Interview with Bernie DeKoven

Bernie De Koven (1941–2018) was a pioneer in physical and communal games, including with the New Games movement. He also worked with early video game development.

This is part of the interview series for my Handmade Pixels book.

The interview was conducted on August 22nd and September 7th, 2017.

Jesper:	As a top question, what do you do? How would you describe your work? Are you a game designer or a play designer, an artist?
Bernie:	Eric [Zimmerman] called me the shaman of play. I enjoy that image. I think of myself mostly as a teacher. I guess I'm also a motivator. I want people to take the opportunity that play gives them and make use of it to explore new aspects of themselves and of the community, and to reach more deeply into the capabilities that the world offers them. I work as a game designer because it gives you a certain amount of very empowered freedom. You have so much latitude because of the tools that you have available. That's why I think imagination is such a powerful tool for. Because when you're creating a game you dwell in that imaginary space. You learn how to manipulate great sheets of conceptual code, not computer code, but conceptual code. You can imagine the whole background changing color or becoming this or that. You can see all of that. You can see the interaction between this opponent and that opponent. You can do that just with other human beings, the same way that you can do that with computer code. We are taking advantage of the freedom that we have because of the enormity of the palette that we are using.
Jesper:	I hear you describing two aspects of what you're doing. One is you see yourself a facilitator; that humans have a capacity for play, a capacity we may have forgotten for various reasons, and you help bring that out. But you also see yourself as someone who teaches ways to reach that. You're both finding something existing and creating new ways of bringing this out?
Bernie:	I think that's true.
Jesper:	Many of the games in your play sessions have been done for a very long period of time. You do feel like you're entering into a ritual which has a history. I thought that was why the shaman label seemed appropriate.
Bernie:	I know there's something spiritual about the whole thing. When you get people to play together, you're sharing a kind of extraordinary space. It feels like you're operating out of a different center of consciousness when you're playing together, especially when you're being silly. It allows you to interact on levels that we, as adults, don't normally have access to. What I've been using of my history has been able to give people permission to act that way. I've been doing this for so long, so I have a special place in actual history. That has a certain amount of power to it, and I'm trying to use that power as much as I can to free people to take their playfulness, the lighter side of their being, the more creative aspects of their work, and investigate those and bring them to the front.
Jesper:	I can see that. I think there are younger designers today very much inspired by your work but describing themselves as artists. You don't describe yourself as an artist, right?
Bernie:	I think of myself more as a spiritual person than as an artist. I guess, as a shaman, you have an art and you a way of helping people transcend the boundaries and helping them reach across to each other and to their higher levels of awareness and all that kind of stuff. But no, I don't think of myself as an artist. I think of myself as a spiritual teacher. I think play is a very spiritual phenomenon.
Jesper:	Going back historically, can you set the scene for your own involvement with play and later with the New Games Movement and beyond that? When I read The Playful Path, I get a sense of going back to something that's been forgotten on a personal or cultural level. Do you see yourself as reaching back, not only personally but also in a cultural sense? Going back to some kind of earlier, pre-modern stage?
Bernie:	How do we get into that state of mind of playing, you and I for example, how do we give each other permission to play? It's not a normal state of mind. I don't know if you could say that it is more primitive or that it comes from an earlier era. But does it come from a more natural space, in how we define ourselves and how we experience the world? It's more like that for me. That play is almost a default capability that we have. We understand, at some very deep level, how to play with each other and how to open up to each other, safely, and how to free each other to be spontaneous and a little crazy and a little outside the normal measurements that we would apply to each other. That is very much like a spiritual experience. Like in the religions where people are dancing and singing and collapsing on the floor and experiencing all kinds of extra levels of ecstasy. It's like that, we enter into a different plane of reality, a different kind of social construct, a different way of defining what's right and what's wrong in how we behave with each other. If we're successful, we free each other to be more free.
Jesper:	By way of temporal proximity, it's easy to read the beginnings of what you do as a counter-cultural thing, going against the Vietnam War or corporate America. Has that been how you thought about it, of going against the big machine of corporate society, and of creating an alternative space outside that?
