Exploring the Wisdom of Games

From time to time I notice that I am once again trying to describe the thing I teach - the one thing, the deepest thing, the most useful and life-enriching thing, the thing, of all the things I teach, that I'd most like to be teaching you. So I go back through my years of articles and posts, workshops and classes and events, and see if I can find one, really clear, comprehensive description of what that thing is, and what happens when I get to teach it.

In March of 2008, I wrote a post called: Exploring the Wisdom of Games. I think it might be the closest yet:

Once I learned to see the connections between theater and children's games, I began to understand the wisdom contained in their playful dramas. Once I started sharing this wisdom with adults, it became the thing I liked to do best - more, even, than designing games or reviewing games or writing about games and fun and stuff. I first discovered this when I was leading a workshop for teachers at the Durham Child Development Center in Philadelphia, and rediscovered the joy of this teaching at the Games Preserve and at the Esalen Institute.

What I do, it seems, is play kids games with grown-ups. Depending on how much time we have, we also play theater games, paper and pencil games and board games and party games and games I just make up. After each game, or maybe after every other, I talk a little about the theater of the game - the play and interplay of roles. And then everyone talks about the "drama" of the game, as if the game were really some kind of theater piece - especially about the drama they experienced, personally. Not so much about their own, personal drama, but about about the drama of the game itself, about roles and relationships, about the way of things in gameland.

As we play and talk, play and talk, some kind of healing, playful, loving wisdom starts manifesting itself. Because we are grown-ups playing these games. Because of the growing honesty and openness and depth of sharing we are capable of. Apparently, just the act of playing each game reveals to us a depth, a drama more profound, more personal, a truth more mutual, more freeing.

"I have learned to see children's games as scripts," I write, "for a kind of children's cultural theater. I see them as collective dreams in which certain themes are being toyed with - investigated and manipulated for the sake of sheer catharsis or some future reintegration into a world view. They are reconstructions of relationships - simulations - (myths) - which are guided by individual players, instituted by the groups in which they are played or abstracted by the traditions of generations of children."

For grown-ups, it's even more powerful - playing children's games again, rediscovering, reinterpreting, reapplying their meaning. It leads to an even more expansive kind of theater. Participating in a play community as adults, endowed with empathy and compassion and years of hard-won knowledge, with obligations and responsibilities and actually deeper freedom - we redefine ourselves, and the world.

And what seems to happen when we engage in all these playful conversations is this: we rediscover our ability to play, and to give each other the gift of play. We rediscover our unlimited selves. We reaffirm fun. We remember the playful path and find ourselves and each other once again on it.

The longer we get to do this, the deeper we get to play. An hour. A day. A week-end. A week. This is my gift. This is what I've been doing for more than 40 years. This is what I do. This is what I am still here to do with you.

Is that enough? Clear enough? Do you need to know more? Did I make it clear why you'd want to play like this, this deeply? Why you'd want to play like this with your friends, your community, your organizations? 




from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith