~Adventures in understanding
These game-based adventures offer insight-generating experience, conscious skill development, & hands-on understanding of self-organizing systems (including “oneself”). Discussion & reflection both expand what’s learned from the play, with added levels of perspective & influence over later outcomes.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS: Intro to Adventures
Aha! Breakthroughs: Sudden, mind-opening surprise or your lack of $ back.
~~~#0. Doug’s Dots (Douglas Harding’s dot-game & our Dot Dash variations) [in the Aha! room];
~~~#1. Pop’s Oral Puzzle (oral writing, texting, showing) [also in the Aha! room].
Up a level:
~~~#2. Ultimate Advantage Game [up ASAP]
[In progress?
~~~#3. Thinking Like a Mountain Game (experimental experience)]
#0: The Dot Game: a group challenge
Developed by Douglas Harding (On Living Without a Head; Losing Face & Finding Self; et al.), this is about as simple a group challenge as there is, yet with the potential to blow your Aha! mind wide open on progressive levels, perceptual & conceptual, person & group, interpreting & integrating what’s learned from solution to the challenge. As starting point, it’s called Adventure #0 to clarify the receptive self, that conscious hole sensory input falls into, &/or the lack of boundary between observer & observed. It has been for many (including Yours Crudely) one of the most profoundly transformative single educational exercise ever experienced, as well as one of the simplest. [Time required: about 1/2 hour, +/- 15 minutes. ]
#1: Oral Communication Puzzle challenge: writing, phoning, texting, showing….
A version of this adventure ought to be exercise #1 in every WRITING, COMMUNICATION, & MEDIA course. It may well be the single most effective exercise in any class repertoire, at almost any level, possibly junior high on. It should PRECEDE How-To writing assignments in high school & college classes, as it can give all students payoing attention a ‘live’ sense of what works & what doesn’t in communication, particularly when giving directions or describing a sequence of events. It can improve writing performance by an order of magnitude or more, while sharpening observation & attention skills. Even more basic, it can help make communicators in all forms & media more effectively attuned (sensitive) to “receiver awareness.” [Time: 30-50 minutes, for puzzle #1, with or without others as follow-up.]
#2. The Ultimate Advantage Game [up soon, or available on request]
I first adapted the famous “Prisoner’s Dilemma” format into the Ultimate Advantage game in the early 1970s, running dozens of tournaments over the years, ultimately with hundreds of players (sometimes 50 or more at a time), teen-agers at summer camp to experienced teachers at workshops. The directions & reproducible forms should allow you to run real & imaginary tournaments in the Ultimate Advantage format, with discussion to clarify how synergies can be encouraged in mixed cooperative-competitive contexts (groups & systems), i.e., many, if not most, situations. Players are in for some surprises, most notably in how they may become more effective agents for personal & group success. [Time: 15 minutes for match with small group to hour or more for full tournament with 50 or more.]
#3. Thinking Like a Mountain [incomplete]
With title and central idea from Aldo Leopold’s famous essay, Thinking Like a Mountain, this experimental exercise is about becoming more ecologically aware–not just about separate entities or particular events in time, but also about relationships across time & orders of magnitude. Our little biotic-flow design is still quite primitive, not really a game yet, though the experience can shift one’s paradigm from within even so, as players start to feel the life-energy exchange through forms in an ecological whole, as distinct from the sense of life as something confined within its individuals & their forms. In the field, “thinking like a mountain” involves observation, feeling, reflection, insight, & sense of relationship across entities, forms, orders of magnitude & time-scales. Players may adapt & develop the life-flow format as they see fit; please share any worthwhile designs & experiences c/o bodlibrary2020@gmail.com. [Time: 5-30 minutes?]
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P.S. This page & the Aha! page each previously had entry password challenges, based on the following “clue sequences.” Since the web software didn’t allow the hints to be included on PW entry pages themselves, the challenge was eliminated. Though no longer necessary to gain entry, you can test yourself on here are the two hint sequences & the prior passwords represented, in case you want to test them/ yourself.
Polly Wanna Password Cracker #1: previously for entry to this page:
hint a: Simply the simplest, 1st, uncapped PW that’s not a number.
hint b: Re-read hint a.
hint c: Re-read hint a again, until “a” sinks in.
hint d: Use a dictionary, preferably one in alphabetical order, & start with the first word. [I don’t know about your dictionary, but mine starts with “a.“]
hint e: The answer may appear if you press shift key & then bring the cursor over the line below.
