The theory of games, the way we play. There's this friend of mine, he collects old, really old video games, the first commercial runs and reinstates them with brand new joy sticks. Not replacing the beaten old potentiometer with a new fangled Radiospares replacement part, but attaching large scale construction steel apparati with sensors built in. Playing with the way we play, he rebuilds a yoyo with a video camera mounted in the middle, rolling it up and down, the rotational speed interferes with the frame rate of the camera and kaleidoscopic images appear. The game as a model, a way in, an attachment. Over in the Economics Department they get paid to play games, entering strategies in tournaments, small stylised villages with a number of people sending their cattle to the common, prisoners in separated cells wondering what their partner in crime will say. Von Neumann's analysis of optimal responses begins to break down when we have to interact again, even if we aren't quite sure that we won't. Even the humble wandering, the Kiwi's "tramp" has been reappropriated as the favoured model for talking about scientific discovery, nomadism to hiking to following the flow of an academic discipline. Taking a bunch of interactive devices to the public is a difficult and arduous task. Trying to get much response out of people, to have them interact in non-banal ways is the goal. It's a win-win situation. If the device has a level of interaction that is responsive, identifiable and possesses depth, then it is in the interests of the constructors, operators and the clients to have the interface interpretable. It is more than obvious that most of the interfaces are fine-motor devices, fingers, hands, heads. Taking toys, games, especially games with some kind of olympiac allied taste, sporting devices in some private school's gamesroom, and using these, this allows another level of interaction. When one sees a seat and some pedals, one has a direct, intuitive idea of what the hell it is one can do with it. Pedal. Interactive installations that require no action on our part are some kind of television for the somnambulent, motion in a space being sufficient to modify some sculpture. Sure it's interactive, but so is a flock of seagulls on the beach near a caravan park, and they at least react to thrown breadcrumbs. We require something of our toys. When I pay to borrow your toys for a moment, and we have all at least swapped toys for a weekend in our youth, then I expect to be able to play with them, rather than just watch them be. I want to throw a special bit of bread to the beaten old seagull with one leg. Watching children play reinforces the knowledge that play is our native state. Most of us play, with cars, children, ideas of self, Lego, mathematical models, our faces, anything. Given more time, we would play more. The Ludic state of Black's ideal world, rediscovered by so many ponderers, is a utopic vision, say many. The gift economy is another utopic vision, except that it exists in the parallel world that we call academia. We often pay to play, it might even be that we would be paid to play if our play was of value to others. And luckily for some of us, we find ourselves in this position. People creating businesses to get some new toys, researchers, parents, artists of many stripes, developers of those self-same toys, explorers in backyards or the Amazon. Bugger it, most anything valuable on the planet is toying with a Ludic mentality, surfing that boundary between cyclic routineness and woolly chaos. Do we need a theory of games, a framework to hang this truth upon? Someone once said that nothing is as practical as a good theory, and in this framework we cannot help but agree. We have been coded to equate games with the frivolous, the unnecessary, the wasteful, in end-effect we note that it is mostly the so-called productive aspects of our society that lead to waste, that we are so often paid to merely appear useful. A theory of games begins to explain to our damaged minds that we really are capable of getting by, indeed, we are capable of getting over in a ludic society. It helps us beat down the voice in our heads telling us there is more to do, that the time is not yet here to toy with the givens, to fiddle with the parameters. A rational argument gets us a long way, but it still doesn't quite hit it. tb perth jan 1998