I was assigned to create a derive for my play class.  A derive is where one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work, and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attraction of the terrain and encounters they find there.  Derives don't seem to work as well in open country, but tend to do better in an urban environment.  

One can derive alone, but a more objective method is to have several small groups which then cross check each other.  

The average duration of a derive is one day as defined as the period between to periods of sleep.  

The field of a derive can be precisely defined or vaguely delineated depending on wether one is trying to study a certain terrain or to emotionally disorient oneself.  In any case, the field of the derive depends upon the place of depart.  You can get only so far away in the time you have given for the derive.

One type of derive is the possible rendezvous in which the subject is invited to come alone to a certain place at a specific time.  Once the person gets there, no one is there to meet them or an unknown person has been given the same invitation.  In either case the subject does not know whom he is suppose to meet so he takes his time to study his surroundings.  

One of the greatest values of derive is the acknowledgement of the unseen borders that separate us from each other and the eventual breaking down of these borders.  

Below you will find an example of a very short derive I did with some friends around the restaurant Denny's.  My original plan was to walk around describing our surroundings to my  blind friend Courtney, but she wasn't there that night.  I am not quite sure that my friends took this seriously, however there were some good moments.  My favorite is "Where did that door come from?"  Hope you enjoy. 

I was assigned to read the "Dissolving the Magic Circle" for my class about play.  This article is about a situationist's approach to play.  The first lesson this article points out is that we need to adopt a constant attitude of liminoid defined as the freeing and transformative moments of play when the normal rules and roles of a community are relaxed.  Situationist games do not respect the boundary of the "magic circle" that Huizinga introduced.  The idea here is to attempt to give a transformative potential to normal life.

The second lesson that Situationists point to is that the competitive nature of play should be questioned.  For situationist, competition is also a ethical question that must be addressed.  

The third lesson is that within cities there is a psychogeoraphic current.  These currents need to be mapped and used to enhance a public consciousness of play in our urban environment.  This leads to the concept that games should not so much be rule based algorithms, but environments to be explored.   Games are now commonly being used to train soldiers for urban warfare.