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IF you’ve got it, Congrats. You’re in. Give yourself an A (but uncapitalize it). You’ve solved one of the simplest password challenges ever invented. It was not designed to keep anyone out, just warm the cockles of your noggin up & tickle your playful spirit. The next is almost as easy, though 4 times as long! Solve it & the real breakthroughs can start with Game Challenge #0, on the Aha! page (next up).
Polly Wanna Password Cracker #2–(4 x harder but just as easy!) Originally used to open the Aha! page, on the breakthrough path:
hint a: Of the 4 required characters, the two in odd places (1st & 3rd) are the same one-letter words.
b: The first of these two is capitalized.
c: It’s what you might exclaim when you realize you’re in!
d: Doubling the last of its two syllables will give you a laugh (haha).
e: The character in the last (4th) place is neither letter nor number, however!
f: May the lighthouse at Exclamation Point shed its light & shadow on thee!!!
g: Gee whiz, doesn’t Exclamation Point take your breath away?
hint h: Although there are 4 characters, this is the middle letter.
i: By now, by the Aye Sea, you must be saying Aha! (over & over).
[If you’re still having trouble &/or suffering from exploding head syndrome, you may not quite be ready for the Aha! zone.]
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Aha! breakthroughs were designed to encourage comprehensive understanding & dynamic insight for people in live groups. They’re collaborative in concept, origin & form, often adapting elements pioneered by others. While in some cases still best played in groups, they may also be played as thought experiments, e.g., imagining yourself as both guide & participant. (Indeed, the effective guide does just that, imagining from the participant’s perspective.)
The Aha! page starts with Adventure #0, along with its “Dot Dash Variation“ potentially used to assemble teams. Based on one of Douglas Harding’s mind-opening, perception-clarifying, relation-deepening point-of-view games, as personally shared in the early 1970s & passed on to countless others since–as one of the single most transformative game experiences many have, though also one of the simplest.)
Dots has something to say (mostly without words!) about the relation between the unique individual & the functional group. The preparation & playing out need take no more than 5 or 10 minutes, with the main impact actually in & from the follow-up, starting with asking the group, “What might we realize, learn or conclude from what just happened?” “What was the main point of it?” There are a half-dozen or so answers, some quite profound, but especially the simplest. His personal experience in the Himalayas led Douglas to degrees in Buddhist philosophy, which he found inadequate for transmission of experience, so developed a set of simple game-like exercises for that purpose. There’s at least one website still dedicated to his work, with follow-up activities for those who want to pursue the Harding approach to “enlightenment” further.
We follow this introduction to awareness, in the form of clarified perception, with the first communication exercise: a framework for dramatically demonstrating differences in the three communication modes, plus invaluable hands-on feel for some basic differences between what works & what doesn’t.
Then we take the lesson up a level with materials for (& discussion of) the “Ultimate Advantage Game”–our adaptation of the classic (but usually mis-framed) “Prisoner’s Dilemma” format. Our experiments over many decades can shed light on how synergy may (or may not) emerge (&/or be encouraged or discouraged) in self-organizing systems, providing a window on dynamic factors implicit in many interactions….
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~~~~~~~~……………….under the radar…………….
NOTE: Adventures are also part of courses offered at B-odd College (www.bodlibrary.xyz, same address as this site except for the hyphen or dash). Our completely unaccredited tuition-free non-institution of higher learning without walls, ceilings or floors, is open to all who apply, although specific courses may require passing (&/or by-passing) entry requirements. Currently, the course offered (especially for teachers) is ACT 101: Awareness, Communication, Thinking, an activity based, coordinated & progressive framework for skill-set development. [Inquire/ Apply at bodlibrary2020@gmail.com.]
Games & play are so intimately involved in learning, only a small hyphen distinguishes Bod Library’s site for games & game theory (i.e., here, www.bod-library.xyz) from B-odd College’s (www.bodlibrary.xyz), where there are courses using & expanding on the games featured here. ACT 101, for example, is an acronym for Awareness-Communication-Thinking, three progressively inter-related skill sets that develop together from a partnership of overview & exercise, practice & understanding. The course represents a step-by-step adventure in clearer observing & reporting, thinking & writing one’s way to expanded awareness, understanding & effectiveness.
Everything has effects, but effectiveness is measured in quality of results. Although engineers may measure quality in microns while financial analysts use some other variety of numbers, the most important qualities aren’t measurable except in non-quantitative depths & heights of experience.