| The Game and how to play it Note1 #156345 The Game-Changing Game is a collaborative strategy game played in real life. Its purpose is to enable the players to co-create the world they will want to live in, while scoring exceptionally high in their careers. |
About The Game
The purpose of The Game is to enable the players to co-create the kind of world they will want to live in—and to score uncommonly high in their careers. Hence the main function of The Game is to create a synergy between personal/career goals and the goal to 'make the world work for all.' The way this is accomplished is straight-forward: The Game enablers its players to 'play their career games' in a game-changing way, that is, by changing the way their professions operate. Since the professions largely determine how the world works, 'changing the world' is accomplished naturally.
There are two categories of players: A-players and Z-players. The A-players play by 'playing their career games' within The Game. The Z-players play by empowering the A-players and providing 'safe space' (by acting as advisors, inspirational figures or sponsors, or by providing other forms of help). A single person can be both an A-player and a Z-player.
The Game has three parts. In the first, the players enter into The Game gently, by choosing a life purpose or career goal. The player is then given a hint why The Game offers a possibility to score unordinarily high along the chosen purpose. All the life purpose or career goal choices lead to the red Game START node.
From there there are two ways to continue. Vision Quest offers a way to a key insight: Why innovating on the scale of professions is exactly now 'an idea whose time has come,' or in other words, why, and in what way, uncommonly high accomplishments along a number of dimensions have become possible. Action Quest offers concrete projects within which the pointed at possibilities can be realized. The idea is to do the Vision Quest to see and choose a direction, and then the Action Quest to find a concrete and practical way to pursue it.
Naturally, the game-changing nature of The Game applies also to The Game itself: Part of The Game is to co-create The Game.
What you are looking at is a permanent working prototype, hence a construction site, not a finished product. Its purpose is to help us develop ideas. The developed ideas can then be used to develop a variety of versions of The Game.
How to Play Click Welcome to The Game-Changing Game to continue. Choose a personal or career goal, then use mouseover to read—and do—the suggested reflection. Click the goal node to continue.
Always choose the next node by following the arrows in reverse direction.
Philosophical Underpinnings
We begin by replacing Descartes’ “cogito” with what we are calling design epistemology. This will give us a solid place to stand on. The epistemology determines in what way exactly we want to be smart.
A colloquial definition characterizes the design epistemology by the kind of attitude one manifests when stopping the car he’s driving to change the wheel that has a flat tire. This translates into two challenges:
- determine what corresponds to the flat tire in the given situation
- determine what corresponds to changing the wheel — and do it!
To say that The Game is a prototype solution to 'global problems' would be in principle correct, but still manifesting old thinking. The design epistemology enables us to say, much more accurately, that The Game is simply — a prototype answer to the challenge posed by design epistemology. - A prototype is a characteristic product of design; it is roughly analogous to experiment in conventional science; a prototype is implemented in reality to transform reality; its purpose is to see how the ideas meet reality, to learn from experience and create better versions.
- Blog post Return to Reason and article draft Design Epistemology will provide material for deepening this line of inquiry.
The Dialog Attitude Experience has shown that acquiring direction-changing insights depends on a certain attitude which we identify with the word dialog.
The dialog attitude is characterized by listening without judging and without rushing, that is, by 'just listening,' while at the same time observing one's own reactions (Bohm called this 'proprioception') — 'Am I getting angry?' 'Is my mind switching to another subject and refusing to listen?'
Physicist David Bohm developed a technique for communication he called Dialogue, and practiced it with diverse constellations of people for several decades. Bohm believed, and claimed, that Dialogue is necessary for solving contemporary issues. (In Vision Quest we develop an understanding why this is likely to be the case).
In "Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals," William James makes similar observations:
But let us now close in a little more closely on this matter of the education of the will. Your task is to build up a character in your pupils; and a character, as I have often said, consists in an organized set of habits of reaction. Now of what do such habits of reaction themselves consist? (...)
If, then, you are asked, "In what does a moral act consist when reduced to its siplest and most elementary form?" you can make only one reply. You can say that it consists in the effort of attention by which we hold fast to an idea which but for that effort of attention would be driven out of the mind by the other psychological tendencies that are there. To think, in short, is the secret of the will, just as it is the secret of memory.
In the Buddhist tradition the dialog attitude is called 'mindfulness.'
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