Dear Ludic Liberators,
THE LAB REPORTS are back! For all the fans that have missed them (I know you out there), I’m sorry, thank you for believing in me, and I promise the backlog of playful wisdom will be shared in due time. You can help me prioritize which Lab to analyze next by voting (anonymously!) on which topic you’re most excited to learn about:
Thank you for doing your ludic duty! Now, I’m very excited to share findings from October’s Manipulation Lab because the experience was so “clunky,” “weird,” “not fun” and “uncomfortable” to the lab participants and I am SO EXTREMELY delighted by this finding that I can’t wait to explore it with you!
At the Lab, six trustworthy chaotic agents (thank you Curveball Carlos, Devious Dave, Dancing Diana, Affect-fluid Aurora, Smushing Sean, and Femme Fatale!) accepted the challenge to play a secret game known only to them while also trying to accomplish a fake collaborative task such as plan a party or design an intentional community. The secret games the unsuspecting manipulators were invited to play involved fishing for compliments, scapegoating others, collecting vulnerable information, and detecting other potential manipulators among the group (shout out to ChatGPT for help generating clever names and instructions, while repeatedly warning me to be very careful with this topic! Yeah yeah I get it!). To my surprise (but also delight!), the Lab attendees appeared to hate the experience and resist it in many ways. They played their secret games badly, tried to find ways to minimize their manipulations, and instead kept investing in the vague and pointless collaborative task (there were literally no *points* to win by playing it earnestly!).
Then, given the chance to play another round with a new secret game, some players took on several new (counter-manipulative and therefore potentially liberating?) postures:
Exaggeratedly embracing their secret game and making their manipulative tactics comically obvious, like using extreme flattery to fish for compliments (“Wow, everyone in this group is so amazing! Does anyone here think that *I* contribute something?”)
Giving up their secret game almost entirely in order to try to make the (again, pointless) collaborative game more collectively structured (“Ok, let’s REALLY talk about what this intentional community is going to look like, guys!”)
Noticing, enjoying, and encouraging someone else’s secret game. (“I see that you’re fishing for compliments which is what I had to do in my last round, and you’re doing it so exuberantly that I’m going to just tell you how awesome you are so you can get secret points, even if it doesn’t help me at all with my own game!”)
During reflection time, players revealed that they found the lab experience unnerving and unpleasant. As a gamemaker and the primary manipulator of the evening, I felt a bit guilty and challenged, but after analyzing it more, I realized that in fact, feeling confused and frustrated and angry is exactly how being manipulated makes us feel. UNLESS, we can become aware of the manipulation and CHOOSE our own game to play with it.
Based on findings from this lab, I’d like to propose three strategies for engaging with other people’s manipulative games (provided — and this is key! — that you can tell what the manipulations are). The three strategies are(/R): Rewarding, Revising, and Refusing!
REWARDING. We can choose to willfully participate in and enjoy the experience being manipulated! This is possible if we: 1) have a pretty good model of what the manipulator is doing, 2) do not feel actively existentially threatened by their manipulation (we can afford to lose), and 3) perceive some personal reward in continuing to play. Perhaps a manipulative player just wants some minor ego stroking, but will reward you with friendship and access to their shiny world or exciting dream. It doesn’t cost you that much to tell them they are amazing, and you get something you value in return. This can also apply if the “manipulator” is not a person but a system or institution, such as your job. Once you reveal its minimum (hidden) requirements, you can perform them and get maximally rewarded. Although it may seem like this makes you actually play a fair game of perfect information, in fact, you must obey the secret rule of not explicitly naming the manipulator’s manipulative strategy or covert incentive. You have to both pretend as if it doesn’t exist, or address it only as a joke, a secret wink.
REVISING. Another strategy for playing with manipulation — if the manipulative maneuvers are adequately known to you — involves proposing a different game that includes the manipulator’s original goal but makes it more appealing to you and other players. Say your ego stroking friend is demanding admiration in a way that’s a little too egregious or one-sided. You can try to revise their game by proposing a shared game of taking turns appreciating each other. The friend gets their ego stroke, but so do you. This play is only possible if someone is amenable to collaboration, which is not guaranteed, and if their collaborativeness can be trusted! Some players want ALL the power (they want to be the dealer, not a player) — be wary of these existential cheaters!
REFUSING. Finally, you can always choose not to play the manipulative game at all. This strategy is appropriate when the reward is no longer clear or reliable, or the manipulator is not amenable to collaboration, or doesn’t actually comply with the conditions for a fairer revision. Sometimes that means choosing to no longer play with that person (or community or institution) at all. This strategy is important! The first rule of Ludic Liberation Lab is that we play to remember we are always playing, we are infinite players of finite and infinite games. While someone’s manipulation may be a finite game rigged for them to win, as a player in the meta, infinite game, you have the ability to choose to exit the game voluntarily at any time. This strategy may also be appropriate when you can’t get a grip on the manipulation you’re experiencing — when the rules seem to keep changing and twisting and trapping you. Consider a “no third chances” rule to apply to existential cheaters who keep secretly changing rules in their favor.
But what if you don’t know if and how you are being manipulated? After all, it’s rare that we are presented with an explicit set of rules others are following in any situation. In fact, when we are handed clear instructions for social conduct, those are almost certainly decoys for some secret rulebook of win/lose conditions. So what do you do? If you’re not sure you are being manipulated and therefore can’t use the above three R’s, follow the fourth R:
RUTHLESSLY STALK AND REVEAL THE SECRET RULES.
There are always secret rules! You are always being manipulated — being played according to rules you are not fully aware of. You are being played by other people unconscious of their egos, by macro and micro social norms, by hormonal urges inside your own body, by your historical traumas, cultural conditioning, and limiting beliefs. One frustrated player at the lab voiced that she had a hard time playing her assigned secret game of intentional manipulation because she preferred to manipulate subconsciously! What an admission! But she’s right — we are all manipulating each other — and ourselves — all the time. And we are often unaware of the rules we are playing by!
The more your stalk your own secret rules, the more you can reward and revise your own gameplay — you can practice the R’s with yourself! And since I need to stop generating new ludic content and catch up on past research (here I’m REFUSING my own burdensome pattern), I’m going to dedicate November’s Lab to a method you can use for stalking your own secret rules that I call Existential Game Analysis. It’s a technique I’ve used with clients and taught in my “Games We Play with Ourselves” course that’s simple and powerful and fun! Join the Lab next week to learn how to analyze a shadowy existential game you play with yourself and explore ways to make it more liberating. Sign up below or wait for another announcement on Monday.
Manipulatively yours,
~ Natalia (aka Magical Merlina)
Existential Gamemaker/Destroyer
You really nailed this one! So glad to have these back! Looking forward to the backlog and the future of Ludic Liberation!
Edit: having returned to this one a few times, it feels like a really substantial addition to your body of work. Your finds are powerful and important, and as always, presented in a fun, funny, clear, and concise read! This may be my favorite report yet! A really promising sign of the year to come!!