Life is full of choices.

I have always felt strongly about play. I think this emerged from my personal experience in college. I did not perform well at school, and a staple phrase of my parent evenings was "Paul is an underachiever". This was attributed to my lack of focus in class. Silently, I attributed my lack of focus in class to just how dull class was.

College was different. I was finally studying a field I was interested in, and that field was intrinsically fun - Performing Arts.

I quickly went from being a student who barely scraped through my GCSEs to a well-rounded performer who just missed out on full distinctions at college AND university.

Since then I have been outspoken about how fun and play can transform not only education, but workspaces. As it has become clearer over the past few decades that the spectrum of educational needs is far more colourful than we had initially imagined, so to it should've become clearer that the way different people work was also a vastly varied arena.

I, for one, find my productivity hinges largely on my environment and the people in it. I work best in short bursts with an opportunity to break up my day with something fun in between.

In 2015-16, I worked in Thailand as an English teacher. The company I worked for would visit multiple schools around Bangkok delivering a specific set of lessons to each age group. My Thursday school had me teaching from every age between two-year olds and 16-year olds.

It took me three or four months before I could wrap my head around working with the teenagers. As you might expect, teenage behaviour appears to be a universal phenomenon, and so they were sullen and full of attitude.

To make things worse - the lesson plans were incredibly dull.

After a particularly rough week of trying to engage with the teenage class, I decided to adopt an entirely different approach, and much to my Thai colleague's dismay - I threw out the lesson plan. She was even more distressed when I told her I was going to play primary-aged games with them like Duck, Duck, Goose. I even brought in a blow up hammer, and we played the game - only they got to bash the person they were chasing with an inflatable hammer. Obviously, they loved it. Especially when they got to hit me with it.

You're probably wondering, what is the point of all this? 

Simple. It's easier to navigate content or complex ideas when it's enjoyable.

This isn't just a hypothesis anymore. It's well-established. It's called gamification. And it's become prevalent in the education sector - just look at tools such as Kahoot!, Classcraft, Duolingo, Quizizz, Prodigy, and Brainscape. Not only that, but there are professional development tools such as Bunchball Nitro, Axonify, MLevel, GameLearn, and EdApp which also incorporate and champion gamification.

These tools help people to navigate complex ideas.

Or stories.

This thread seeks to deconstruct the concept of play and navigation in the context of ergodic literature when applied to a theatrical text.

In doing so, it will be relevant to explore the ways in which play and navigation are used elsewhere in mediums that could be associated with ergodic literature.

My approach is to be as holistic as possible in topics that surround the central premise of this project. Those consist of -

• Dramaturgy
• Narratology
• Ludology
• Immersology

Exploring examples of ergodic functionality, and its relation to play and navigation, across these four fields of study will hopefully provide us with a network of interconnected theories that will support the central premise.