Future Tripping Machine
This game asks the question: Can embodied performance be a useful, resource-effective tool for liberatory game design? And, can social play be positioned as a viable way to democratically ideate solutions to personal and social problems that, while imperfect, are playable, rehearsable, and scalable?
The term “future tripping” is used to describe when one worries so much about the future, that one is incapable of being in the present. To "future trip" is to fall prey to paralyzing anxiety, which for many millennials and college students is tied to economic and social uncertainty. The Future Tripping Symposium at UCSB addresses our current climate of economic, political, and environmental uncertainty through a multidisciplinary structure that involves games, data, virtual worlds, living species and more. The game takes as its inspiration some of the ways people experience and cope with future tripping, summarized as the following:
This game looks to educator Paulo Freire’s radical theories of critical pedagogy and to the work of Augusto Boal, a theatre practitioner whose body of work called Theatre of the Oppressed included many tools for theatre production – though crucially, a theatre that is political and always liberatory. Two additional sources critical to this game are: The Thinking in Systems Playbook, by Linda Booth Sweeney and Dennis Meadows, and Games, Design and Play, by Colleen Macklin and John Sharp.“I try to stay focused on the moment, on what is right in front of me.”
“I try to break down big tasks into small ones.”
“I talk about my options with another person. I need an outside opinion from someone I trust.”
“I try to not make rash decisions.”
“I continue to eat well, sleep, exercise as best as possible. I maintain good self-care.”
HOW TO PLAY
We start by asking players to take four blank blue cards and to write on each one anxiety about the future that they have experienced or are experiencing. They then write on each of four blank pink cards one thought or approach that has helped them to cope with future tripping in the past. Players are instructed to pocket their pink cars and to switch their blue cards with other players.
Next, players are asked to choose one of the blue cards they are holding, and the game facilitator lets them know the following:
This was just an ice-breaker, a way to hopefully get the players to feel comfortable enough with their voice and their bodies in order to play. Next, while the facilitator offered some initial thoughts and guidelines about how to build on top of this initial, basic iteration, what follows is a collective discussion by the group until an idea is agreed upon that seems interesting enough to playtest. This new variant machine is put in motion as before, with one player expressing a blue card. Now, the other players consider their pink cards. If someone is holding a pink card which they feel describes something that would be helpful as a way to manage the anxiety being expressed inside the machine, they insert themself in the machine and offer their pink card. The player they are offering their pink card to takes it and tries out the coping suggestion by vocalizing it and taking on the new motion loop. The player that had just entered the machine with a helpful pink card now looks at their blue cards and chooses one to express. And, someone else will now enter the machine with a pink card for them. And so on the machine grows. This iteration, though initiated by anxiety just like the previous one, is a machine that is made up of anxieties and coping mechanisms. A conversation about problems and possible solutions. When all players are participating, it results in a big and loud machine entirely made up of coping ideas and helpful thoughts.You are going to use your body and your voice to express what is written on this one blue card. You will use your voice by actually saying it, reading it out loud – for example, "I worry that everyone seems to be getting smarter and I’m getting dumber." And, you will use your body to make one simple motion loop to accompany the words. We’re making a Theatre of the Oppressed inspired machine. A Future Tripping Machine. We will each be one part of this large, collective machine. A machine made up of independent parts that each perform or express one thing. One person will start it off, put the machine in motion with their own individual expression of anxiety. And the next person, and the next, and so on; think of it as a chain reaction, until all players are participating. The result is a performative expression of a lot of individual and collective anxiety.
Next, one by one as each player is touched lightly by the facilitator, they stop speaking. In the spirit of using games as a way to playfully research a topic, this activity encourages players to model some of the ways people experience and cope with future tripping. The embodied experience of being one part of a larger, more complex and chaotic whole offeres a way to think through the concept of breaking down big tasks or systems into smaller ones so that they may be understood and affected. At the same time as players did need to focus on the moment and what was right in front of them, they were also collectively sharing their anxieties and their ideas. And overall, what is emphasized is that imperfect solutions and models are stepping stones to the next less imperfect ones; social play is positioned as a viable way of democratically ideating solutions to problems that, while imperfect, are playable, rehearseable, and scalable.
Table of Contents (also available on this window's upper left corner):
1. Introduction
2. The Film Directing Game
3. Future Tripping Machine
4. Directing with Action Verbs!
5. ideaDECK
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