Bernie:	Yes. You know when you're playing that you're doing something that is not normal. You know that there's something slightly illegal about behaving that way. Whether it's because of the intimacy - a lot of the games that I teach involve in physical intimacy, or because of the humor and the silliness of it all, because a lot of the games involve falling on the ground and rolling on top of each other and being very funny and doing strange things together. They're all political statements insofar as we live in political environments which reject that kind of behavior. As I'm talking to you, I'm thinking about a New Games event: you see people just starting to break into play, and the freedom and the laughter and the intimacy and the closeness and hugging each other and all of those kinds of things which are clearly, in most of our cultures, unheard of. But somehow it doesn't seem like any kind of revolution to me. It seems like this is just a more natural way of being. Given the opportunity, given the permission, given the freedom, this is exactly the kind of behavior that we all choose.
Jesper:	That's probably true, hopefully.
Bernie:	Every time I do a game session, I see that same thing happening again and again and again: people opening up to each other and laughing and taking things to sometimes some very ludicrous moments of shared hilarity and spontaneity.
Jesper:	I thought that was interesting because when you were giving the workshop in Copenhagen, there was a two-step process. You had a preamble which, at first, seemed odd. Everybody had obviously come to play with you, but you said, "It's voluntary. You can leave at any time. You can just step out; you can come back. It's fine." Nobody stepped out and nobody left, but you're explicitly asking people to give permission to the game, to control them for a while, and by allowing that process, we gain a kind of freedom within the game. It's a funny, convoluted multi-step process.
Bernie:	That's me all over.
Jesper:	I thought it was elegant because you emphasized the voluntary act of playing, and by that you allowed people to give themselves up to in the game.
Bernie:	Exactly. I have to find a way to help people give themselves permission to play because there are a lot of cultural forces against playing. In a university setting, for sure there are a lot of cultural forces against playing. If your professor happens to be there, then it's even more obvious.
Jesper:	Do you see this as going outside the play space? You create situations where we play and we lose ourselves, so we give ourselves permission to play. If I go back to my job, does this help me? Does this give me more permission to play in my job? Does it spread play beyond the play sessions?
Bernie:	Very much so. What are the real rules versus the assumed rules in a working situation? Most people find themselves trapped by rules that they've only assumed to be there. If they can give themselves a permission to test out those rules, they'll discover that they're not there and that they have the freedom to behave on levels that are much more satisfying to them as artists, as individuals, as crafts people, whatever role they have in the organization. A playful approach will surface those opportunities. That's central to what I teach. It's impossible for me to teach a lesson in games without thinking I'm teaching a lesson in life.
Jesper:	Okay, that's good.
Bernie:	One of the things that thrilled me when I was writing The Well-Played Game was how I could continually read it and re-read it, and it would fit just as sweetly, describing the very nature of life as it would be talking about the very nature of fun. To take those two things which are sometimes in such dramatic opposition, and to put them together and to see the same message in both, the same opportunity.
Jesper:	Isn’t that the thing with games and play, right there? Games are micro-worlds that exist for a short time, created by a God, the designer, plus the player, and which then disappear afterwards. Some game designers talk about how you should create a game with enough depth or emergent complexity, such that the player can keep playing and they can keep improving their strategies. They can become super-experts at a game. Obviously, Go would be a paradigmatic example of that. But in your piece Seven Ways to Make Games (&, Actually, Almost Anything) More Fun, the examples you give are things like switching turns, doing it backwards, doing it with one hand tied behind your back. These are funny because this is something entirely different. This is not about setting up a space where you become really competent, it's much more about setting up a situation where you're incompetent and you'll do terribly but there will be shared joy in it. Is this a conscious design choice? Do you dislike games about optimizing strategy, or is it more that you think that shared goofiness brings out something interesting in a social space?
Bernie:	I would say the latter, for sure. When we give ourselves and each other permission to change rules at the core of the game, that uncovers our core assumptions of how we're supposed to play, and we open up the whole play contract. It becomes something different, and that's what I want to expose people to. That there are all of these assumed rules which form the body of things that you can challenge. By challenging them, they bring you into whole new states, new possibilities, new social contracts, new ways of behaving. That newness and that openness brings a perspective of things being a lot more fun than you thought they were. That there are a lot more ways of have fun, and they're right in front of you. You don't have to become an expert in order to achieve those things. You just have to challenge those limits that are not real.
