Big Fun Place For Adults. A blog.
It all started when I was a little kid, growing up in the suburbs of Detroit. Along with most of my school mates, my father worked for the automotive industry, making a comfortable middle-class living. Things were great. I remember getting our first computer, a beige nearly useless monstrosity with a green and black screen. It had some sort of word-based guessing game on it that we found endlessly entertaining. We had video games on the TV, digging and jumping in the sand-box next to the garage, lazer-tag wars. It was a great place to grow up. The increasingly elaborate street hockey league forming on our block was actually quite impressive.
We played.
At some point along the way, things got in the way of playing games. I moved away for college, girlfriends came and went, work became important. Don’t get me wrong, I still play. My patient, wonderful, incredible wife tolerates me slinking off to the garage to noodle on my guitar here and there. I own a respectable desktop gaming computer that I occasionally use. We own a rather dusty board game collection. Unfortunately, for me play has been relegated to mostly the thing that I do when I have a minute between rushing home from work and crashing in bed. My two sons play for sure, but my play time seems more and more to have occurred in my past. Extrapolate the trend and in a few more years, I will have had very little play time in my adult life.
It’s time to turn this boat around.
Back in college, my brother and I jokingly started asking each other, “what’s in your big fun place?” At the time, we were pretty disappointed with the options for grown adults to do fun things. We could go bowling sure, or maybe go-karts? The options for two guys in their twenties to do anything besides slowly kill our last remaining brain cells were limited at best. We even had the audacity to drop in on one of those indoor trampoline places one time. We quickly realized that we were the only adults in the joint not sitting in the sad little food court area waiting for our kids to finish playing so we could go home.
Weren’t we told “you can do that when you are older.” I figured I would get the chance to play on one of those huge Agro-Crags from Nickelodeon’s 90’s tv show “Guts." There would be plenty of time to play with that slime from Double Dare. I want to get into that damned Hidden Temple. What about Gladiators? My god I loved American Gladiators as a kid. Who am I kidding? I still love American Gladiators.
We started talking about what our fictional “big fun place” would have in it. Maybe an arcade, a lounge area for live music, a rock wall, tennis ball cannons… the exercise of actually defining what would be in an ideal “Big Fun Place for Adults,” BFPFA for short, was far more entertaining to me than our usual routine of drinking beer and watching TV or whatever banal things suburban malcontents get up to. That was almost ten years ago now.
Starting with my brother, expanding out to my friends and roommates, I began surveying people about what things they would put in their big fun place. The ideas people generate tend to swing wildly from nostalgic 90’s tv game shows and pure unbridled hedonism on one end, to a quiet place to relax and read a book on the other. I love hearing about what other adults long to do in their free time. It is a wonderful thing to read. I’ve come to realize that if given the opportunity, some grown adults would love nothing more than a quiet place to play a board game with their partner. Others would want to take turns sling-shotting themselves up a foam mountain.
This is the way.
I intend to create this small space as a way to document the various big fun places that I encounter and put them together in a fun and entertaining way. Hopefully this increases the number of big fun places that I can find myself in. If nothing else, it gives me the opportunity to do something that I enjoy.
Heck, maybe someday I’ll open a big fun place for you to visit. Wouldn’t that be fun?
-Kyle