New People not Plots

Is nothing new? Many believe that is true.  All stories and ideas are just restatements and reiterations of stories and ideas of the past. If that were the case than what would be the point in creating anything?  That is where play comes in.  Just because a story has been told before doesn’t mean that it has been told the best way, or your way.  People know things and understand things differently than they did in the past, and therefore the way we tell stories now will be different and historically important.  Play makes stories and ideas new because of the people and perspective that create that play. 

Ideas and their physical counterparts are signs used to communicate between people, but their meanings are not fixed. They are actually fluid, which allows people to play with them and their meaning to create something new. This room for movement, for give and take, and for loose correlation allows us to create new juxtaposition and new meaning.  I saw a depiction of Mitt Romney where an artist had made him into a Dungeons and Dragons character (he even had an amulet with the essence of Reagan).  These two ideas put together to make a comment about how ridiculous and fantastical the artist thinks Romney is.  By intertextualizing the piece of art, it created a new juxtaposition and interpretation.

 

It is really interesting when you take the people out of play, and I don’t like it.  I watched a video called Toccata for Toy Trains.  First of all, I don’t particularly love trains, so that wasn’t a selling factor for me.  While watching, it felt eerie to see all of the toys moving without a person or child moving them. I believe that the human element has to be a part of play to make it truly playful.  Otherwise it is just objects moving of their own accord.  Without any real anthropomorphic features that can draw me into empathizing with them, I just loose interest. 

Going back to the first question, I think it is the human element that makes things new.  We played a video game in class called “Curse of the White Witch”.  Was the plot of the game new? Absolutely not. What was new and unique about the situation were the people playing it. No one experienced or will experience that game like we did last Wednesday night.  We passed around the controller, we were playing it in a college class, but more importantly, Spencer, Keala, Kelyn, and I read the text in funny voices, we laughed at “tidy”, we made fun of it.  We brought ourselves to the game and we are unique, which made our experience unique. So while stories may never be new, play is always new and fresh as more kids are born who will experience it differently.