Jesper:	You want to help us all challenge the rules that we take for granted, both in games and outside games. But isn't the other aspect of goofiness the willingness to be performing badly? I read you as saying that we also have to give up the idea of being the perfect, say, perfect worker or the perfect professor, or the perfect student - that these roles are too narrow?
Bernie:	Very much so. What is it that keeps us from playing? It's those assumptions about how we appear to other people. We worry about being taken seriously. I think it's especially true of most of us in the game industry because we're dealing with something that's frivolous in the first place. And yet we're very serious about it because we see this huge window into how the mind works, how society works. It's an amazing thing that we discover as we begin to explore games. It lays open so much of the hidden mechanics of being a social being. I think that's really key. The biggest damage we can do to ourselves is taking ourselves too seriously.
Jesper:	Is that also the problem with trying to make games respectable? I spend much of my time saying, "Video games are an art form," or trying to elevate them to some kind of important plane. But that has its own problems. If everybody suddenly accepted that, then playing video games or even playing would become equivalent to going to an art gallery with your art professor. If it was elevated to that kind of plane, then it would appear to people that there was one right way of doing it. Is the renegade status also part of the freedom of games and play?
Bernie:	I can have great respect for the nature of a game and its design, even though I know that it is inviting me to behave very foolishly. Much of my early discipline came from children's games. The vast majority of children's games have something to do with looking foolish. That was my teacher about the nature of playing games, how we could look foolish but at the same time there was something really, incredibly intricate and beautiful about the design of those experiences. Even a game like Duck, Duck, Goose makes us laugh, but yet the design is so beautiful. The balance between being "it" and being "not it" and wanting to get chosen and not getting chosen and how you manifest yourself and how you choose not to manifest yourself. All of those things are beautifully encrypted into the design of the game. In fact, two of my champions in my inner playground have been Serious and Silly. I talk a lot about the dialogue between those two beings, Serious and Silly, either on a fantasy level or pre-conscious level or somehow operant in the way that I think about everything. One path to healing ourselves, is for us to get those two divisions of our being more cognizant of each other's reality and of the validity and the necessity for each being there and the value that Silly brings to us just when we need it, and the value Serious brings to us just when we need it.
Jesper:	This is always the thing with play, that play is frivolous but it's serious. I was reading a piece by Brian Sutton Smith talking about play as a parody of emotional vulnerability. Many of your games are about social anxieties. In Prui you have to walk around with your eyes closed and shake hands and you're afraid of becoming part of that other group, but then it's so nice to become part of the group. Or the game where you pass around your shoes, where it's shocking thing to have to take off your shoe and give it away. A lot of your games are really about such anxieties, it seems. Is that a fair statement?
Bernie:	When you look for what is fun, a lot of the things that are fun in life are things that we are a little bit afraid of or embarrassed by, or that we think might be a little bit dangerous, or that we have to keep hidden from other people. To help people experience fun, we can choose from that particular area of human experience.
Jesper:	And a lot of laughter comes from those situations. You've agreed to follow those rules, and suddenly the rules make you do things that you wouldn't normally do. It clearly crosses a boundary, but then, because it's in a space where hopefully you feel relatively safe and you trust people, you realize, "Oh my God, this crosses all kinds of boundaries but it's actually okay." Then you laugh.
Bernie:	Yeah. And that brings you closer to people. Even though the trust has no basis in reality, but it's because you've all shared that silliness and all exposed yourselves that way, that the sense of trust builds. To me, the apotheosis of the play experience is the experience of play community. Once you're in the play community, you trust each other and give each other the freedom to do whatever the hell you feel like doing.
Jesper:	You made some early video games such as Alien Garden. I think the last seven, eight years, a lot of people in the video game community, especially academically, have been interested in your work and are inviting you to workshops. How do you see yourself in relation to video games? Do you feel an affinity to video games, or do you work in a different space now?
