Pure Play

Boys playing (Petrov-Vodkin) -Wikimedia Commons Picture Archives

I spoke yesterday with a man I respect immensely named Bob Appleton, he's a professor at Ryerson and a graphic designer of note but more importantly I view him as sort of a mentoring figure, which is odd since I have had him as my professor twice and neither class focused on learning but more doing. I digress what I find wonderful about Bob is that I can't stop talking to him once I start and when I'm speaking to him my thoughts seems to work themselves out as they fly from my mouth.

So yesterday after a long hiatus we spoke, notably about the importance of play and how it pertains to both art and society. During this conversation I came to reflect upon my previous statements and some notes and conversations about the idea of "perfect play"or "pure play", a sort of childish innocent play that was free of the seemingly guilty facets of adult play. So I suppose this post is some kind of retraction, or more of a re imagining for the sake of understanding my field better, I'm changing my notions of play or at least expanding on them. While it was fun to look at play as though it was some kind of universal mathematical constant, as was necessary for the project, I can't continue to look at it as a Psychologist or a Mathematician becasue I am neither of these, which also for my means giving up the search for "Pure Play" for the sake of actually understanding play better. I liken this to a musician who had the erroneous idea that some how he could make a song that every single person on the planet would enjoy, its a pleasant Lennonesque notion but I've come to the realization that I was dismissing the real play in favor of finding this single and ultimately elusive type. So I'm fondly waving goodbye to my Unified Play Theory, it will remain here on the site as documentation but in the name of knowing more about play I think I'll be putting it out to pasture.