Whether you’re feeling stuck, need a creative boost, or want to examine a challenge in a new way, the Emergent Game helps you attune to your own bigger wisdom, creating a new space for breathing, sensing, feeling, thinking, and acting into. You may come up with some answers along the way; more importantly, though, you’ll have the experience of getting curious, delving, and connecting.
The first step of the Emergent Game is to open the space of the game. We do this with the Opening Oracle, a single cast of a SPACE CARD to answer the question: “What should I know about this game today?”
The Emergent Game works whether you play on a big idea, like “friendship” or “fulfillment,” or a more specific concept, like “our friendship” or “fulfillment at work,” or something even more specific and more seemingly mundane, like “What to get Jamie for Christmas” or “meal planning this week.”
If you don’t have a specific Game Theme in mind, the Opening Oracle will spur your attention and imagination to let a topic emerge.
Whenever you draw a space card, remember that there is no single meaning and certainly no “right” meaning. Each player will have a different feeling about and reaction to the card; let these differences enrich the conversation and the experience. The card is a way to let our deep, wordless wisdom and creativity percolate up to consciousness and combine with everything else present in the moment: our surroundings; the other players or people in our lives right now; whatever’s happening in the week and in the world. Whichever card you draw, its meaning may deepen or completely change even over the course of this one emergent game!
If you wish, you can click the eyeball icon beneath the card and look up the formal interpretation and related questions for the card. But again, remember that your meaning is the one that matters.
Round 2 of the Basic Game is the Roundabout.
You’ve opened the game, and specified your Game Theme, with the Opening Oracle. Now you’re going to examine that theme through the lens of the directions.
Draw four (4) DIRECTION CARDS and place them in such a way as to sketch out four “compass points” of a circle.
Now draw a SPACE CARD. The first step, as always, is simply to give yourself time to react to the card. How does it feel? What does it make you think of? What aspect of your Game Theme does this card speak to?
Once you have a sense of the card, you’re going to consider it in the light of the four different directions you’ve drawn. Let’s say “windward” is one of your directions. Windward is a potentially difficult direction — into the wind, against the current. So drawing “windward” invites you to consider your topic in terms of what might be challenging, slow-going, requiring preparation and gear and the belief in where you’re going in order to keep moving. Is there an easier way to move? Or does the destination make the difficulty worth it? etc.
Once you’ve fully considered the space card and that first direction card, move on to the next direction and do the same thing.
Click the eyeball beneath the direction card to read more about moving in that particular way.
Round 3 of the Basic Game is Keep, Stop, Start.
Pick a topic, either the Game Theme itself or an associated question or idea.
Draw three SPACE CARDS. Examine them, react to them, and then put them in this order:
• What should I keep doing? • What should I stop doing? • What should I start doing?
To close your Emergent Game, cast a Closing Question.
“Could it be… that questions are more important than answers?… Could it be that questions are the remedy for solitude? After all, we have learned from history that people are united by questions. It is the answers that divide them.” — Elie Wiesel
So, as we move out of this Emergent Game and back into the regular texture of our lives, we ask the Oracle: “What is a good question to take with us?”
Draw a card and let a question arise.