Mandatory Fun
From the unofficial Duke TIP Wiki
Mandatory Fun Time As one Dr. Steve Benko described it to his PILF class, "TIP staff thinks that although you TIPsters are advanced intellectually, you are far behind socially." This is the reasoning behind mandatory fun time. TIP ensures that nerds will socialize through 1 and 1/2 hour activities Monday-Thursday and 2 hour activities on Sunday. You sign up for them (at Davidson you sign up in one central location early in the morning; at Duke East you sign up for unlimited activities with your RC and limited ones in Bassett; the Duke Marine Lab works the same way as Davidson) ahead of time and go there right after evening session. Activities vary widely from movies to crafts to Calvinball. One night every week you have an RC group night. You choose an activity with your RC group, such as going to Main Street or Ninth Street, going to Laser tag, bowling, ordering pizza and a movie... et cetra.
Some Davidson activities in 2005 included:
- Hang out in Union
- Ultimate Frisbee
- Cards
- Various movies, including the Italian Job and Ocean's 12
- Soccer
Recently Mandatory Fun has become even more mandatory. Previously, if activities were at their logical end at, say, 9:00, RCs would let us out. However, at West '05, this common sense was not applied, resulting in kids who signed up for football or soccer sitting on a bench for half an hour when it got dark.
Before 1998, activities were not mandatory and just things you could do if you felt like it. Then you had to start signing up for things (not necessarily a listed activity, you could write like card games as long as you had a specific location).
Edit by Logan Wall: Mandatory Fun's original implementation may have had a connection to the prevention of TIP Babies.
In Kansas, Mandatory Fun often takes a tragic turn and results in forced entrance to corn mazes. Ironically, such mazes have been known to provide the dark corners neccesarry for the creation of TIP Babies.
