There’s a pair of jokes David Thomas likes to tell when he talks about the theory of fun.
“A horse walks into a bar,” the first joke goes, “and the bartender says, ‘Why the long face?’ “
“A duck walks into a bar,” goes the second, “orders a beer and says, ‘Put it on my bill.’ “
“These are simple jokes, but there’s this break… It’s funny, it sort of evaporates and you laugh,” Thomas said.
“When those planes of meaning intersect and don’t collapse, that’s fun,” he said. “Breakfast for dinner — that’s fun.”
The director of academic technology for the , Thomas wrote his dissertation on . In a past life, he worked as a newspaper video game critic.
What might be really fun, he thought, is teaching a college course about fun — the theory and design behind fun things, whether they’re board games, amusement parks or .
So, is Fun Objects, offered at for the first time this fall, the most fun class in the history of college classes?
That would be hard to prove, but the instructors and students are certainly having a blast.
“It’s a tough balancing act,” Thomas said after a guest lecture about treasure hunts from a local artist. “It’s a class, but if it was totally not fun, that would be a tragedy.”
“It would have been the worst class ever if I were just lecturing.”
So far, the class has gone on field trips to , a haunted house and , a new interactive puzzle attraction in LoDo.
Guest speakers have included a board-game maker, one of the creators of the and the director of a documentary about zombie culture.
Thomas’ co-teacher and “artist in residence” is , a Denver .
And, yes, there is homework, Novick said — this isn’t Underwater Basket Weaving.
The latest assignment was to pitch an alternative haunted house to “venture capitalists” (Novick and Thomas) looking to open a new walk-through attraction (not really).
The catch: Halloween themes were highly discouraged.
Among the results: Christmas, Thanksgiving, St. Patrick’s Day, even Octoberfest and International Cat Day. A Graduation Day haunt, one student proposed, would begin with a choice of doors… to decide your future for the rest of your life.
“If you read the syllabus, it says this is a real class. There is homework,” Novick said. “It’s not trivial. It’s not just showing them cool stuff.”
The goal, really, Thomas said, is to equip the students — all of whom come from fine-arts backgrounds — with the ability to discern what makes something fun and then apply those principles to their own work.
Fun, in Thomas’ view, is an aesthetic — a sense of ambiguity, a paradox, “the experience of an is/is not.”
Take masquerade.
“If you put on a police uniform on Halloween and you’re a cop, that’s just going to work,” Thomas said. “If you put on a police uniform and go out to a costume party, that’s having fun.”
(Pretending you really are a cop, though, is not fun — it will get you arrested.)
The same ” is/is not” dynamic is at play with puzzles.
“Puzzles are a challenge,” Novick said. “We’re faced with challenges every day, but this is an inconsequential challenge.”
It’s like work that isn’t work.
So, that bomb students had to defuse during the recent field trip to Puzzah? It was and it wasn’t.
Puzzah, which opened to the public on Halloween, is part of a wave of across the U.S. offering fun-seeking customers an immersive problem-solving challenge.
Armed only with law enforcement badges, four “detectives” — students Brock Byrd, Matthew Daniels, Robbie Fikes and John Kesig — walked through a black door to find themselves backstage at a theater.
A “bomb” had been planted by an evil composer. The only way to defuse it? Solve a series of interactive music-themed puzzles.
“We’re all going to die,” Daniels said. “We’re the worst detectives.”
Soon, the clock was ticking faster and faster — literally speeding up to pump up the pressure on the final clue.
“This is the hardest class I’ve ever been in,” Byrd said.
They pulled a wire. The bomb “exploded.” Game over.
Was it fun, at least? The owners wanted to know.
“It was a lot of fun,” Byrd said.
The fun continued the following week with a guest lecturer.
A painter and student at the University of Colorado, also orchestrates elaborate treasure hunts as part of his art practice. The last one had a prize of $1,000 in gold — concealed on an otherwise ordinary U-lock in Capitol Hill.
Over the course of a month, scavengers traversed the metro area from City Park to South Table Mountain, parsing information from clues that weren’t clues, going on wild-goose chases and in one case, devising an elaborate and unnecessary cipher.
Class began with its own scavenger hunt, the students set loose upon the King Center with 15 minutes and a page of riddles.
“What makes mimicry more fun, for the player who wants to be someone else?” read one.
“Want want a snack snack before class class?” read another.
“Ask Terry,” read a third.
Kesig had one question before heading out the classroom door.
“Is there going to be a Fun Objects 2?”
Emilie Rusch: 303-954-2457, erusch@denverpost.com or twitter.com/emilierusch
