Lab Report #12: Fifty-Two Ways to Play a Year
Findings from playing with plans.
Dear Ludic Liberators,
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Here is a picture of a plan made by one person… so nice and neat and organized:
Here is a picture of the above plan being played out by 12 people:
Last night at the Ludic Liberation Lab, we played with plans. Specifically, it being January and all, we questioned our norms around planning a year. You know the classic methods: announcing new year’s resolutions, setting big career and creative goals, writing adventurous bucket lists. When those things (inevitably) fail, we wait until the year’s end to reflect on what we actually did. We review our memories, write top 10 Xs of the year lists, and chuckle at our most-played Spotify songs.
Our plays don’t seem reflect our plans very much. Yet, each January, we persist in the same old insanity! WHY?
Inspired by 1) Jessica Creane’s brilliant re-imagining of the New Year’s resolution as an interactive experience, and 2) Avery Alder’s The Quiet Year, a map-making game about building community in which each turn represents a week, I wondered: how can we let a year unfold week by week and season by season, balancing our intentions, inevitability of external interruptions, AND leaving room for creative improvisation? In other words, how might we embed more play into our plans?
To answer this question, I gathered a Lab to help me consider the nature of plans. Fortunately, last night’s group was especially wise and philosophical. Together we arrived at some profound observations:
Plans are voluntary constraints made inside a noisy, entropic system.
In other words, plans are attempts to control chaos.
(In other words, plans are games of imperfect information).
Maybe a better way to think about a plan is as a set of invitations for improvisation.
The difference between PLAN & PLAY is one of a consonant and a vowel. N/Y. N(o)/Y(es). One forms a boundary, the other – a line of flight.
A plan is a kind of dare to your future self.
A resolution / aspiration is not a plan, it’s a destination.
A plan, then, is an itinerary that considers your resources (ones you have both in Scarcity or Abundance), and the contradictory perspectives of your internal community.
When we make aspirational plans for ourselves, especially for a fresh new year, we’re usually designing just for just one part of ourselves. The part that we envision as being perfectly willful, obedient, and consistently inspired. I call it The Tyranny Of the Aspirational Self.
But we are not just that one person. We contain multitudes. Each one of us has a messy, contradictory, internal community inside us.
Our internal community includes parts of ourselves that get really tired and discouraged, that feel scared and overwhelmed, that act out like little children, that rebel against authority, that also have fascist, authoritative instincts to discipline and punish our own misbehavior, that crave novelty and variety, and that want to be rewarded with abundant pleasure and unconditional approval.
Finally, the plans we make for ourselves in the present might be in contradiction with older or deeper plans, including our DNA, our childhood programming, our parents’ proleptic expectations, our unique neurological patterns, our unconscious drives and desires, and our habits and addictions. Our plans are never made on a clean slate.
After exploring a bit of The Quiet Year, which helped us see the way these dynamics play out in a small distributed community, we asked: What if we planned our year like a role-playing game for our internal multitudes?
This is the game we then workshopped together last night and I present to you now as a gift 🎁
I’m calling it the Playful Year Generator (name subject to change) and here are the instructions (beta) to generate your own version. Maybe you’d like to try it? 🙃
You’ll need a deck of cards you can modify. Walgreens currently has a bunch of novelty varieties for $5.99. I got a gold one called JUBILEE and it makes me very happy.
Pick one suit to be your first season. A common correspondence is: ♠️ - Winter; ♥️ - Spring; ♦️ - Summer; ♣️ - Autumn. We’ll start with generating a playful season because it’s easier than a whole year, and making this easy and magical is a design priority.
Tune into the contradictory desires of your internal community. You don’t want to listen to just the part of yourself that says you’re not enough and wants to add 52 ambitious things to your life! Either in your journal or taking turns with a partner, finish the following sentence stems, for 1 minute each. Don’t overthink it, just let them flow from your stream of consciousness:
I’m Craving…
I’m Curious About…
I’m Tired Of…
I’m Letting Go of…
I’m Opening Up to…
I’m Feeling Good About…
Next, take a piece of paper and make a chart with 4 or 6 boxes, depending on how much variety you want. These are your categories. Name them. For example: Books I Want to Read That Are Already On My Shelf, Cleaning Projects, Creative Practices, Style Experiments, Scary but Potentially Transformative Challenges, New Things I want to Try or Learn, Decolonial Self-Education, Indulgent Binges, etc. In making the categories, make sure you vary the kinds of demands and investments that are involved. DON’T make all the things equally intellectually or physically challenging. Definitely DO make some of the things very easy and fun.
