During the 14th and 15th centuries, today would have been the day of the big match. Shrove Tuesday was the day that games of freeform Folk Football were played. They were tumultuous affairs in which village competed against village (or, it seems other arbitrarily oppositional groups such as married men against bachelors), in teams of unlimited number of players, kicking, throwing, and carrying a wooden or leather ball – an inflated animal bladder – across fields and over streams, through narrow lanes with a minimum of rules. The ‘goal’ was some kind of marker at each end of a town. Sometimes the goals would be the balcony of the opponents’ church.

The whole landscape became transformed into game-space. Houses, agriculture, sites of worship lost their everyday meaning and became an abstract terrain whose qualities impact the possibilities of game play.

@ Strange Harvest

Via Life Without Buildings:

The transformation of urban landmarks into the abstract terrain of a life-field is indeed a clever advertising ploy for a non-sport athletic drink. The New York is reorganized as a playing field, defined here by the presence of the athlete, who in turn is redefined as the modern urbanite. Regressing the concept of “sport” from the “essentialized urbanism” of football back into a loosely defined environment, the modern city becomes a place where everyone is a potential player.

(via BLDGBLOG, via hermitlabs)

That freeform style of play sounds like my route to these posts, following the unpredictable bouncing of links as the game and its boundaries followed the bounce of the ball.