Harvesting another little tidbit amongst all the learnings I had at the Applied Improv Network Conference. This one from the opening session with Bernie DeKoven and Matt Weinstein, when Bernie talked about game community versus play community. In a game community the big question underneath is “is the player good enough to play”? And in a play community the big question underneath is “is the game good enough to play”? Connected to this was the idea of changing games from win-lose to sink-swim. Win-lose means one of us wins and one of us wins. With sink-swim we build community: we sink together or we swim together.
This was illustrated by Matt who invite us to play rock-paper-scissors with a partner (the old fashioned way, including a whap on the wrist with two fingers!). Then we adjusted the game to try and be the same as our partner. We went from win-lose to sink-swim.
Then we played Pistol Person Tiger. The highlight? A whisper campaign where instead of applause at the end of the session all 200 of us did pistol fireworks. Ahhhhh…. smiles!
One reply on “Game Versus Play”
Love the distinction between playing the game and a game good enough to play.