Bernie:	When I first started doing video games, it was so wonderful because it was so new and there were so few criteria for determining what could be a successful video game. I had tremendous freedom. I could exercise my imagination endlessly, which for me was a great source of fun. It was kind of like a trip, like some kind of psychedelic experience just to sit there with my eyes closed and imagine all these interactions taking place on the screen. Alien Garden was one such experience. It gave me a chance to challenge a lot of the preconceptions about what a game has to be. Alien Garden was a game where there was no violence and there really wasn't any enemy. All the difficulties were those that you chose yourself. There was a sense of a gentle beauty surrounding everything, all these crystal creatures changing in variety as you managed to figure out how to change them. Jaron Lanier, the guy who coined the term virtual reality, was the programmer and he managed to squeeze in all these sweet little musical effects. He and I figured out the graphic effects together. We wound up playing with character graphics because we were working with 4K of memory at that time. How do you create a universe of different beings when you only have 4K of variables to deal with? I even had the score of the game shown at the boundaries of the game screen. As you scored higher, the column where the scores were became wider and you had less room to play in. The challenge became higher.
Jesper:	That's a very economical way of doing it.
Bernie:	It was about being able to create that environment and to make it into something that felt like a reality, but completely artificially.
Jesper:	With independent games and experimental games, some people argue that we’ve come back to the early experimentation [of the 1980’s] again. Do you think some video games have returned to the experimentation of early video games?
Bernie:	The parts of video games right now that give me the most hope are games that involve physical activity, where people are using their bodies, like Johann Sebastian Joust. There are a lot of games, fortunately, and I love watching how the indie game festivals have changed to incorporate more physical games. This gives me great faith in the future of gaming. My continued hope is that the medium will become even more mixed, that more of us will be engaged on the physical and aesthetic and fantasy and social levels of our being. I don't know if we're going backwards or forwards. I just think that we're realizing that there were things we left out, and fortunately, some of us are bringing them back in and that gives me a lot of faith.
Jesper:	We talked about how getting used to playing and to changing the rules, can affect your regular life. I was wondering if you ever had push back against the idea of play as being political. Somebody must have told you that play is not the real revolution, that what you're doing are just silly games?
Bernie:	I usually shoot people who say things like that to me. I’ll teach you whether play is political or not. Take that. I'm sorry for the transcriber, that's not correct. That was said in jest.
Jesper:	Got it.
Bernie:	Let’s say you're outside in full view of the public and you're doing an act defined as play because something indicates that you're not taking it seriously, and you're finding pleasure in. Because of the country, the society, the culture in which I live, I can let that go because I feel that it's permitted. Were I living in another culture, and I'm sure that we can identify some pretty quickly, I would be terrified to be in the presence of that act lest I be accused of some political espionage.
Jesper:	Oh, sure.
Bernie:	So I feel pretty grounded when I'm saying that when you play in public you are making a political act. And adding to that, that if you don't understand that it's a political act, it shows how far removed you are from understanding your existence as a political creature.
Jesper:	In Emma Goldman’s autobiography Living my Life, there's a scene where she's dancing and somebody says to her,” how can you dance when you have a revolution to make”. And she answers, “if I can't dance, I won't join your revolution”.
Bernie:	That’s what I mean. You need to acknowledge that fact that if you're in public in the first place, it's a social act. And consequently, your behavior is somehow attributed to your person, and if you're behaving in a way that we feel is off limits, then it's really showing the limits of the political environment in which we live.
Jesper:	That's probably why totalitarian regimes have very low tolerance for ambiguity, and of course, play famously has lots of it.
Bernie:	Very little tolerance for ambiguity, absolutely. Because then I can't really tell how you're feeling, what you're thinking about or whether you're telling me the truth. I think that's the underlying message, and the reason why I think it's a valuable thing to be sharing with people.
Jesper:	You started doing play and games before you joined the New Games movement. Do you see yourself part of a longer tradition? What comes before Bernie Dekoven?
Bernie:	It was only the hell fires and creation.
Jesper:	I knew you'd say that.
Bernie:	Well, immediately before me, there were people like Sutton-Smith and certainly James Carse. They had visions of using the language of games in ways that were really very powerful and gave that language much more meaning, I thought. And Huizinga, of course, these definitely were people before me. In education you'll find some people who worked with play and playfulness and how important it is for children. There are a lot of paths leading to the same conclusion. We've talked about animal behavior: there's a very serious controversy over whether you can be talking an animal's behavior as is if it were play. Because using the word play pre-supposes an attitude of mind, and does the creature have enough mind to say that's really truly playing, and is it experiencing it the way we do? There difficulties and challenges when we try to interpret play.
