The Festival of New

Play. Thinking of the word, one might envision images of children running around in a playground, puppies wrestling, or teenagers concentrating on hitting their targets in a first-person shooter—activities that seem frivolous and removed from the serious business of life. But what if instead we looked beyond these images to what play really involves: improvisation, creative problem-solving, strategy, empathy, subverting social norms, and systems-thinking. In fact, play is the natural way people learn. These are just a few of the ways play helps us re-imagine the world. Perhaps play is more serious than we think. In this class students look at play and how games—or, in other words, machines that generate play—model the world and let people try out new strategies. The course includes playing games, deconstructing them, modifying them, and making them to reflect the world, social issues, and experiences that are fun and profound, serious and playful. By the end of the semester, students will have a deeper understanding of how games work, and through playing and making them, how the world works too.