There's the time I split my knee racing friends while wearing flip-flops. The stitches in my head earned during a vigorous match of tag. The countless skinned elbows, bumps and bruises of a youth spent on skateboard and bike.

Those were just the hallmarks of growing up outside. Each wound, each scar a tiny reminder of time spent running, laughing, playing.

But the summers of today's youth seem far removed from those times. Over the decades the evolution of play has drawn children closer and closer to home, from side streets to backyards to, finally, dens and video games. As parents become more cautious and children more agoraphobic, is something getting lost?

In Roger Caillois' famed book on play and games, Man, Play and Games, he divides play into four categories: Competition, chance, role-play and the physical effects of vertigo.

That last one is the feeling of riding a roller coaster, of running with abandon, of losing control. And that's the only form of play that video games can't tap into points out Ian Bogost, video game designer, critic and researcher at Georgia Institute of Technology.

"The sense of vertigo is missing," he says, "of being very active, physically spastic in some way. I don't see how we could argue that video games provide that."

While some games include a physical aspect, like what is found with Nintendo's Wii and in-development projects for both the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, they still require very controlled motion and physicality. For a game to truly tap into that fourth element, vertigo, there has to be a sense of abandon, of danger.

"Outdoor play has to be almost destructive in some ways, you have to be at risk at some time, of breaking something, of falling," Bogost says. "You don't really have that in games, simulating it isn't sufficient."

But don't blame video games. Video games are just the byproduct of a society and encroaching suburban lifestyle that buys into the culture of fear, Bogost says.

"It used to be that before suburban life, in the early 20th century, people would play in the streets, not just backyards or parks," he said. "But then you had to move the kid with the stick and the ball to the park.

"Now we're taking the backyard and moving it into the den and the television screen."

These relocated children still find ways to tap into three of those elements. They make up their own rules, games within video games. They play Rock Band or Guitar Hero with friends. But by limiting play to the relatively safe confines of home, children might be missing out on a chance to find and explore the raw edges of life.

"Something about play should be disruptive and antagonistic, not toward each other, but toward the environment. It should be about children finding the edges of their world, " Bogost said. "When we were children our neighborhood kind of became this kingdom."

Now a child's kingdom is often a haven of air-conditioned safety, of entirely explored space and little opportunity.

Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe today's children don't live in the same type of world that we did, don't need to run the risk of injury or testing oneself. Maybe they should prepare for a life indoors, online, physically void of risk. Maybe that's what we've all become.

If you find that hard to accept as a desirable beacon of progress, then do something about it.

But don't just send your children outside, go outside with them, even at the risk of a skinned knee.

Play games with them, even if they're ones that mimic their childhood pastimes.

Have fun.

Well Played is a weekly news and opinion column about the big stories of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion.

The feature, Dramatic Play, analyzes the intersection of interactive media, drama and games as well as the classic tenants of play and storytelling that make or break a video game. Dinehart says that Aristotle's original notion of dramatic play — that's interactive drama where you experience a story instead of just hearing about it — has bled into games like World of Warcraft, Dead Space and his own Company of Heroes.

These games seek to immerse the player in a dramatic role play, whereby they assume the role of character in a different time and place, and whose actions and presence having meaning in the world as designed.

Dramatic play is the new niche these games expound upon, a paradigm that is the focus of interactive narrative design, a craft that meets at the apex of ludology and narratology and conjoins the theories into functional video game development methodologies.

Heavy stuff, but very interesting — the kind of thing that would make an awesome dissertation topic in a Rhetoric Department at some research university. I mean if we're all on the same page that games are interesting and important and worthy of respect, we have got to get more academics on the case. That, or clone people like Ian Bogost.

Dramatic Play [Gamasutra]

In fact, most people play a combination of four or five games in World of Warcraft. There's the leveling up game, which almost everyone plays ....

After this game, some people play the endgame game, in which they try to fill out their character with the best items, or the other endgame game, in which they try to beat all the raid bosses. Some people play the Honor System game, where they try to amass honor points, and others play the Arena game, where they get to the top rank in any given season. Then, there are the less popular games - or the one I just made up: going from one capital city to another as quickly as possible at level one.

Half Blizzard driven, half player driven - so Warcraft turns. It's a nice little look at games-within-games and how these things take on a life of their own.

