In parallel with my research on play and American architecture I am a practicing architect. Although no theory should be applied literally I have attempted to describe each of my projects as playing a game. This game includes players and rules. In an architectural project most rules are implicit. The main one is to share the same taste, taste which for Hannah Arendt is at the core of every society. When this is not the case each of the main players will think that he can make his own taste, which he assumes to know, prevail over the others'. But here already the dimension of play has disappeared.
With this shared taste, to be able to exercise architecture as a sophisticated game, one must also be willing to share risk. There is a greater chance of mistakes, a risk which is acceptable when it comes to cultural choices but which should be otherwise curbed. This is where norms which are also rules come into play, partners with whom one must compose.
This shared taste, or at least its hypothesis, an hypothesis that the project will test, allows to dare set out for the adventure of a project understood as playing a game.
Then all the participants will be able to use all the resources of play. "One is never more efficient than when one plays" have repeated such thinkers as Aristotle, Leibnitz or Pascal. These resources will be at hand because of the pleasure which will be taken in this play. "All my best projects have been designed with joy" Claude Parent told me.
Freedom of action also makes play possible (since play requires liberty). The necessary choices must be delayed as long as possible to leave the game open. If everything has been decided before work on the site actually begins the contractors merely have to slavishly execute someone else's gaming and for the client to accept what he had only foreseen on plans, models or computer.
This necessity to have some leeway, to leave things unresolved which in itself is a constraint is decisive. It has financial impact for all participants by the choice which is made to do it over again, to evolve, to refine until the mind is satisfied, until it plays (this feeling, which is at the core of all the metaphors using the word play, is what makes you say for example that the light plays in the branches of a tree or on a building). However the reward meets the stakes : the participants will have felt for once that they have done more than work.
Of course as many involved parties as possible should be ready to play the game ; I specially think of the contractors. Those who would not would then be instruments, not players, a position which is possible for minor roles.
Each game is contingent, imperfect, or perfect according to all the visible and invisible parameters which have brought it into existence. It is for the players to decide !