Play

Playing Word Games in Blog Comments

November 23, 2008

I just noticed a whole series of word-association and other games going on in the comments of Fail Blog posts. I have no idea if this is a new phenomenon, but I haven’t seen it before. Nor is it clear if any of these people know each other from elsewhere, but there is a whole [...]

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The Rules of Currency

November 10, 2008

Image: J0nB0n Stephen Sniderman’s excellent 1999 essay, Unwritten Rules, in The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology talks about the tacit agreement of unwritten (and impossible) rules required for any kind of play or game. He uses currency as an analogy – we all know the piece of paper is inherently worthless but [...]

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Tim Brown on Serious Play

November 9, 2008

I would have loved to have gone to the Serious Play conference, but seem to remember it cost serious money too. This talk from Tim Brown of IDEO sums up a great deal of my own thinking and research, although he got there first of course! It’s much, much harder to put into practice than [...]

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The Unfinished Swan

October 27, 2008

The Unfinished Swan – Tech Demo 9/2008 from Ian Dallas on Vimeo. The Unfinished Swan is a still in-development game set in an entirely white world. Instead of splattering the blood of monsters around the walls, the player splatters black ink to find their way through “an unusual garden”. Apart from looking stunning in its [...]

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Palin Bingo

October 20, 2008

A variant of bullshit bingo, Jesper Juul played Palin Bingo during the vice presidential debate (did she really never mention her family?). I like “Air Space” over her picture in the middle spot. And in the spirit of the classic <a href=”http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=playpen0b-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B000FVEG6S&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr””>Living Books interactive storybooks, be sure to play Palin as President. It’s quite depressing, [...]

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Designing Education’s Future

September 11, 2008

I gave a presentation yesterday at Northumbria University’s School of Design’s staff conference called Designing Education’s Future: online, collaborative, playful and socially aware. I just found out it has been featured on Slideshare, which is always good to hear. I’ll try and stripe the audio on it soon to help it make more sense. It’s [...]

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Flap to Freedom

August 16, 2008

Flap to Freedom from Chris O'Shea on Vimeo. Battery hens flap to help battery hens in the Flap to Freedom installation that Chris O’Shea and Icodesign created for the V&A Village Fete to support freedom for farmed chickens. Contestants flap their arms and their chicken moves in sync. Quickest flapper wins the highest place on [...]

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Rubik’s Cube. Magic.

August 1, 2008

During some research into the history of Rubik’s Cube for my PhD, I stumbled across this video of freaky mind control an amazing trick by Keith Barry using Rubik’s Cubes and Numb3rs star, David Krumholtz, as his victim. The one where he freaks out the Entertainment Tonight presenters is pretty entertaining too. Anyone want to [...]

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Play as you go – hijacking public spaces

June 16, 2008

A quick reblog of Pixelsumo’s post about Bruno Taylor’s work hijacking public places to make playful spaces, which explores the notion that play is being designed out of the public realm. “71% of adults used to play on the streets when they were young. 21% of children do so now,” says Taylor. The above video [...]

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Core77 Broadcast interview with Troika

May 6, 2008

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of interviewing Sebastien and Eva from Troika, the studio behind the Cloud and All The Time In The World installations at new Terminal 5 at Heathrow. So, if you were one of the hundreds stuck at Terminal 5 when it opened, at least you had something decent [...]

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