Intentional Society: Possibility Engines Game review
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The Possibility Engines Game is a cooperative exploration for playfully uncovering possibilities for collaborations and strategies that could advance your real-world quests. I hosted a PEG last week with both IS and TB players present. (Lineage citation: Naryan and Eileen hosted the first "Emergent Strategy Game" in the ThinkBetter retreat network, inspired by a game of Wingspan. This second game was a minor-to-medium iteration on the format.)
Basic structure: Prior to the main gameplay session, each person makes a set of cards: Quest cards, Resource cards, and Action cards, all referencing real things in their lives. Then, gameplay consists of teaming up, learning about each other's cards, scouting across other teams, and then building an Engine with your team that connects (anyone's) cards in "a way that points to collaborative possibilities that could support one or more of your team's Quests".
If you want to look at the game board (as it appeared at the start, without personal information on it) to get a better sense of it, check out this Miro board template. What follows are my reflections as the primary designer and host of this second game, after a group brainstorming/design session generated the content and gameplay evolution ideas. I'm not limiting my word count today, watch out!
Lesson 1 — Where to set expectations with regards to goals/outcomes. The first game was hosted with a wide-open "we have no idea what will emerge" type of expectation. For this game I wrote a more concrete, "You "win" personally if you can exit the game session with one new person to talk to or possibility you're excited to pursue!" I think the sweet spot is somewhere in-between — keeping away from a goal specific enough to be fixated upon or Goodharted, while keeping some awareness on impact beyond the game board being our interest. It's just that, the impact might not be clear immediately after the game, and it might be an internal impact (from you seeing some possibility) vs making a direct external connection.
Lesson 2 — The trust waterline. We had people from two allied groups in attendance, and some varying experiences came out in the debrief about whether trust felt relevant to people as they played the game. Not, like, big holding-back impacts, but even a minor cognitive tax on that front steers me more strongly towards saying "this game is best played in groups with high pre-existing trust (and alignment, communication capacity, familiarity) amongst each other".
Lesson 3 — Duration and depth. I thought that by putting all of the card-building in separate pre-game sessions, that we'd be able to get a little more time into the last stage of engine-building (connecting up a bunch of cards into a system design of some kind). It didn't work out that way! It wasn't less time than previously, but it still felt rushed, and I'd add another hour next time (to 3.5 hours total) in order to really make all the prep work and learning pay off better and feel more rewarding with more richly developed team productions.
Lesson 4 — Card structure and definitions. While the first game defined only one type of card (everything was an Action), the concept of "resource tokens" popped up during gameplay. Also, the engines didn't (IMHO) have many connections! So this time I had folks define Quests (things you want), Actions (things you do), and Resources (things you have). This introduced a little more complexity to the card-building learning, and didn't produce a noticeable shift in the reusability of the building blocks in the engine-building. And yet, I continue to think that actually using the cards to build interesting engines is critical to making this thing really sizzle. Some delightful things got built this time - but most were not made of the cards! That leads me to:
Lesson 5 — Complexity. Managing and limiting the complexity of playing the game is important. As facilitator this time, I didn't manage to do that: I had planned to do "pick a quest to focus on before the scouting trip" and in the moment I flinched and pulled back from that, thinking that it would be difficult-to-impossible to do that picking. Thus the scouting trip shifted a bit to "give a mini-tour of all your team's stuff" that did have a "boil it down" summarizing effect, but still left most of the "everyone learns about everything" effect that A) produces a feeling of overwhelm for some players, and B) I think biases the engine-building to be too big and grand and try to solve too much. My group ended up with a full dozen quests on our board, and I think diving into just one might have produced a more interesting outcome. "Picking a quest to center" will need some time and some support in future gameplay, but I'd want to apply some learning from "who's case should we do Case Clinic on today?" situations where there is no "right answer" doing a quick aliveness/stuckness-energy-check works quite well.
Design hat on, re-imagination time: Now I'm wondering if some of the difficulties of card-creation could be eliminated, and more relevant cards generated, if the WHOLE GAME ran backwards and the prep phase was eliminated. What if you started by introducing Quests, having everyone generate one or two, sharing in their teams, and THEN spending some time creating Action cards? Share again with your team, THEN think about what Resources are relevant to those actions, then make some resource cards? Perhaps you'd be doing "engine building" the whole time, with one scouting trip occurring with your engine already partly built. Heck everyone could be building their own personal engine for their one top quest, while the "combining possibilities with actions from others" could be kept by people being aware of their team's quests and thus generating actions with relevance to any of them. Ooh maybe there could be "holes" that are anti-cards looking for some card to fill them.
Huh, trying something like that (letting the desires pull everything else into existence) has me more excited than trying to optimize the "generate a bunch of lego blocks and then see if they fit together" strategy that I've been assuming so far. I wonder if I could get some folks interested in (re)designing further in that direction.
Off in another direction, I'm also interested in how to adapt this game to longer-term, asynchronous interaction, where a community could treat it like a living inventory of its resources and a generative kanban-type board of possibilities and proposals and projects. But maybe that's not the same game.
Isn't designing fun. I'm a bit worried that this word dump doesn't contain enough context to be useful to anyone other than the game players... But, this has been a productive day for me so thanks!
Cheers,
James