Jesper:	That's the Gregory Bateson argument, where he talks about the meta-communication of animals fighting each other.
Bernie:	Right. So these traces have been around for a long time, and I don't even know when they start. I know that there were compendiums of children's games even in Greek literature. I think the rules for games very much like marbles and hopscotch and jump rope. That means there was culture that was interested enough in reflecting on children's play, and that has to be a fairly advanced culture already to embrace children's play as a meaningful social phenomenon. I think ever since we've been able to talk to each other, we've been interested in play. I was very close friend with Brian [Sutton-Smith], and he and I certainly intrigued each other, confounded each other. It was great relationship.
Jesper:	He was also quite funny actually.
Bernie:	Very funny, especially when he was drunk, and it was fortunately very easy to provide that opportunity to experience it with him. It made him very lovable. A very smart man. I keep on saying that when I try to define what is undergraduate horror, I would say as taking one of Brian's classes. Imagine, he talks in footnotes. I'd just imagine myself trying to take notes and capture what he thinks is important enough for me. I think throughout history there've been people who appreciated play. Like Lewis Carroll, or Swift.
Jesper:	I also think the late 19th century with folklore and the Romantic era, the idea of folk culture being important.
Bernie:	That's very good that you say that. In terms of large academic movements that I know, before the play movement began, was the folklore movement.
Jesper:	I have a question that I have been trying phrase. In your manuscript [for Infinite Playgrounds], you ask, how we can be creating so many games that focus on violence, anger, cruelty, and destruction. On one level I completely agree with you. On another level, it does seem that art, and we could count play and games art, tends to deal with the things that worry humans, so isn't it to be expected that violence and anger and cruelty and destruction do become represented in any art form such as play or games?
Bernie:	I think any kind of art has to be sensitive to the world in which it finds itself, and so it has to be as sensitive to moments of playfulness as it is to moments of anger and fear. What I'm referring to here is more if a culture supports one kind of art over another kind of art, then you have to start asking questions about some of the founding principles of the culture. This is also what’s in the movement to have women and different genders be more accepted in the game community because they've been painfully ostracized from the game community for years. And it's an amazing achievement that they've been able to change that. Does that help any in looking at it that way?
Jesper:	I see – the problem is lopsidedness.
Bernie:	It's lopsidedness, right.
Jesper:	Game designers like to talk about design process. What is your design process? How do you make a game? How do you deal with the fact that any new game will sometimes fail horribly? How does that actually happen?
Bernie:	For me, imagination is the center of how I make a game. I haven't found any other way of doing it except by closing my eyes and just trying to imagine the field of play that I'm trying to create. And then imagining it under different changes, as a missile impact or as a soldier or a fairy or whatever is going to be interacting in that environment, and what happens when five or seven of them interact together. And the pieces of the environment are going to meaning, and that's all done in some kind of strange filmic feeling that I get as try to imagine these things. I can do more than see them and play them back, I can actually rearrange them and edit them. There's some very highly powerful camera in my mind that imagination becomes.
Jesper:	And this goes for both analog and digital games?
Bernie:	I think the same thing is true in analog games as well as in digital games. In analog games, when you're still playing chess, you begin to envision those pieces you're playing with as actual powers. You see them become some abstract representation of the power, or you begin to see in their facial expressions of the king and the knight.
Jesper:	Does it also go for, Prui, for example?
Bernie:	Right, so I'm glad you asked because that goes back further, to my origins of this whole field. Before I was involved in games, I was involved in theater. And I really, enjoyed improvisational theater because I just loved that experience of sharing control with other people. It was so magical how the control becomes shared when you're doing an improv performance with three or four people or five. They're all into it in some way, they're working together to create, and they somehow manage to support each other. We never see them undercutting each other. They're always moving the act forward, and when somebody makes a mistake, they kind of weave it back into the fabric. Even when nobody's around. And they just really are having so much fun, which is exactly the way that we played when we were kids. We just wanted to be in the fantasy with each other. It was that experience with theater that originally brought me to games. And what I saw in games is that the games were written in their own language. There's a semi-script that's going on in the game. It's a language that describes human relationships, and the most effective way I found to invent a game of that type is to play it with other people, and to let the game emerge by the immersive nature of a social setting into the right rules that feel most comfortable with the community. Generally, I've found that if you find a game that a community of people likes, it's very likely that almost any community of people will like it, especially if you work in diverse enough groups. And so that's always been my stated preference, is that when I'm going out to make games, I always look for groups where it's a very diverse community of people playing, and where the tacit understanding is that they're just playing for the fun of it. And there's no prizes, there's no awards, there's no recognition, and you don't have to play, and that's why when I do workshops, my very first exercise is quitting practice. I’ll tell people that they should just quit just in order to feel what it's like to quit, not because you really feel like quitting, but just to try it. Who first wrote about play and voluntariness?
