How did i get here? Why do i have a passion about playing? You didn’t ask this question, but since I am writing a blog on the subject I think that I should talk about this.

Firstly, it has an obvious link with my personal experiences. I collect games since I was a kid. I love playing for the sake of playing. And don’t care a lot about winning (although I like to win, of course), but I love to see people having fun around me.

I am 36. I saw a great part of the evolution of the world we live in now. When I was a kid, I played pong, then Atari, then computer games, then Nintendo, PS2, Wii, DS, PSP, Iphone games…

When I saw the first ATMs, in the eighties, in Brazil, it seemed to me like really simple arcade games. Only I was playing with money. When internet banking started to really work, I looked at that and thought: geee, it looks like Sim City. Then came Friendster, Orkut, My Space and… Facebook. Now we organize our social lifes as they were… games. As if we were playing The Sims (the most popular computer game EVER).

But, ok. Come on. It is just the games inside our life, right? But what if we finally admitted the fact that play is a part of what we are? Animals play all the time. If you have a cat or a dog, you know what I mean.

A long time ago, I read a book, an old one, called Homo Ludens. And boy, it made me feel so bang on the subject. We need to play. It is part of us. Simple as that. I didn’t want to be a real game designer, but I wanted to make my work as editor of magazines a good thing. Because of that, I became a deep lover of design and always looked for ways to make the pages of my magazines pretty and engaging. But I am not a designer. So it becomes a search for the person that will be able to translate that vision and go forward with it. Add something. Do something special, amusing, interesting. Some times it worked. But not always.

Last year, while I was making a new magazine called Época São Paulo for Editora Globo, in Brazil, I was reading every local magazine possible: many different Time Outs, Los Angeles Magazine, Chicago, Washingtonian, New York and those many New York Times magazines. That was when I saw a great cover article about the subject that I love: play. It made me have long talks with some of my friends about our relationship with this urge. How we look for fun in so many different ways.

Now I am intensively researching the subject, looking for different ways to approach play and a circle closed. Looking at TED lectures I found Stuart Brown’s session and he starts it talking about that article from the NYT magazine. And the session, of course, is amazing.

I think it will help to put some light on what I am trying to do.