After all, we live in a golden age of play. The video-game industry is bristling with innovation: You've got haptic controllers on the Wii, titles like Eye of Judgment merging card-games with computers, and the increasingly strange economic activity in online worlds. Our culture is clearly hungry for new forms of play.

Yet how many new major physical sports have you played in recent years? Zero, I'll bet. The pantheon of major team-sports -- football, basketball, baseball, soccer, hockey -- hasn't significantly altered in decades.

So Russotti decided to expand the field a bit. By creating a new sport, he decided, he could level the playing field between athletes. When you join a pickup game of basketball or football, it's always slightly marred by the fact that some of the players will be totally experienced -- making it slightly more dull for the less-expert folks. A new sport wouldn't have that problem.

Russotti began casting around for ideas, and while visiting a family vacation home in the country, found a pile of discarded Whiffle bats. Presto: Russotti decided to design a variant of hurling that uses Whiffle plastic. The rules are generally similar to the old Irish sport: You can catch the ball with your hand and remain stationary, but to move you have dribble the ball on the Whiffle bat. Otherwise you have to pass by hitting the ball.

"I figured it'd have all the action, the exhilaration, but different physics because of the plastic balls and bats," Russotti told me when I met him and a gang of friends in New York to play the game. (He also instituted some delightfully silly rules: One team is required to wear sombreros.)

As we raced around the field, I quickly intuited some basic strategy. For example, I realized that I didn't need to drive up too close to the goals -- I could shoot successfully from midfield. Then I realized that it paid to be aggressive: If the opposing team was about to gain control the ball, I'd dive headlong into the mud and whack it away -- using something closer to a golf swing. Pretty soon I'd developed a reputation on my team for being psychotically willing to fling myself nose-first on the ground.

Meanwhile, one of my opponents demonstrated a scarily amazing facility for dribbling the ball long distances -- which let him easily traverse the field, since you're not allowed to interfere with a dribbling player.

Essentially, were figuring out how to play. And this is, counterintuitively, a big part of what makes a new game so great: You get to explore the intriguing and unpredictable ways that the rules interact.

Video-game players understand this implicitly: We often find that the thrill of a new game is in the process of mastering it -- not the mastery itself. (Indeed, once a video game is mastered we often stop playing it.) You never get this experience with an existing, well-known sport like soccer or football, because the rules have been exhaustively explored.

Russotti, too, has had to gradually fine-tune Whiffle Hurling as he watches how the athletes interact. During the first game, he discovered that offensive players were camping out near the goalposts, which made it trivially easy to smash a goal past the goalies. (I love it: Camping.) So Russotti instituted a 15-foot goal-shooting line. And after personally suffering a brutal black-eye injury in the first five minutes of the inaugural game, he instituted a "no physical contact" rule.

This is other delicious thing about playing a new sport: You get to watch the rules evolve, which gives you front-row insight into the intellectually fascinating process of game design. Baseball and football and hockey all underwent the same tweaking process, but because they don't change much any more, people don't think of them as designed objects. And because we don't think of them as designed objects, we don't think about designing new sports.

The irony, of course, is that Russotti is merely doing what children already innately do. Children in playgrounds invent their own physical games every day. It's a completely natural human activity, but it's drummed out of us once we go to school and are told that the small group of advertising-supported team sports are the only "serious" ones. For the rest of your adult life, you never deviate.

Unless, of course, you hook up with Russotti. In a few weeks he's going to showcase another new sport he's invented: A version of basketball played with three opposing teams, three nets and two balls.

I can't wait.