Dear Ludic Liberators,
I’m not sorry about the subject line. I had to do it. Making puns, no matter how silly and obvious, is one of my favorite conversational indulgences. Just like audibly grunting at puns, no matter how clever they may be, is a habit for some people. In fact, it’s a symbiotic relationship: making a pun gives someone else permission to make a disapproving noise like almost nothing else in a conversation. And making loud disapproving noises is itself pleasurable and indulgent! We are beautiful in our differences, the universe vast enough to contain both pun-makers and pun-haters.
I have some cool data for you from our registration surveys. Some comparison charts of the conversation habits participants said they disliked as well as the conversation habits participants admitted to practicing most often themselves. Check it out:
And then:
(I’m not claiming any kind of statistically generalizable validity here. Our sample size is not only small [n=9], it’s limited to a self-selected group of people that attend something called a “Ludic Liberation Lab.” In addition, self-reports are known to be positively biased. But, it’s still fun to make little charts! ^_^)
Here are the highlights of the most drastic differences:
What does the data say? To me, it seems to suggest that many of us don’t like it when conversation feels confining and our contributions dismissed, yet, it appears that we are the ones who confine and dismiss ourselves the most by second-guessing and self-silencing. We may attempt to compensate for frustrating patterns by changing topics and over-enthusiastically affirming what others say. But do these strategies work?
The little graphs can’t tell us that much. So we must play games to investigate!
Last night at the Ludic Liberation Lab, we played META, a game designed by performance artist and philosopher Aaron Finbloom. META aims to hack our conversational rules. Instead of speaking like we “normally” do, we pull cards that give us certain constraining conditions. For example, we must ask a rhetorical question, request a clarification, or make a declarative statement. Or, we must use an assigned sentence stem, such as “Now…”, “One thing I’m curious about…”, “Although…”. Another deck of cards reveals a random topic for the group to focus the chat around, like “Friendship” or “Healing” or “Government.” Finally, the game embeds some audible interruptions, such as a prompt to collectively meditate for 15 seconds, hum, or speak all at the same time. Other than all of that, we are free to do as we want!
At first glance, it may seem that META is extremely constraining, since it limits the options for each individual conversational move. We must play the hand we’re dealt. But what it actually does is expand the menu of shared conversational rules beyond our normal, habitual palette, liberating us from our own pre-existing constraints (pre-existing conditions?)
Most days we essentially walk around with just a few internalized/unconscious conversation cards, seldom very well defined (e.g., “say something smart,” “be funny,” “don’t offend”). What if we changed our deck? Even temporarily? Not by reversing our typical conversational rules, but by adding in a variety of challenges and creatively working around the limitations?
I’ve been reading Wittgenstein this month (ahem, name-drop), so I’m hyper-aware of “language-games.” Ludwig Wittgenstein revolutionized the world of philosophy by claiming that language was not some pure objective description of reality that could be used to make universal sense of the world (as philosophers try to do). Instead he said that language always exists in context, as part of human activity, in multitudes of “forms of life.” Language use, then, is always a situated “language-game” with situated rules. In other words, even when we’re not playing META, we are always playing a game of limited languaging.
Last night, something interesting happened. After a 30-minute round of META, we reflected on our experiences… for forty-five minutes! Despite being aware of the artificiality of the language game we just played and unsure whether what we’d done was “genuine conversation,” we didn’t want to stop talking to each other… about how we talk! AHH, SO META!
Here are some findings from our collective sensemaking:
We are each following (if sometimes breaking) our own personal conversational rules, including rules for determining what makes a conversations pleasant, successful, honest, or worthwhile. These values are different for different people! For some the valued bits are revelations of intimate history, for others it’s discussing “Things with a capital T.” For others still it may be equity of participation among the group, or alternatively, the level of one’s own contribution to the whole. Do you know what your valued bits are?
Some kinds of conversations, like engaging in chit-chat or listening to a relative’s story for the 20th time don’t actually need to have new informational rewards; they can simply serve to nourish the relational connection. Remember: humans invented gossip after our social groups got too big and complex to regularly groom each other’s knots and ticks. Think of chit-chat as verbal grooming!
Being playfully “forced” to obey extreme constraints (like trying to speak without using words that have the letter “a”) can produce a collectively absurd tension (socio-cognitive collapse?) that actually becomes bonding and ultimately freeing when the rule is released. Like holding your breath longer than you want to and then taking in that big luxurious inhale. The principle of Contraction/Expansion.
Even after we were released from META’s many rules, we kept using its prompts in our discussion, almost as inside jokes that only this group would recognize as funny and appreciate. At the same time, our other ordinary sentence stems (“I was reading an article,” “Building off what X was saying…” “Just real quick…”) became glaringly obvious in their own artificiality.
We can play META inside our “ordinary” or “organic” conversations by sneaking in some of the more passable card prompts in secret: we can ask our interlocutors to provide examples or clarifications, inquire about their feelings, or challenge ourselves to pose existential questions and make confident, declarative statements. No one has to know we are playing a game, but it might make us feel more willing to try on new conversational rules.
Interruptions to conversational performance, and even the subjective act of logic-based sense-making—such as a 15-second meditation, or a 10-second hum, or making an emotive grunt for everyone to imitate—were MOST LIBERATING, and functioned like collective reset buttons during the game. May we invite more strategic silences and subversions into our cluttered social speech!
A GAME GIFT IN EVERY REPORT 🎁
Want to bring more playfulness into conversations? Try these:
With your Zoom meeting, play Aaron’s warm-up game called The Word Game. It starts with a single rule: Speak one word at a time and wait until another person speaks to speak again. After a minute or two, the leader lifts up a number of fingers to designate the number of words to speak in a turn. 2, 3, etc. We got to 3, but more would be fascinating!
With a friend or partner on a long walk, play a game in which one person only asks questions, and the other only replies. If you want, choose a big Thing with a capital T to talk about, but you don’t have to. Everything is in everything, so it doesn’t matter. At the halfway point of your walk, switch roles!
🗓 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 JANUARY 14th!
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! 🎲🔬
wishing you all the most liberating constraints this holiday season and in the new year,
n a t a l i a
Game Maker/Destroyer
Another great read! The part about indulging a “relative’s story for the 20th time” made me smile. Whenever someone I love asks me if they “ever told me the story about X?” I always say “no”, even if they’d done so a million times. It’s important for both the teller and the listener. Letting someone relive a memory, letting them share it, letting them weave a narrative from the past events of their life, hearing how the telling of the story or the events recounted change (or don’t), and letting that story become one of my own stories, part of my own life narrative. It’s such an important thing!