Introducing: Play's The Thing

I recently came across an entry in my journal from the Pokemon World Championship in London. This was only our second ever Pokemon tournament, after Nate qualified for it in the luckiest and most fluky manner possible. I wrote:

I think these trips could become something of a tradition that really solidifies the bonds in our relationships, even if it isn't Pokemon related forever.

In the 36 months since I wrote that, we have been to 20 Pokemon tournaments including 8 where I joined the kids in playing. Whatever the shelf life of Pokemon is for our family, it doesn’t seem like we’re approaching it yet.

The 2024-25 Pokemon season just wrapped up with the World Championship in Anaheim, California. Despite both kids qualifying, that tournament was not 1 of the 20. We stayed home and watched it on the stream, and that felt perfectly fine to us^[1] …but we are already gearing up for a new season of Pokemon.

Each of the past 2 seasons has brought a new focus for this newsletter, and this season will be no different. So it might also be worth tracing the progression of what has now become a multi-year project for me…

The Pokemon Travelogue

in the first season, I was playing a game…but it wasn’t Pokemon. No no, the game I was playing was “arbitrage opportunity for a free vacation to Hawaii.” My almost accurate belief was that we could earn 2 travel awards of $5,000 by having 2 players in the top 22 in Europe, my somewhat flawed belief was that I cared about a vacation to Hawaii, and my deeply flawed belief was that it would cost us less in travel than we would earn^[2]. During the course of the season, I was mostly interested in exploring third tier European cities, but we also found our way into this community of itinerant Pokemon amateurs. If the kids weren’t hard-bitten by Pokemon before this season, the combination of intense hobby with intense friendships cemented it.

Pursuit of Play

in the second season, I made the move from spectator to player and used it as a lens to consider this thing we call play^[3]. We were still chasing Pokemon glory - or at least, the kids were…I was mostly playing fun decks that were quite unsuccessful. At the outset, I was mostly interested in the activity of play within the context of games, but as the season went on my attention gradually shifted back toward what I think of as my first love: creative, collaborative play. But I was barely scratching the surface. I hadn’t yet read or thought nearly as deeply as I wanted to, and I had still kept my primary focus on games. At the same time, in the rest of my professional life I was spending a lot of energy engaging with questions around what the emergence of artificial intelligence means for work broadly and creative work more specifically…and I couldn’t help but feel like that needs to be in direct conversation with why we play.

So it’s time to evolve once again. Welcome to third season: Play’s The Thing^[4] - an exploration of play as an essential human activity .

Play's The Thing: What's new

This season is going to be a bit of a departure; I’ve spilled an awful lot of ink about Pokemon events, all the while knowing that it’s a niche view of a single niche community. For this season, I’m going to explore different environments and communities built around play - many of them not related to games. We’ll look into things like:

• how does puzzling connect elite universities to Wall Street
• how does a country make creative thinking a national priority
• how does play contribute to the product development process
• how does a company built on the primacy of play operate differently

In addition, readers last season^[5] know that on the downlow I’ve been developing my own game, Read Me Like A Book^[6]. This year, I’m going to playtest the game live in small popup events alongside a lot of my travels and share thoughts about developing a quirky little game that is meant to foster human connection.

Wait…so no Pokemon?

The Pokemon isn’t going away. It might take a backseat and will probably be buried a little deeper in the newsletter for the real Pokefans out there. We’re still playing a lot of events, but not as many as the past couple years because this year we aren’t chasing the World Championship invite. One thing I learned from last year, however, is that I personally value the community around Pokemon more than the competition. As a result, this year we’re going to invest more into being active members of our local league and playing low stakes, friendly competitions.

But, yeah, we’re still planning to hit half a dozen big regional tournaments, and I’ll write a bit about each of them - but, once again, it’s a lot of redundant cities^[7], one retread from 3 years ago^[8], and one intriguing new entrant^[9].

And for all the talk about minimizing the Pokemon, my own lack of interest in competition, etc…let me also say: we’re 2 weeks away from the Frankfurt regional championship, and I’m having more fun playing the deck that I’m bringing to that tournament than I’ve had since February’s side quest to try and deal no damage at the European International Championship.

This sounds like…a lot of travel

Indeed, it is. Candidly, I am not 100% sure that I’m going to pull all of this off. I’m planning to self fund it, so the projects that I’m doing with paying clients are going to take priority…but I’ve given myself a small research budget for this year. Aside from the Pokemon tournaments, let’s get into the details - all tentative:

• December: a visit to the best country at creative thinking, according to the PISA exams - I was in Singapore 7 years ago working on a project to introduce more creative learning in their higher education institutions, and everywhere I went I heard people talking about how Singapore is so good at process optimization, but for the future it needs to become more creative. So I’m going to go and explore a bit to see what has happened.
• January: MIT Mystery Hunt in Boston - I’m hoping to plug in to this weekend long competition to solve a series of mystery-based puzzles. The amount of team preparation that goes into this event is kind of mind-boggling, perhaps exceeded only by the planning and production to make it happen.
• March: IDEO’s Play Lab and the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco - these two things dovetail nicely. GDC is the biggest conference for game developers, and it’s so much more than just an industry showcase. It’s also chockful of developers talking about the more abstract ideas behind games and game development. And right down the street is the original office of global design consultancy IDEO, where they have a whole practice devoted to play-based approaches to design.
• May: World Play Day at the LEGO house in Billund, Denmark - LEGO is the global company that takes the idea of creative play seriously. They’ve supported research into creative play and their foundation funds projects to introduce play-based learning in schools around the world. They’re the force behind World Play Day, so I’m going to see how they celebrate it…and maybe connect with some people inside the company?
• Summer: the Play Make Learn conference in Madison, Wisconsin - I’ve had this particular conference circled on my calendar for the last 2 years and had scheduling conflicts both years^[10]. I am not exactly a person who loves conferences, but this one is smaller and really at the intersection of abstraction and application.

Are there ways that we, your ever curious readers, can help bring this to life?

As a matter of fact…there are 3 big ones:

• if you know people in any of the communities laid out above, connect me with them. I do have some people I know already, but in all of these cases more is better. Just click on the email button below, let me know who you want to connect me with, and I’ll send you a little blurb.
• if you know of companies in any of those cities who might want to bring in an expert for a multi day design sprint, or a new product discovery & prototyping workshop, please also connect me! The biggest cost I’m going to take on in this project is flights, so if there’s someone who wants to fly me in already it will reduce my own out of pocket costs considerably.

• if you just want to throw some of your own hard-earned currency behind the project, you can become a Nerd Notes subscriber. There are 2 tiers^[11]. The reality is you get the same thing at both tiers, and the second one is only there if you are super keen to bring this project to life.

We're going to ease into this...the next couple months will be mostly focused on getting back into The Pokemon season, with a heavy dose of exploring creative play. Look out for some links in the next couple weeks and the first installment of Play's The Thing at the end of September.