"Come Out and Play" Festival
Founded in 2005, the Come Out and Play Festival is an annual festival of street games that happens in different neighborhoods of New York City. The goal of the event is to provide a forum for people to come together and play both traditional and new types of public games. For the past five years it has gone beyond classic street games like stick ball or kick the can to include games that use public space as gamespace and alter players’ perception of their environment. The 2010 installment of the festival happened from Jun 2-4 in Brooklyn, New York. I wish I had known about it in time to help spread the word, but… there’s always next year!
Among the variety of games they think up and bring to life every year are “pervasive games” that take gaming away from the computer screen and back to the three-dimensional world; urban games such as Parkour (see Sally’s recent post about it); GPS-enabled hide & seek, and much more.
While a good number of these games are for adults only, family-friendly ones abound and are clearly marked in the festival’s program. For instance, last year the game Hidden Parks invited kids to imagine what would happen if a group of property developers wanted to ruin Central Park and they had to save it, which meant the children had to assist the preservation efforts of the Magical Wildlife Protection Agency by trying to prove fairies and dragons live there. Hmm… I think author Tom O’Leary and his daughters would have enjoyed this one…
This year, children’s book author Linda Perkins (in her spare time she is a volunteer tutor at 826NYC) and research scientist Rachel Schutt designed and organized the first Paper Airplane Derby, where contestants of all sizes and ages competed in a level playing field.
Mixing old-fashioned fun with interactive games that connect technology to public spaces, this fun-filled and eye-opening festival shows that the reality of how and where we play and what play means to us is ever-evolving.
I hope all this talk about play is inspiring you and your children to go out and perform some random acts of fun!
http://www.comeoutandplay.org
For a list of books on imagination-powered playtime, you can check this annotated list of my personal favorites, or this one from Common Sense Media.
July 14th, 2010 at 3:37 am
This sounds such FUN! And as you say, a great mix of old and new. It reminds me of when we were living in Rome and there was a book fair in the summer around Castel Snt’Angelo – in the evenings you could go and play games. It’s where I first played Go (well, tried to…) and Mancala. I wonder if it still happens…
July 14th, 2010 at 6:03 am
Speaking of playing outdoors (to get away from the TV or computer screen), we’ve been kite flying of late and have really been enjoying that. My daughter got two kites for her birthday last month and they’ve seen a fair bit of air time with friends!
July 14th, 2010 at 2:25 pm
I love the sound of such a celebration of play! Recently I introduced some old-fashioned paper and pencil, and silly card games to a group of friends and it was fantastic to see the warmth and energy that was generated. I wonder if we could have some kind of blogging play tour, where we each contribute one play activity guaranteed to produce those random acts of fun???
July 15th, 2010 at 9:19 am
This reminds me of the book, Something’s Happening on Calabash Street by Judith Enderle and Stephanie Gordon.