Play

It's a new, tiny handheld game system with a bunch of brand-new games. We made Playdate just for fun.

If we made hardware, and built a tiny little game system that came with lots of surprise games, would that make people happy?

Interesting observation is that “solo-dev” seems to be the new indie.

...In this case, I think it’s great when things get brought back to the basics… Work by just one person counts as something. It brings value to the table in ways that work by large teams never will because it’s the unique voice, perspective, and intention of just one person that you are experiencing when you are playing their game. Experimentation can thrive here.

...It is particularly interesting when you look at the tool space. Tools outside of the mainstream, made by just one person, a group of friends, or a small team… all asking “what if”, and then exploring how their tool can empower creation in an idealistically creative way.

Dave quotes The Hot Potato Process to give this way of working a name. The name is misleading. Passing a hot potato implies you want to get rid of it because it´s hot. I do not want to get rid of it. I want to get a hold on it, enjoy handling it and playing with it, then passing it to someone else for enrichment and getting it back. As a metaphor, soccer could be more suitable. Passing the ball back and forth to your teammates, enjoying the interaction while crossing the field to achieve a goal, is what I want. I want serious play.

My design goal was simple: A person can walk up, play with a MIDI controller, see a resulting image on a screen, and then send the image to a pen plotter. The plotter draws their unique drawing, and they can take it home and frame it.

...Typically, Generative Art is fully autonomous, and a pseudo-random number generator is called to create a randomized set of parameters. For AAS, I intended to pluck out the randomness and insert user controls.

I evaluated a few options for input devices. I landed on the Intech Grid series MIDI controllers for their simplicity and modularity. Meant to be snapped together, these controllers offered the correct number of inputs to encourage playful exploration without being overwhelming.

Lion cubs play-fight to learn social skills. Rats play to learn emotional skills. Monkeys play to learn cognitive skills. And yet, in the last century, we humans have convinced ourselves that play is useless, and learning is supposed to be boring.

Gosh, no wonder we’re all so miserable.

Welcome to Explorable Explanations, a hub for learning through play! We’re a disorganized “movement” of artists, coders & educators who want to reunite play and learning.

Two studs wide and angled at 45°, the ubiquitous “2x2 decorated slope” is a LEGO minifigure’s interface to the world. These iconic, low-resolution designs are the perfect tool to learn the basics of physical interface design.

It’s a game we’d been dreaming of for years: a giant rube goldberg machine builder in the style of the classic Incredible Machine games, made of a patchwork of machines created by individual xkcd readers.

...Sometimes an idea feels like it emerges fully-formed, but when you start talking about it, you realize there’s still a dizzying array of decisions to make. Thus ensued 5 days of brainstorming to discover each of us had slightly different core beliefs about what this comic should be:

• Where do the balls come from?
• Does everyone see the same machine? What is its purpose?
• How can players interact with it?
• And most importantly… why do they?

Psychogeography is an exploration of urban environments that emphasizes playfulness and "drifting". It was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as:

• "The study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals."
• "A total dissolution of boundaries between art and life."
• "A whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities...just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape."

Because “Inventing” is the precise word, for, as Brosterman elaborates, it’s not as though kindergarten always existed. It had to be invented and it even had an inventor. For most of European history, no one had bothered educating children before the age of seven, as it wasn’t until around that age that one might be confident they would survive into adulthood, so why bother? By the 1830s, however, it was becoming clear that if kids had made it to age four, they’d likely make it altogether; and this realization had a catalyzing effect on one German educator in particular, a charismatic crystallographer, of all things (and how often does one get to use those two words in one phrase?), named Friedrich Froebel.

Over the next several decades (through his death in 1852), Froebel elaborated an ever more specific theory and practice for the deployment of kindergartens (his term), small schools for children starting around age four, in which the kindergartners were the teachers—the gardeners of children—and the gardening took the form of guided free play: no tests, no drills, no grades, not even any reading, ‘riting, or ‘rithmetic. Just patterns and patternings (remember, Froebel started out as a crystallographer): a sequential exposition of and exposure to form and the formful.

So, if you ask me, I’d like the internet to be a place, where people love to stay and play.

But with the same passion to leave for a comeback.

Remember when tech wasn't all sleek slabs and monotone minimalism? When gadgets were vibrant, playful, and dared to be, well, weird? Yeah, me too.

...In the recent past, we used to get new devices all the time. Palm Pilots, Tamagotchis, calculator watches, even clunky walkie-talkies – they weren't all game-changers, but they were sparks in the tinderbox of creativity for engineers and product managers the world over. They pushed boundaries, sparked imaginations, and kept the tech world humming with the energy of ‘what if?’

That's the real magic of new funky gadgets. It's not about the specs or the price tag (though, let's be honest, who can resist a new toy, and at $200 it’s an easy purchase to tinker with). It's about the audacity to be different, to inject a little fun into what some would say is now simply another part of change-averse corporate America. It's a neon sign flashing: you don’t have to be a trillion dollar company to build a device. That’s cool.

Listed in a Van Eaton Galleries auction recently was a mysterious document called “Paradise Pier Imagineering Project Scope” that profoundly called to me.

The reason I’m mildly hostile to Lego is it takes away too much friction and engineering messiness in favor of simplicity of UX (PX? play experience?) and aesthetics (apparently this has been a trend known as “juniorization”).

...As a personal preference, I like to see the higher-dimensional messiness of real-world engineering reflected in a tinkering medium.

It's such a tactile delight. The clicks and friction and spinning disk and toggles and tilts and materiality. The tiny dotted LED display, subtle drops of color. The tight tolerances. The quirky UI. The depth of "oh, I can do THAT with THIS?" discoveries. The feeling of something esoteric being fun to master. The few-too-many controls at first glance that eventually feel right at home.

Yes it's pricey, and yes there are plenty of alternatives for far less coin, but for me, the inspiration is priceless. And supporting people doing unusual, high-quality, high-design things is worth it. I just like playing with the damn thing. I like looking at the damn thing. It gives me all sorts of ideas for my own work.

I just adore functional objects like this. Incredible imagination, incredible work.

More than making money… more than that feeling of launching a new product, feature, website, or app… the idea I am coming to value most in my professional life is the feeling of “play”. Sometimes play is being on my own with high autonomy and low consequences, sometimes it’s getting to choose new and fun technologies, but where play is most valuable is when it involves other people.

...If there’s a downside to the Hot Potato process it’s that there’s a lot of re-building mid-flight as new requirements trickle in or you discover new constraints. When you build frequent iteration and circling back into the process, it can lead to a feeling of never being “done”. That is a tax on cognitive load, like open browser tabs, that may not neurologically suit everyone. Others might even prefer a more linear assembly line process.

If I had to choose which process I prefer, I’d pick reworking a component over-and-over in a Hot Potato process versus other alternatives.

It is an invariable principle of all play… that whoever plays, plays freely. Whoever must play, cannot play.

Another favorite concept of the CIAM theorists and others is the separation of recreation from everything else. This has crystallized in our real cities in the form of playgrounds. The playground, asphalted and fenced in, is nothing but a pictorial acknowledgment of the fact that ‘play’ exists as an isolated concept in our minds. It has nothing to do with the life of play itself. Few self-respecting children will even play in a playground.

Play itself, the play that children practice, goes on somewhere different every day. In a natural city this is what happens.