secret agents or relating the miserable tales of gothic families before their horrible deaths.
How do you know when it’s time to stop playing?
One of the key elements that people who theorise about play point to is that when playing people want it to continue. ‘Just ten more minutes…’ is the refrain that tells you your kids are playing.
As someone who strongly advocates for play for people of all ages, you might think that I’d say the time to stop playing is never. And in a sense I certainly do say that. There’s no age at which you should stop playing – in fact I believe it’s vital that that age never arrives.
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Play is Failing, Safely
I’ve written before about the notion that Play is in some way a simulation of more serious activities in the real world, but expressed discomfort with the notion that that makes it a ‘dry run’. For one thing, loss in a game does hurt; for another we can be playful about very serious things in real life.
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