My presentation proposes a model for understanding the design of play across digital and non-digital media. Designed play is a multivalent experience which can be framed along three axes:

1. RULES: the formal structures, spaces, and objects of play
2. PLAY: the play experience that emerges when the rules are inhabited, manipulated, and explored by players
3. CULTURE: the ways in which both rules and play are embedded in and determined by larger cultural spheres

 Aided by plenty of audience participation, I will explore and reframe play in many ways: as a dynamic system, as emergent complexity, as pleasure, as representational space, and as a model for ethics. My presentation is part of a larger project of establishing a critical discourse for interactive design that bridges theory and practice.

This paper will explore some of the crucial developments that have transformed the terrain of technology, education, art and culture. These changes will have a profound effect not only on the social and political structure of advanced industrial societies, but on the ways in which we see ourselves, act upon and within the communities of which we are a part and how we create meanings, messages and information for the proliferating networks that now surround us. 

Employing recent developments in cognitive theory, this paper examines how sports spectators engage in an intertextual process of game play which simultaneously recalls their experience of spectatorship across the board (in television, video games, and spectator sports) as well as tapping into their experience -- real or imagined -- in participant sports. Video games thereby become positioned within a historical line of sports spectatorship and its attendant notions of interactivity and empowerment.