The Infinite Playground

A workshop run by Bernie at NYU, 2013. Photo by Dylan McKenzie.

The Infinite Playground is Bernie De Koven's last book, out last week from MIT Press.

So. I have a small history with Bernie's books.

For the five years that I directed Now Play This (a games festival that runs at Somerset House as part of the London Games Festival), we always set up a little library in a corner of the exhibition. A couple of shelves of playful books that people could sit and read. Usually visitors would flick through a few different books and put them back, or maybe they'd pick one and sit down and read for five minutes. But there were always a few visitors who'd just settle in and read something right the way through. (I remember fondly the man with a tie and a briefcase who sat down on a beanbag in the corner and spent the afternoon reading the entirety of Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game.) 

We always put big NOW PLAY THIS stickers on the books to discourage theft, but every year, of course, a few of them went missing.

And for some reason, the book that always, always went was Bernie De Koven's The Well-Played Game. Each year we'd buy a new copy, sometimes two. And each year it would vanish again.

I never minded. The first time we hosted the Now Play This library it was mostly made up of books I owned personally, including my own copy of The Well-Played Game, which I'd kind-of stolen in the first place anyway: or at least, I'd borrowed it from a workplace, and then that workplace had closed down and at some point I'd eventually just moved it off my "books to return" shelf.

So I think I understand why people who picked it up were so compelled to just... carry it away. It's a really extraordinary book, with some incredible insights into what it means to play, how to get a group engaged, when to flex the constraints, different rules and moments and insights. If you flick through it and stop somewhere at random, you immediately find some anecdote or insight or sidelong comment that feels important: maybe putting into words something you've felt but never articulated, maybe giving a totally different perspective on an experience you've shared. And then you flick through a few more pages, and stop again, and look, and: oh  there's another one. Stop again, and maybe you'll find Bernie saying something absolutely outrageous about play, something that clearly isn't true, surely isn't true, but which no matter how much you agree or disagree with it does make you stop, and think, and rethink. Flick again and stop again, and this time: perhaps a charming little story about a game, or maybe a suggestion of something to play, and the sense as you read that you're listening to someone who paid an almost unprecedented sort of attention to what's going on when people play, and why, and who has then captured the things he noticed and laid them out for you. 

It's hard not to want to pick the book up and wander away, just to carry it with you for now and flick through a few more times before you set it back down.

I knew Bernie a little, so once his book had been stolen a couple of times I told him about it, and he didn't seem to mind either; although he did apologise, I guess for tempting so many broadly honest people into pilfering.

A few years back, Bernie let everyone know he wasn't well. I read his blogpost while sitting on the floor during a Now Play This install, next to the bookshelves where I'd just arranged that year's copy of The Well-Played Game, intrigued to see how long it would stay in place. And I wrote to him, and he wrote back, and he mentioned that he had a draft of a final book he'd been working on.

And then, a little later, Celia and Eric talked to me about working with them and Bernie to put this final book together.

The book, which was called The Infinite Playground, or possibly Infinite Playground, or maybe even Infinite Playgrounds, took a couple of different forms: two drafts, a few possible structures, some potential inclusions and references and insights that were articulated in Bernie's blog posts or notes but not yet in place in the book. And in all those forms it shared with The Well-Played Game an enormous density of thought and experience: games and stories and insights and moments and dramatic statements and grand claims and sidelong jokes that all drew on a huge and careful attentiveness to what people do and how they feel when they play, and when they imagine.

So I talked to Bernie, chatting over his thoughts and where he wanted to take the book, and worked with Celia and Eric to come up with a structure that pulled together the best parts of the drafts without becoming unwieldy. I definitely came to know Bernie's work better than I ever had before, digging into the words and drafts and thoughts, both with Bernie’s guidance alongside and then continuing after he stepped back from active involvement to spend his last months focusing on his health and his family. 

Our aim, working on the book, was not to add or change anything, but rather to arrange and shape what was there, and fill in any spaces; to make the book the best articulation we could of what Bernie was working towards.

I think, and hope, that the book is close to being what Bernie wanted it to be. I know it's full of his discoveries and inventions and imaginings. I know that even after all the time we've spent working on it, I can still open it now and find myself struck by something that puts what I think I know about games and play in a new light.

And now that it’s out, I hope other readers share with me this experience of exploring Bernie’s insights and moments of speculation and outrageous claims and counterintuitive suggestions and rulesets and stories and imagined possibilities.

The Infinite Playground, cover design by Edanur Kuntman