A craving for playing & learning along with Bernie de Koven
Bernie de Koven is an American game designer, an expert on PLAY, an author of numerous books on playfulness like the Well-Played Game and A Playful Path but most important he is such a fun person with a great sense of humor. His work in devoted on the ways that rudiments of playing can be breathed into our lives and throughout the years he has set up an incredible (online) library with interesting ideas & resources on how to create games from scratch, embrace our uniqueness and explore ways of adapting a more playful lifestyle.
Some weeks ago, I read this post from him on his personal website “Deep Fun” entitled: “ Hello. My Name Is Bernie. My friends Call Me “Blue.” I Have Cancer And Maybe A Year To Live. This Is What This Is What I’d Like You To Do About It.” And again this time, along with his fun-loving manifesto, he provides us with one lifetime piece of advice: PLAY GAMES, whatever we do, no matter where we are, with whoever we can. Just play for the sake of playing!
The thought of organizing one event inspired by his practices in Paris has been in my mind for a while now. After reading this article, this seemed like actually the right moment to make it happen. And with the great motivation of Jesse Himmelstein, the CRI Game Lab Director & the co-founder of Gamelier and one of the first people at the CRI who actually spread Bernie’s playful ideas at the CRI, we co-organized TWO ludic events inspired by Bernie’s ideas & playful lifestyle.
1.New Games Movement event (Parc Villette)
The New Games Movement started in the 1970s in order to reclaim cooperation elements and introduce the value of “play over competition” into sports games. In “new games” we are free to break rules and create new ones. “New games” stem from games that we all know, we co-create them together and no one is expert. In adults’ playing as in children’s playing, strong pedagogical relationships among players can be developed when the game takes up the form of a participatory game design and play session, as the one we had at Parc Villette. Especially in our case, we were able to organize this event in an outdoor environment. It is miraculous how the outdoor environment impacts the way that we used this play space, how its natural elements provide numerous opportunities to generate ideas and boost our creativity thinking, how the resources (glow sticks, frisbees, balls and more) that we had can change shape and use accordingly.
I am sure that Jesse can explain you more in this video: goo.gl/A9hNUS
2. Junkyard Sports event (CRI — Cochin)
Along within the same approach, the Junkyard Sports session, influenced by the homonymous book of Bernie, aimed at encouraging players to reuse old items (that we do not need anymore) and create from zero games that we could play right away. As Bernie explained to us, since we had an amazing Skype group video chat with him, the term “sports” is used as we all know for what we are talking about.
The focus is the “living together”, “playing together” approach and as we create again new games from the beginning, no one is expert. After all, who is good at playing basketball with balls made of supermarket leaflets and scoring points through a plastic bag used as a basketball hoop? So what we did is to create new games from junk items (for inspiration check this list of items: https://goo.gl/jiEe3j ), make new rules, new play goals, new scoring systems.
You can find his inspiring and useful guidance throughout this session here: goo.gl/AJV6ud
If you want to know more about Bernie’s work, visit his personal webpage: https://www.deepfun.com/
And in any part of the world that you live in : do not forget to play!