'Play Evolution': The Evolution of World of Warcraft and Its Many Games [GameSetWatch]

This paper explores levels of abstraction: Representational games present a fictional world, but within that world, players are only allowed to perform certain actions; the fictional world of the game is only implemented to a certain detail.

The paper distinguishes between abstraction as a core element of video game design, abstraction as something that the player decodes while playing a game, and abstraction as a type of optimization that the player builds over time.

Finally, the paper argues that abstraction is a related to the magic circle of games and to rules as such.

I have absolutely no doubt that it's more interesting than The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan; it's a text-heavy article (obviously), but hey, there are pictures!

New Paper Posted: A Certain Level of Abstraction [The Ludologist]

The richly illustrated texts in "Space Time Play" cover a wide range of gamespaces: from milestone video and computer games to virtual metropolises to digitally-overlaid physical spaces. As a comprehensive and interdisciplinary compendium, "Space Time Play" explores the architectural history of computer games and the future of ludic space. More than 140 experts from game studies and the game industry, from architecture and urban planning, have contributed essays, game reviews and interviews. The games examined range from commercial products to artistic projects and from scientific experiments to spatial design and planning tools.

"Space Time Play" is not just meant for architects, designers and gamers, but for all those who take an interest in the culture of digital games and the spaces within and modeled after them. Let's play!

The table of contents is, at first glance, a lengthy and fascinating list of topics that really do span a broad range. You can see for yourself at the Space Time Play site [via The Ludologist]

Terra Nova has a post trying to generate a list of potential doctoral programs for people wanting to study video games and synthetic worlds, but not necessarily make them. Having done the grad school search/application grind myself and nearly having had a mental breakdown doing it, I envy no one going through the process - especially not when trying to find programs that will fit an academic interest that doesn't really have a 'home' yet.

The post and comments make some good points about what to look for in a program, some programs in the US that might be a good bet for people wishing to study video games from a social scientific or humanistic perspective, and thoughts on positioning yourself for the ultimate goal: getting a job. Maggie Greene

State of the Field 2007: Graduate School Edition [Terra Nova]

An interesting discussion over at Terra Nova: how to design a new paradigm for online worlds that don't harken back to Second Life or WoW? Given a few basic rules - existence independent of the players, limitations on the actions that can be taken in the world, each player having a character/avatar, and existing in real time - what can you come up with? And is there really a need for such a thing?

The article itself is quite short, but the comment section just keeps growing - and is fairly interesting reading to boot. Maggie Greene

First Principles [Terra Nova]

Chris Bateman at Only a Game has an interesting - if jargon heavy - post up on his nine hypothetical types of gamers, broken down by patterns of play, emotions, and skills. What's his purpose for putting such a list together? He's trying to design a survey that could lead to answering a couple of questions: "What are the basic types of player? Can we uncover a comprehensive inventory of play styles? What would this teach us about games and game design?"

If you're up for following his links and dealing with some heavy sledding, it's a thought provoking read. What's your style? Maggie Greene

The Nine Basic Players (Maybe) [Only a Game]

Ben S. Decker isn't just playing video games at Harvard, he's studying them. His concentration is "the study of video games from both a technological and humanities perspective," AKA "ludology."

Ludology? 'Mkay.

He'll take a smattering of classes in computer science, economics and psychology at Harvard and cross-enroll at MIT for media studies. Ben adds,

I'm not nearly as hardcore a gamer as some—I'm certainly obsessed with a couple of games, but I have a lot of faith in the medium going forward.

That, and a pretty cool sounding major. Harvard isn't the first to offer ludology as a concentration, but rather, the University of California-Santa Cruz. Go Banana Slugs! Brian Ashcraft

Harvard Teaches Gaming [The Crimson, Thanks Joseph!]

It sounds like his latest speech, at BAFTA, was no different. In it he talks about programming for next generation systems, aka children.

As he points out, the thing developers should really be concerned with is the human experience and how it can be shaped by games.

Game developers are developing for two processors, and the human mind is the one we should be concerned with.

Basically what Wright is saying is that the kids who are growing up now virtually soaking in bandwidth and video games, are going to be much harder to create games for then my generation, which is still easily amused by the process, the idea of gaming.

I look at my 5-year-old son and see a person who finds video games as prevalent and mundane as I found radio and TV. Kinda frightening. Brian Crecente

Will Wright Talk @ BAFTA [Functional Autonomy]