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                 . ).  *     
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G

Hello weary traveller of the web. Nice of you to join me at this campfire.

You

What is this? Who are you?

G

So eager to know aren't you? I am a grasshopper. How I can talk, I do not know. It seems my friends have just left for home so you are a little late to the party. If you’d like, I can retell some of the conversations here for you too.

This is a collection of inquiries into play through the form of dialogues between characters, much like the one we are engaging in now.

  1. On defining play
  2. On terminology and definitions
  3. On novelty and surprise
  4. On intrinsic motivation and the lusory attitude
  5. On playing in a post-work society
  6. On playgrounds and balance

You

Hold on! I still don’t know what this is for… why am I having a conversation with a talking insect?

G

This was the artifact for an Interact Circle on Hackathon Culture + Play. We were heavily inspired by Bernard Herbert Suit’s The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia, specifically the heavy use of Socratic dialogue throughout. Our little group of people wanted to explore the concept of play through various facets through conversation.

You

And who is ‘we’ exactly?

G

Jacky Zhao, Justin Glibert, Joel Gustafson, and Becky Button. You can find the source code for this project here. Now, let’s talk about play, shall we?