One of my favorite parts of the June, "Come Out and Play Festival" in New York City was re-experiencing Times Square - a place I walk through several times a week.

Many of Come Out and Play's games started with a big mob gathering in Times Square (see my Flickr set for The Following here). And, as Sarah Williams (Spatial Information Design Lab, Columbia University) pointed out, Come Out and Play games managed to reactivate this urban space, Times Square, and remake it as public space. As Sarah noted:

"Times Square has a huge density of people who are actually looking for something to be doing. They are not sure why they are there."

And we were certainly a mob with a mission - to Come Out and Play.

Recently Times Square has been closed off to traffic and in the process started to look exactly like Second Life at the peak of its hype cycle with "people sitting around in lawn chairs looking at advertising" (picture below of Second Life camping from Hack It Easy Blog).  Camping in Second Life became a popular occupation because you could earn money based on the population density of a sim, so people would park their avatar in chairs and get paid a few Lindens for doing so.

When Frank Lantz, area/code, quipped during the Saturday morning panel of Come Out and Play, "Sim City and Second Life are the two biggest influences on Urban Design," I cracked up.  Frank is spot on - see this set of photos I took the weekend of Come Out and Play.  I finally got a moment to upload them to Flickr.

When I saw someone lying down in a lawn chair (photo attached here) reading "Outline of a Theory of Practice," by Pierre Bourdieu, I couldn't resist striking up a conversation. And I was right in assuming he shared my amusement in the whole scene.

It turned out Jordan - my new lawn chair acquaintance, works for - terrapartners.com - a very interesting company.

"As of January 1, 2009 Terra Partners Group managed over 130 million USD in three funds..... the targets will include many Emerging Markets, an area where some countries have experienced high volatility...."

I got the feeling in my brief chat with Jordan that Terra Partners may specialize in something like the kind of transactions between Favela Chic and Gothic High Tech that Bruce Sterling described in his recent look at the what the next ten years will feel like. For more on Favela Chic and Gothic High Tech see my interview with Bruce Sterling here, and Bruce Sterling's keynote at reboot11.

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