Robert Sawyer is an artist, digital fabricator, and designer who is interested in the capacities for play and games to engage the imagination and encourage a playful spirit in the 21st century. As a result, he uses his understanding of strategy, printmaking, and game theory as a way of creating new methods and environments for play.
Robert has a wide background of design experience spanning the disciplines of athletic apparel design, footwear design, visual arts, and graphic/brand design. His graduate visual arts experience coupled with his undergraduate liberal arts education has contributed to the foundation of his practice as it relates to games and play.
An excerpt from Roger Caillois’ book Man, Play, and Games.
| Definition of Play |
“But for the present, the preceding analysis permits play to be defined as an activity which is essentially: 1. Free: in which playing is not obligatory; if it were, it would at once lose its attractive and joyous quality as a diversion; 2. Separate: circumscribed within limits of space and time, defined and fixed in advance; 3. Uncertain: the course of which cannot be determined, nor the result attained beforehand, and some latitude for innovations being left to the player’s initiative; 4. Unproductive: creating neither goods, nor wealth, nor new elements of any kind; and, except for the exchange of property among the players, ending in a situation identical to that prevailing at the beginning of the game; 5. Governed by rules: under conventions that suspend ordinary laws, and for the moment establish new legislation, which alone counts; 6. Make-believe: accompanied by a special awareness of a second reality or of a free unreality, as against real life.”
Caillois, Roger, and Meyer Barash. Man, Play and Games. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. p. 9-10