Now, if you chose 4 categories, you’ll want to come up with 6 things you can do for a week in each category. If you have 6 categories, 4 options for each. There are a couple of rules for specifying the weekly commitments:
Each can be done for 7 days or completed in a week
It shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes or so a day (so no very long and difficult books)
It won’t kill you if you don’t do it at all (don’t make one of the things “file your taxes” or something else you absolutely have to do)
It should require no prerequisites you haven’t done already, so don’t add “edit a novel,” if you haven’t written a draft yet. Although maybe you want to edit someone else’s novel for a week, which could be interesting.
Some good examples: Take an Online Course on Oil Painting on Skillshare, Learn to Bake Bread, Write a Personal Essay/Poem/ Short Story, Play the Minimalism Game (give up 1 thing on day 1 of the week, 2 things on day 2, etc); Have an Orgasm Every Day, No Social Media for a Week, Binge Star Trek, Buy Nothing, Revisit an Abandoned Creative Project, Explore an Abandoned Building, Inhabit a Different Character Every Day, Dress Up in Something Wild or Glamorous Every Day, Do Everything With the Spirit Of [_____] (pick a word like Generosity, Ease, Sweetness to infuse into the little things), Plan an Impossible Trip, Choreograph a Dance, Interview Someone About Something You’re Curious About, Ask for Help, Slack Off.
After filling out your chart, you should have 24 things. Now add 2 more to your list: 1) Stranger a Day – this is a collective challenge we decided to include in our decks, which you can interpret as you wish… interact with a stranger every day, make a stranger laugh, do something kind for a stranger — you decide; and 2) Ask someone else — friend or stranger — to give you a Dare, or if you prefer, an Invitation. Tell them one of your categories or desires, and let them make up a challenge for you to try for or accomplish in a week. Mine is Ride a Horse. I’ve never done this and would have never thought to include it in my list, but I’m excited to MAYBE do it. Thanks Cleo & Deecie!
Now you have 26 things you can do! On each card of your chosen suit, write (with a permanent marker) two of the options with an “OR” in the middle. For example: No Social Media for a Week OR Plan an Impossible Trip. Make sure to not put two things of the same kind of intellectual or physical demand on the same card. Plan for different parts of yourself to want to take charge, circumstances and energetic capacity pending. Do this for each of the 13 cards of your suit.
Amanda’s completed deck! She laminated it, which is a really good idea. To play, Sunday or Monday or whenever you start your week, shuffle your quarter-deck and pull a card. Choose one of the 2 options and mark your choice by circling it or putting a check-box or a sticker next to it. Play your challenge for a week. Once the week is done, put the card in a done & discard pile. Tip: If the challenge ends up being TOO HARD (it happens), make it easier. What’s the Minimum Viable Version of it you can do each day? Do that, and you can always try the more advanced level next season.
Improvise as you need to. Notice how you feel. Keep doing what feels good, discard what doesn’t.
If you’ve read to this point and maybe even decided to try the playful year generator for yourself, I love you and you’re awesome! ALSO, last night we decided to gather again in ~13 weeks to report back on our experiments and plan the next season. I hope you’ll join us. If you need a dare, let me know, I’m apparently “really good” at making them up for people.
Oh hey, do you want to play “The Quiet Year” all the way to the end?
We only got a little taste of it at last night’s Lab and several people wanted to play a whole game. I’ve reserved WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 27, 6-8:30PM for this purpose. If that time works for you and you want to join, fill out this form. If it doesn’t, feel free to play it with your friends. You can get it a copy of it here.
🗓 Don't miss any more labs! The Ludic Liberation Lab meets every 2nd Thursday of the month, 6-8:30pm Eastern Time, so add it to your calendar. WE'LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH ON FEBRUARY 11th!
Do you have feedback and findings from your personal Lab experience that you want to contribute? Please send them to ludicliberation@gmail.com. The email is also where you should send proposals for future playful liberation experiments you’d love to conduct at the Lab! 🎲🔬
"The problem is all inside your head"
She said to me
"The answer is easy if you
Take it logically
I'd like to help you in your struggle
To be free
There must be fifty(two) ways
To play your year"
n a t a l i a
Gamemaker/Destroyer
Did you get to ride that horse?! I really want to know!