Jesper:	Huizinga certainly wrote about it.
Bernie:	It is a good fit because it snaps together, play and voluntariness. When you can create a situation in the community where people voluntarily follow a set of rules, and the way they follow it adds to their desire to play more, then you know that you have a game that can be played by anybody.
Jesper:	When you're creating a new game with a group, sometimes it must fail in some way, such as people being unsure what's happening, or not enjoying it? What do you do then?
Bernie:	Okay, the sooner you can turn the game over to the group, the more effectively you can interact with them as a designer, so if you have to push the group too hard, then you know there's wrong in your relationship to the game and to the group. They don't understand the game, or they don't understand their relationship to you in the game, or they don't understand their relationship to the game, or they don't understand their relationship to each other. Something has not yet been made clear, and until you can reach a point where that is evident, you really have to let the group take over the game because that's how they manifest their understanding of the game – that they can take it over. So that's why you see that whole immersive nature of games, especially in social games. When we played New Games tug of war, as soon as the rope was imbalanced and we saw that it was being pulled by one team more than the other, their members would get off of the back of the rope and go onto the other and pull at that. And eventually, it became adopted by the whole community as the way it played. Now at first, we may have introduced it, but 15 minutes later, it was so coincident with the collective desires of the community that it became immediately absorbed into the core understanding of why you played the game. So now everybody knows that people are always going to be pulling no matter what you do, and there's no possible way to avoid it. And they just delight in how impossible it is, and that becomes the game. So the game changes, and it takes on its purpose in that community. So if people are not enjoying the game, watch what happens to them after you introduce a rule. If you tend to this enough, you can close your eyes and imagine these people because you know them. You've played with them and understand that there's a generalizable way of describing how they play. There are certain generalizable qualities to the way we manifest playfulness. Like the play bell, like an animal: I know I'm biting you, but this is for fun.
Jesper:	I always show my students a video of some polar bears playing with dogs. Obviously, the polar bears are really dangerous for the dogs, but they share this language of lying on their back to signal playfulness. But I see the influence in your example from James Carse’s Infinite Games- With the tug of war, you start with a game that's about ending the game, and you switch it to a game that's about keeping the game going together.
Bernie:	That's right. That's beautifully said.
Jesper:	As a final question, how does one become a facilitator or shaman? We talked about what you say to players, but is there anything particular such as a tone of voice or address? If I may describe it from the outside, you tend to have playful accessories or clothes on when you're facilitating play. And then you switch between being barker and using a calm voice.
Bernie:	Yeah.
Jesper:	Is that how you become a shaman?
Bernie:	No, you become a shaman by becoming a shaman, that's the only way. I'm sorry, even I, in all my efficient shaman status, do not have enough power to transform you into a shaman yet.
Jesper:	That's fine.
Bernie:	I think that you become a facilitator of play because you find your way of helping other people play. You become that kind of artist that I just wrote about today on my Deep Fun blog, about Matt Weinstein, an old friend of mine. It shows him leading a game, and you can sense that his leadership is balanced and practiced and every joke he makes, every little side thing, he has said a hundred times. But he manages to say as if it's the first time ever. He also just happened to be an actor, and he also happened to be in comedy, and he also happened to really enjoy the informal part of improv acting. If you enjoy play and you enjoy turning other people onto play, then you'll become a shaman. If you read about play and think about play and talk to people about play and play whenever you possibly can and watch people play ... your whole life will lead you to play because it's everywhere around you. It's not like you have to really hunt for it. You just begin resonating with it. You have to wallow totally in total play, because that's what's going to communicate your ability or your offering in the world with your stance in it.
Jesper:	Thank you.
Bernie:	Okay, play on.
Jesper:	Play on.