🎲 THURSDAY: Ludic Liberation Lab ~ Playing with RULES 🎲
Join this month's experiment in collective liberation!
The Election Game is over! 🎉
 ... or is it?Â
The Winners have been Declared!  🎊 🎆
... but are they finalized..?Â
It seems that different players involved are playing two different games, with different sets of rules.Â
WHO IS RIGHT? To each side, the other's game might feel inappropriate, ugly, even absurd. But the entire game of GOVERNMENT is really a game of rule-making and un-making. No rule is permanent, and everything is always up for negotiation.Â
Have you ever played a WAR GAME? The first time I did was in college, in an American Studies class called Ideal America: The Future. A War Game is a military simulation, played as a kind of chess-like exercise by national strategists. I played as Russia and everyone laughed at my intentionally exaggerated Putin accent (I played and won a personal game of trying to be funny, likable). Vladimir Putin was already/still Russia's president in 2006. I bet he's really good at both War Games and chess. After playing that, 14 years ago, I wondered, why don't we do this all the time? Why don't we play this in grade school, about all kinds of conflicts and situations? We need more war literacy. War is a game in which the stakes are not just laughs, drinks, or dollars, but real lives and futures. We need to play so that we remember we are always playing.Â
This month at Ludic Liberation Lab, we are not going to play a war game about the next two months (who needs a break from that reality?? 🙋 🙈). Instead, we'll play a meta war game – a game of rules. Rules – explicit but especially implicit, deeply internalized ones – RULE us! To play with them can liberate us to rule rules instead. After some fun and silly warm ups, we will play a version of Nomic – a game created by philosopher Peter Suber in which the primary activity is making and changing rules. What will we learn about what emerges in our rule-making system? Corruption? Justice? Anarchy? Impasse? Boredom? What will we discover about the secret rules we play by when we gather in a group? You are encouraged to bring both your virtuous self and your mischievous self for maximum data-generating experimentation. Oh, and bring a DIE 🎲  if you have one!
Join Us to Play with RULES
@ the Ludic Liberation Lab
Thursday, November 12
6-8:30pm EST or another time in your timezone
Ludic Liberation Lab is a contribute-what-you-can adventure! Please see our variable participation options and select the one that delights you most. All contributions (whether material or energetic) go directly to feed the gamemakers and advance the Ludic Liberation project.Â