The game of tag became more than playground fun for one Freshman Learning Community.
Tuesday, 21 students from a class called Experiencing the Arts distributed 600 to 700 cards across campus that said, "TAG. You're it!"
The idea was to connect the campus community in a playful way.
"We were basically attempting to get our fellow students at UNM to put aside their reputations, iPods, Walkmans and too-cool-to-talk-to-you attitudes, which we saw as something of a plague, which has definitely stricken our campus this fall," student Ted Romero said in an e-mail interview.
He said the purpose was to incite the same willingness to have fun people experience as children without shame.
"We felt that in this time of uncertainty, making people smile and laugh while getting away from their personal worlds could unite the campus in a positive way and make students remember how much fun simple social interaction can be," he said.
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It was apparent people on campus exist in spite of others instead of for others, he said.
Bryan Konefsky, one of the instructors of Experiencing the Arts, said the class is on aesthetics.
Students spent the semester looking at different approaches to creativity. Instructors brought in artists, musicians and actors from the community to talk to the students in the class.
Konefsky said he and Krista Kozel, an instructor in the arts Freshman Learning Community, spent a lot of time brainstorming for the class, because they are artists. He said they wanted students to put together a final project relating to memory and attaching memory to a physical location.
"We wanted them to do something that memorialized something they felt strong about," Konefsky said.
The class began to discuss the relationship between research and play. The class wanted to point out the importance of play as a research tool.
It was during a discussion that the idea of playing tag on campus came up.
After students broke into groups and distributed the cards, they reported the reactions they received.
"It was field research of a kind," Konefsky said.
Romero said the reactions varied from excitement to anger and apathy.
The class also put together a Web site.
Although the class ended, Konefsky said he hoped playing the game of tag would become an annual event the week before finals, when people are stressed out.
"The game of tag is a little kids' game," he said. "But they discovered deeper ramifications playing it on campus."
