Amp08 – Less Talk, More Play

This particular session, run by Johnnie Moore, was surprisingly the most useful one for me. I went in not knowing what to really expect from the title, except that "more play" sounded fun. Although I knew there were bound to be games at first, I still had an awful sinking feeling for a moment that they would be those cheesy roleplay-based ones which I've rarely enjoyed participating in. Thankfully, they weren't.

Both games were quite silly and seemed a bit pointless even though they made us all relaxed by making us laugh. However, as Johnnie said, the making us laugh bit was important, because having fun playing games can create more sense of engagement than "important" discussions. (I certainly noticed this in the third session I went to, which really could have done with a bit of fun injected into the room to lighten it up a little. More on that one in the next post.)

The first game was called "noise ball" where people stand in a circle and throw an imaginary ball and make an accompanying (often very silly) sound. When you catch the ball, you have to remember to say their sound as well as make your own. Afterwards, we all noticed how much your attention gets divided between thinking of a good noise, following the "ball" and remembering the previous noise before your throw, which parallels the way your attention can get divided whilst juggling things when you're multi-tasking. This became even more apparent when a second "ball" was introduced into the game, and we realised that you had to actually stop thinking so much about what noise you were going to make, and pay more attention to what other people in the group were doing and where the "balls" were. As I twittered at the time (quoting Johnnie again), "It's less about delivering and more about being prepared to receive, " which goes back to the "two ears one mouth" principle.¹

This is the principle that was suggested by Toby Moores right at the beginning of the event¹, and the game was a brilliant active reminder to reinforce it, so despite my initial reluctance to join in I'm glad that I did. I wish more people had played it, actually, because there were quite a few who seemed to have forgotten that they were there to listen and not just talk (again, I must mention the last session I attended.)

The second game was also good fun and pretty interesting, psychologically. Two people take it in turns to draw the features of a face, and after that, they each add letters to name the person they've drawn. (You can see them all here.) What struck me about it was the way me and my partner kept avoiding certain features as though we were trying to force the other person into drawing them, which was something that several other people mentioned as well. In fact, this was so acute in our first drawing that we ended up with one of those carny half-man half-woman people, complete with beauty mole, lipstick and only half a moustache, all because my partner kept shying away from drawing the other half of the moustache. Well, having drawn one half of the moustache, I wanted a go at some other features like an eye, an ear, a necklace, an eyebrow; I didn't want to be stuck doing the same thing again! I found that really interesting, too. Perhaps that is quite reflective of how I work. It's true I do like starting things and then get bored or dispirited and go off to start something exciting and new.

So it was a useful session for me, personally. I don't know how useful it was overall, but I think it's always good to be reminded that sometimes it's good to do things which don't seem important so you can see what is important. And it's important to make the work fun.

¹ and one espoused by Abram Games, as I recently mentioned at the bottom of this post.