Metaplay 5

Some definitions:

Game: Play with rules.

Rule: A constraint upon behavior that is imposed by social convention.

Play: Good luck with that one.Better scholars than me have tried and failed to define play.

Examples:

Suck on this Thing I Found

This is a popular play activity performed by infants everywhere with all manner of intended and accidental toys. Is it play? I would say, yes. Does it have rules? No, it does not. It is play, but not a game.

Peek-a-boo (novice player)

Player 1 initiates play by hiding and abruptly returning while vocalizing. Player 2 is startled by Player 1 and reacts. Player 2 realizes that Player 1 is not a real threat and that his or her startle reaction was unwarranted. Comedic irony ensues. (The foundation of all things that are funny is, “I’m in distress; oh, wait, no I’m not!” and it starts right here.)

In this play, Player 1 is using rules, but Player 2 is reacting only with basic physiological/emotional responses. I suppose it counts as a game for Player 1, but not for Player 2.

Peek-a-boo (expert player)

Player 1 initiates play by hiding. Player 2 recalls this from earlier and anticipates the forthcoming abrupt return. Player 1 returns, Player 2 pretends to be startled, reenacting the novice game, and comedy ensues. Or players skip that step altogether and jump straight to the giggling. At this point, the startle effect is assumed, but not obligatory.

A symbolic transformation has occurred! This is a social convention, and thus it is a rule. Player 2 has joined in the game.

Gravity

Player 1 drops Cheerios from high chair tray. They fall on the floor as opposed to hovering in space of falling to the ceiling. (Not a rule, natural principle of the universe).

Dog eats Cheerios. (Not a rule. More of a natural consequence. Although this does have some qualities of agency, in that the dog’s motivations and behaviors are its own, unlike gravity, which has no agency.)

Player 1 drops spoon. It makes a different sound upon landing than the Cheerios. Dog licks, but does not eat spoon. (I’m beginning to sense a pattern here in that objects tend to fall toward the floor consistently. More data are required to confirm)

Player 1 drops sippy-cup. A third unique sound occurs, perhaps accompanied by more bouncing and rolling than the previous objects.

Unwitting Player 2 returns cup, but not the Cheerios or the spoon. (Okay, now we have a socially established rule. How consistent is this rule? Gravity is pretty persistent, but how many times will Mom give back the cup before the pattern changes? What else will she give back?)

New definition:

Goals: Goals are motivations that are established before the play activity begins. Much play involves behavior directed toward an intended outcome, but there is a difference between intentions that arise as a reaction to things inside the play frame versus intentions that come from outside the play frame.

Examples: Chase each other around in circles

Any number of player run around in imitation of one another in an attempt to catch one another. (This game has pretty simple rules, but it doesn’t really impose a goal.)

Tag

Like above, but players run away from a specific player who is intending to catch them. Who the chaser and chasees are change depending on some criteria, most commonly a touch indicating one player has caught the other. (While it looks on the surface similar to the above game, Tag one is much more goal-oriented than the Chase. Tag is much more sophisticated and played by older children.)

Notice that a goal is not the same as a win-condition. Tag is not a game one can “win,” although one could be quite competitive in pursuit of the game’s goal.

Sadly, I’ve started to realize that most of this is not contributing to my dissertation at all, even though it is important and useful to my thinking. I don’t really need this model to make the Pentad work as an AAC intervention. It may be a separate paper at some point.

Metaplay 3

Turns out, I’m not quite ready to do the play vocab list yet. I haven’t introduced the whole framework. I should explain the framework before I fill it in. There’s a bunch of categories I need to outline and define.

The whole thing makes something of a matrix when it is done. This is a rough draft: you are seeing it pretty much at the same time as I am so wish me luck.

Here we go.

We can improve on this.

Parallel Play

Parallel play

Parallel play is when two children are playing the same play frame, but not collaborating with one another or influencing one another’s play directly.

Rather than through negotiation, the two children’s play frames are synchronized and coordinated by imitation. You often see one child repeating the same action that another child does. (Classic Vygotsky: the play frame is in their ZPD and they are learning how to act in it from one another).

This poses problems for kids with disabilities: #1: their motor and linguistic capacity to imitate.

Can our kid actually perform the physical actions of driving the car up the ramp or putting a dress on Barbie? This is a problem (but is a little out of my universe as an SLP. I’ll let the OT and Rec Therapists work on this one).

Can a child using AAC imitate something that another child says that sounds interesting?

No.

Metaplay 2—on the use of drama as play

Last post I talked about metaplay as an important type of language output that is particularly difficult to program into AAC due to its unpredictability and dynamicism.

The imaginary reality that children are engaging in is referred to as a play frame. The play frame can be something established and obvious (I’ll call these “off-the-rack frames”) or it can be something improvised in the moment. If the children are playing House, that’s mostly an off-the-rack frame that we can mostly prepare for. If the House gets overrun by zombies (or worse, as my 7-year-old cousin decided, zombies piloting robot armor suits) our off-the-rack AAC programming for the House frame is going to be inadequate.

The end goal here is to make the AAC system programmed by the players as part of the play. Play frames are co-constructed, so talk about the play frames needs to be co-constructed as well.The action in the play itself programs the device.

I'm the store worker, okay? Pretend you're buying something from me.

And, no, I haven’t the foggiest idea how to implement that in the Real World™. I’ve talked to the foremost experts in the field of AAC and none of them know how either (if they think about it at all). It certainly isn’t possible with the hardware and software available today, nor do current attitudes regarding AAC held by professionals doing the teaching lend themselves to implementing something this radical.

I do have some ideas for how we can structure an off-the-rack schematic setup in an existing AAC system. Here is something that you can use today to make a schematic theme for play within a specific play frame.

Stick

The Strong National Museum of Play has inducted The Stick into the Toy Hall of Fame.

a well-deserved honor

The best-designed toys are the ones that aren’t designed at all.

The floor is lava!!!

Good thing wheelchairs are lavaproof.

lava

Now go play.

Blurry lines 3

Huddle

Are these children playing football, or pretending to play football?

Nicole Lazzaro and the 4 Types of Fun

Nicole Lazzaro is a game designer and founder/CEO of XEODesign. This is a research firm that tests video games (electronic interactive entertainment is the term they use) for player experience.

Unfortunately, her research isn’t published anywhere. And while I appreciate that there is much better money to be made in mercenary science than in academic publishing, it sounds like she is working on the same sorts of things that I’ve been thinking about with play design so I wish I could read it. (I also wonder if she’s hiring.)

Specifically, she has a conceptual model for “4 Types of Fun” and a way of categorizing games more precisely than Piaget. Read on for the model…

Blurry lines part deux

A game is play with rules.

Can you name a type of play without rules?

I think there might not be.

Strange Attractor updated

Strange Attractor is a video game that you can play with a single switch. Strange Attractor 2 is playable with 2 switches or with a single switch.

Strange Attractor 2

Developer’s website You can get SA1 at this site.

SA2 was Featured by Greenhouse and won an award at PAX (Penny Arcade Expo). Penny Arcade is pretty serious about games. They wouldn’t recommend it if it wasn’t completely awesome.

Accessible games do not need to be crappy. A well-thought-out game can be fun for everyone.