It's a delight to bring Gwen Gordon's new site to your attention. Gwen is a play advocate, life-trainer and scholar operating out of the Bay Area in California. Gwen has a fascinating history - she started out designing and building Muppets for Sesame Street! She branched out from there and has established a practice that does personal, group and organisational consultancy, using all the dimensions of play to revivify lives and enterprises.
I deeply admire both her practicality, and her searching, spirituality-meets-science approach. Some of the academic papers she has recently published on definitions of play (What is Play? Toward a universal definition, Integral Play, and Are We Having Fun Yet?, all PDF's) are ground-breaking, in my view. She's beginning to point towards the idea of developmental levels of adult play - play that gets more capacious, more complex, more ethical - which I've begun to talk about in some recent presentations, particularly at the BBC Digital Futures event at the beginning of the year.
For those of you Enlightenment, neo-Calvinist Brits who can't quite cope with Californian optimism, suspend your scepticism, and dive in. As Martin Buber says on the cover: "Play is the exultation of the possible".
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