A-Playful-Path_DeKoven-web

ing sessions, organize ideas and develop them into completed concepts. I could also easily
work on several games at the same time. Essentially, it helped me keep ideas in play. I reasoned
that I could do the same thing with meetings – helping business teams work together
more productively.
The success of this approach led to my publishing a small booklet called Power Meetings, and,
four years later, Connected Executives. I started a website devoted to this process and called it
Coworking. That site still exists as the Coworking Institute. Much later, the term Coworking
became redefined. My associate Gerrit Visser and I were both so impressed with the similarities
between my Coworking concept and their implementation of it, that we offered them
the use of the domain.
While I was using the outliner and designing games, I also got to work with Children’s Television
Workshop. In fact, Dave Winer, the inventor of the outline processor, and the products
ThinkTank and MORE, helped me develop the prototype for a game I modeled after
the children’s game of Streets and Alleys. I designed it so that it could be played with one key,
hoping to establish some sort of precedent for games that kids with limited mobility could
play.
The 2004 publication of my book, Junkyard Sports proved to be just the opportunity I had
hoped it would be – an invitation to the sports and physical education establishments to
come out and play. Based on the tradition of backyard, street, and sandlot sports, Junkyard
Sports are traditional sports, reinvented. Sports redesigned, where the players make their own
equipment out of whatever they can find, and adapted so they can be played wherever the
players happen to be, with whomever happens to be there. In other words, sports, like new
games, get played for fun, for everyone. Played playfully.
And all the while I was involved in designing more games for some more companies. Did I
mention Ideal Toys, Children’s Computer Workshop, CBS Software, Time-Warner. And I
worked with Mattel Media.
Recently, more than 25 years after the first New Games Tournament, I found my self on the
adjunct faculty of the Multimedia Division of the USC School of Cinema-Television, teaching
the principles of New Games, watching my students create what had to be the world’s
first Giant Human Card game/event.
My book, The Well-Played Game, was originally published in 1978, and republished in 2013
by MIT Press. It is now required reading amongst the computer gamerati thanks, in no small
part, to excerpts published in Salen and Zimmerman’s Game Design Reader.
A game I designed to accompany the publication of Junkyard Sports, Tabletop Olympics was
debuted in 2004 at a conference of the North American Simulation and Games Association.
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