GAMES WE PLAY WITH OURSELVES
INSTRUCTOR: Natalia Stroika
DATES: October 6, 13, 20, 27, Nov 3 & 10 (6 Sessions)
TIME: Wednesdays 7-8:30pm EST
LOCATION: Zoom
TUITION: $350 Early Bird Registration before Sept 27
​(please contact us for sliding scale tuition options)
PERK: One-on-One Session on your Personal Existential Game

As children, we talked to imaginary friends, built forts and arranged dollhouses, daydreamed about fantasy worlds, and pretended to be magical beings. But when we got “all grown up,” these varied forms of solo play have all but dissolved. As adults, we still play sometimes, but our play is mostly designated to certain contexts: the phone screen, the video game console, the weekly RPG night, sometimes, perhaps, the bedroom.

Whatever happened to those childhood games of ours? In this 6-week workshop series for adults, we’ll consider the possibility that we didn’t just outgrow imaginative solo play; rather, we’ve adultified it – made it complicated, work-like, self-important. In fact, we played our games so well into this next level that we forgot that we were even playing. In the process, we also lost the most important rule of childhood play–the one that says that you can always change the rules.

This series will invite us to reveal our secret adult gameplay dynamics and – if we desire – to re-envision our existential playbooks using the methods of Ludic Liberation. Ludic Liberation is a practice of collective play designed to explore and experiment with conventions, norms, mainstream concepts, and commonly-held beliefs. The goal of Ludic Liberation practice is to playfully make the familiar strange, and in the process to uncover a deeper, more essential truth that has been covered by the illusions and contradictions of living in society.

Some adult-level games we might collectively redesign during “Games We Play With Ourselves” include:

• The Game of Infinite Goals on a Perpetually Shifting Horizon (It’s Kinda Like Tetris Except the Shapes Don’t Fit)
• The Running Away from DEATH Game! (Also Kinda Like Tetris except the Music is Scarier and the Shapes are Zombies)
• Game of Bank Account Peek-a-Boo! Now I see it – now I don’t!
• Walking the Weeping Wilderness of Past Mistakes (kind of a bummer of a game)
• “What Else Could Go Wrong?” The Game of Advanced Anxiety You Can Play Anywhere (™)
• And more!

This series is for existential players who are feeling the call to adventure, are intrigued by the power of the reversal, are willing and ready to question (at least a few of) their beliefs, and are brave enough to experiment with different rules for playing the game of life!

​WEEKLY SESSION DESCRIPTIONS

WEEK 1: EXISTENTIAL GAME RETRIEVAL. In this session we will (imaginatively) journey to a magical place where all our childhood play experiences are safely stored. We will explore our personal core play orientations, why we might have forgotten or abandoned certain games, and retrieve forms of play we want to bring back with us into our present lives.

​WEEK 2. GAMES OF ASPIRATION. A category of imaginary games we continue to play as adults are games of “aspiration.” We love to imagine our future selves – better and richer and wiser and perfectly fit, living in our (always clean) dream home. In this session, we’ll luxuriate in our future perfection to uncover the hidden rules of this class of games, how they may be sabotaging our fun and happiness, and consider if they might need a tune-up.

WEEK 3: REGRET GAMES. Whether it’s the “spirit of the stairs” from the last conversation with an acquaintance, the lover that got away, or that dumb thing we did when we were nineteen, many of us are haunted by regrets. What if we’d made that other choice? In this session, we will experiment with ways we might STILL live out alternate lives, in the process altering our present reality. YES, have your cake and eat it too! Delicious regret cake!

WEEK 4. PLAYING WITH ATTENTION. Zen teachers cryptically suggest that awakening is attention. Poets say that attention is what the soul is made of. Mystics say that ecstasy is attention at its highest. Meanwhile, what’s left of our attention after email and social media have stolen most of it, keeps… wondering? In this session we will observe and manipulate the powers of our sense to learn to play the most important game of all: the game of being present to what is (and receiving its many presents!!!).

WEEK 5. THE GAME OF BEING YOU with guest facilitator Indigo Esmonde. BE YOURSELF! “All the other jobs are taken.” But how do we know to be ourselves, really? Do we try to repeat who we were yesterday? In this session with Daydream Artist and Failure Consultant Indigo Esmonde, we will act out and play with re-directing the scripts of our personalities.

WEEK 6. PEGGING OURSELVES. In this final session, we’ll put together all what we’ve discovered about our personal existential games and decide if we want to reinvent them using the many ludic and liberatory mechanics explored throughout the series. Players will walk out with a new set of rules for their own life!