Fun!

I’ve been told that all things pass, and I can personally confirm this, because a number of things have certainly passed. Currently I’m in Australia: the deadliest country/continent in the world. Do I fear for my life far more while I’m here than I did while I was in Nigeria? You’d better believe it. According to Bill Bryson, five of Oz’s creatures are the most dangerous of their kind. Not something to fuck around with.

The future, much like the land mass, is wide open, and occasionally blemished by furtive nuclear detonations by Japanese doomsday cults (another useful tidbit from Bill Bryson!)

In any case, I’m shaking things up a bit. This makes sense to me: I feel like I’m a dynamic person. I feel that I have dynamos within me. Also pistons and widgets. I’m gonna be a professional fun-maker! Wheeee!

This is, of course, not terrifically curvy as curveballs go, since I’ve been on this trajectory for a while. I have at least one extremely successful, overwhelmingly ambitious project under my belt; that would be TorGame. I founded the organization and directed its first project — a two week “live alternate reality game” with over a hundred players. I did so immediately before leaving for Nigeria, which was an interesting twist, as the logical follow-ups had to be put on hiatus. Now I have the opportunity to pursue the dream — the dream of making money off of this sort of stuff. Not that I’m particularly fond of money; it’s just that I’d prefer to develop my craft in the bright sunlight of day, rather than in the dark recesses of my basement, after-hours, my hands already transformed into RSI-disfigured claws from 8 hours of full-time, soul-crushing programming work. I am, in short, going to do what the hell I want (which is my own estimation one step up from working for a soulless corporation in order to pay the mortgage, and one step down from saving orphan babies in Cambodia.)

So what does a professional fun-maker do? Well, if you’re me, you call yourself a pervasive gaming consultant. Defining what precisely that means is going to be an essay-sized blog post in itself, but in short, it’s about constructive forms of social play that takes place over common modalities. I’m a lot more interested in the concept of play than games per se, but play is a rather nebulous idea that is effectively operationalized in the form of actual games. Also, if you say you’re a “play” consultant it makes it sound sort of like you’re doing something sexual. Nevertheless, I’m guided strongly by thoughts like this one:

“Play cannot be denied. You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, not play.” -Johan Huizinga

That’s class, people.

What does a pervasive game look like? Kind of like ARGs, kind of like transmedia or cross-media storytelling, kind of like big games, kind of like urban games. If you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, that’s fine. I’ve got a lot of writing to do.

It also bears mentioning that my definition “pervasive games” is somewhat different from
other definitions, depending on who you ask. The interesting thing about trying to do business on the bleeding edge, though, is that you can largely make up defininitions at your convenience, because to 99% of the population it’s all fresh anyway. The only people you really need to worry about offending are the academics; and given my background, I’m quite capable of satisfying those types (hint: booze.)

I guess I have a real blog, now. =0

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