Soft fences and wild places to play.

The world game-wise I would like to portray and celebrate and create is sort of mapped out in my head. It is a world based on the etoys theory of soft fences: you start out in a children's playground that is very rudimentary, very activity oriented and with a very low fence. This is the sort of physical playground I remember as a child growing up: it was a set of bars and rings and a sandbox with a scrap of pavement marked out for hop scotch and a numbers square game.

It had a low fence that you could look over into the next playground.

The games and physical activities were rudimentary versions of the larger scale versions that existed just beyond view beyond the confines of the low fence.

There were two ways to gain access to the older kids side, where the really challenging play equipment was: one was to figure out the somewhat physically difficult and potentially finger smashing gate latch, the other was to physically scale the little fence.

In the playground in my minds eye there is more fun stuff in the areas that you come upon in the playground than we ever could have in our playground. It would all loop around to vistas that would show what was being created by the players at the very top level who are essentially preparing content and creating the game. Little views into the beyond. There were limitations in that playspace and how we used it at least physically; in that playground the limitations were physical rather than on the imagination because mentally in that playground I remember going everywhere. It had a pretty tall fence, tall enough that you could lean up on it with all your body weight. You had to really work to climb over it, you had to want it to get over.

Far beyond that were the wild places to play. These were the best.

They had more sort of magical entrances and secret ways in.

Have you ever stumbled upon a fort?

A small nested space under a hedge where very small children can have privacy and play pretend? The race of bikes up and down a street where the cards in the spokes and the sounds from the children suggest an imaginary racetrack...after all the street is as much a wild space as the greenwood and the dell beyond the shadow of the streetlamp. These are the sorts of wild spaces where play erupts into a new level of agency and self definition. sense of self and sense of performance start to have a predominant hand in shaping participation.

We played in the forgotten spaces, where the water ran off too quickly from the development of our homes in Giant Pipes under bridges. We played in the dirt of the bulldozers and where the wildness hung on in traces and in adapting spurts. We watched as crows and hummingbirds and sparrows settled into our neighborhoods along with us.

The wild places beyond the fences are also important to the imagination. These are the places in the imagination where we wander, hopefully with a partner or many and often with the loving help of a guide or two. This is like setting up a personal fort at the edge of the great story woods in which all the magical woods stories take place in. Or beyond a great shimmering sea where fantastical creatures abound and where you are traveling in a magical balloon with great living quarters like a zeppelin with solar power on the top that churns out fresh linens and breakfast to the people journeying below in the stunning observation decks.

Observing Islands of fantastical possibilities arising through the mists. Continents of new places where we can find a personalized niche and a fresh space to test ourselves and play. A window into a possible future which we can find if we keep striving and yearning and working towards it through play.

Play can produce dramatically intense sudden and spontaneous work.

Having a view into miniature world and scale models of of issues and problems helps participation and sets the stage for play that evolves work as a residue.

It is a personal vision based on my own tendency to wander and adore vistas which create miniature views of far off places. Miniatures have always fascinated me and I have always connected them to wildness.As a child there was a nursery near where I grew up in Agoura in the Thousand Oaks area where they had this lovely waterfall fountain installation and lots of bonsai supplies and lots of unusual miniature porcelain items. Like tiny Japanese houses and little figurines. There were also supplies for people who made train set miniatures because I think someone in the shop was an enthusiast or somehow it fit in with their very whimsical theme and they had all these little bushes and trees and ways to fabricate abstracted environments in a couple of scales.

You would stand there and imagine landscapes while the sound of falling water and the murmur of other people enjoying themselves stimulated your imagination. Visually you would be soaking in all the tiny things and what they represented and auditorily you would be racing around the room enjoying the atmosphere.

There is a a spatial aspect to play in this way, in these demarcations of soft fences and tall fences and gateways to wild places, and there is a granularity that is important to notice.

A very very young child often needs other children or adults to "teach them the game".

Once you know how to learn you can go out onto a playground where games are already in progress and sort of jump in as a new team member. You can just "go out and play".

After a certain point you can go beyond these activities and assume a higher level of agency in the playing field arena. You can set up your own ideas about what is fun and what the game is and how you yourself are going to participate and how you will be judged by yourself for how you yourself internally perceive your own performance to have been.

This contact between wildness and between self image is what interests me most, how do we connect the ability to explore and have direct agency in your own world with a sense of self that is resilient enough to withstand the difficulties and setbacks of protovation?

Mostly it is not that difficult to develop yourself enough to be receptive to failure as part of the process in great part because there is a raft of teaching that already exists in that area that we can still rely on. Being self editing is part of any discipline.

The reward for exploration and for agency is the ability to create the potential for play to erupt. To fabricate your own play sets and develop your own games and language of ludic interaction. To party is to play. Fiesta is fun.

Many of us build these wild forts in moments and in seasonal ludic activities and places in our yearly cycle. Like the surfers in my childhood in Malibu who would build fantastical huts out of driftwood each summer with elaborate entrances and decorated fences we build imaginative and expressive personalized camps for ourselves to live in at places like Black Rock city at Burningman, at festivals like Earthdance or even larger scale festivals like Coachella or the emerging music and sustainability festivals you can find in almost any metropolitan area any where in the world now.

We bring some ludic senses to the act of exploring the wilderness as well as urban spaces. Play is everywhere when you are exploring and participating in your own world of knowledge.

These are the ubiquitous features of play. Our learning how to play leads to us learning how to participate in games and this leads to us being able to imaginatively explore and take agency in the world. The act of connecting an internal mind which is engaged in a gaming type state with the activities of your life that you undertake is somehow dynamically connected with your ability to perceive your own participation and presence as satisfactory.

In the interstitial spaces of the internet a sort of wildness emerged in which it became possible to build forts and hideouts and soft caves in the hill with wood for a door and even a sort of flying balloon with a magical device that makes breakfast and coffee when you are groggy. On the myspace and then facebook the kids led the way making a sort of clever personal space based on polls and blogs and event sharing tools. As they play beyond the edges they are confronted with the real wildness beyond beyond. Web 2.0 became about building a fun fort other people might want to come and hang out in.

How do we play these spaces into the next wildness, the next billion people who all bring an innate ability to play and take agency to the field. How do we bring this play activity into the wilderness of human participation; into the developing world, into a cohesive systemic view of our information systems, our water systems our food systems?

It seems like if we were able to play more of a game like scientists do in the wilderness identifying plants and animals and establishing larger scale feedback loops it seems like we could build more robust systems based on the levels of play and of learning and on the structural integrity necessary for a game to be a game rather than a loose system of play, or simply a playset with potentials for play built into them. It seems like we could start to build games together that allow us to participate and create new views of how we see our own world as well as each other.

Ultimately what we need to do is to continue to develop a ubiquitous set of tools that people can use to access an entire toolset of play equipment that can be set together to allow useful data driven play activities to take place on ubiquitous devices.

The race is on to go beyond and play with everyone.