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Thanks for suggesting this look-back; I'd forgotten about this sequence of conversations, and enjoyed re-reading the archive.

What struck me, first, was how different an invitation into "risk-taking" is from one into "play"--> play seems less risky, because more bounded, more rule-driven (see Mary Flanagan ideas about Critical Play....). It actually seems as though the conversations we hosted on Choices and Constraints, the year after we talked about risk, come closer to our current project about playing with/in the grid....

I was delighted to see, for example, that the first discussion in this series, led by Mark, was about The Play of Choosing. Mark said then that he "attempts to make the act of choosing playful and fun for his audiences, structuring situations in which there is 'no cost for selecting one option over another'"; "he would like to create dramas...where there is an 'unceasing delight in play, discovery, recognition, connectedness...and choicelessness, understood as meaning either that the 'alternatives don't really matter,' or--if they do--that the audience is making them 'without anticipating the negatives.' Such choices 'are not dominated by thinking about the consequences'; they 'take place only in present time.' We might call these 'unconscious choices" in which we can revel and take pleasure.'"

Is that a good/accurate description of what we are after in this new course? Creating a space where what is chosen doesn't matter? Hm.....