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Playing and Winning the Game You're Built 4 FAQ's (Frequently Asked Questions)
It's an experience delivered in 3 Rounds:
Each round is a 2 day event of 8 hours per day (approx. 7 hours in play and 1 for lunch, unless of course you're playing with your food and then it's 8 hours of play).
Without giving away too much of the surprise, we explore critical elements of all games, the aspects that enhance and inhibit having a great time, and then evolve your ability to be masterful in the everyday experience of your game. Not too shabby! And it's primarily delivered experientially because if you're like me at all, you've already attended more than your fair share of someone in the front of the room telling you how you should live your life. They talk at you for hours. That bores the bejesus out of me and I expect it does for you as well. All the moves except the open and close are randomly generated for all three rounds. This provides a lot of wonderful unpredictability and excitement. Just like life, huh?
What's the Philosophy behind the Game? This is a little long so if you don't need this info then don't read it. It's not required to have a great time in the game. Useful, but not required. There are two ways to look at what's behind it all. Method #1 - The Mechanistic View When we examine our world, our reality, we can notice that everything is made up, invented. Og the caveman didn't have businesses, marriage, politics, armies, educational systems or societies. He was too busy just trying not to get eaten. Farms, towns, and everything that comes with them came later as the game of tribe/living with others developed and evolved. The thing is we've forgotten that it's all a made up game and so we engage with it, like it's fact, unchanging, permanent, and 'til death do us part.' (well, not mine if I have anything to say about it). Everything from caveman days has been created in the same way we created games as a kid. For kids, those games felt very real. In their world they had very real consequences. It's the same for us later on in life except we've forgotten that we're pretending. We think it IS real and can only be played the way it's currently being played. Here's an example of tracking the evolution of a game over time. If you examine something as simple as the bookselling game you know that's not true that the games we're born into are fixed, permanent and have to be played only one way. At first, we didn't have books. Stories and religious texts were related via ritual and storytellers. Then scribes wrote them down and sold them to those who could afford them or copied them for the religious organization of the day and region. The printing press changed the game from people working their butts off scrupulously copying everything down to a kind of 'books for everyman' principle. Books were sold out of a pouch you carried around with you, then from stalls or out of the backs of wagons. (sidebar here, it seems Jack Canfield copied this historic method when he mentioned he first sold his books out of the trunk of his car). Anyway, soon the stalls and wagons became stores. Book merchants opened those up as a precursor to the brick and mortar ones we know today. This way to play the game of selling books went on for hundreds of years and had the seemingness of permanence and 'the only way to play' until...Amazon was born... Jeff Bezos and crew decided to change the game. The chose to relocate much of the inventory from the typical warehouses or stores. They opted to leverage the emerging field of self-publishing combined with mom and pop bookstores and kept Amazon's inventory in those people's garages, offices and the small print-on-demand locations globally. They basically made everyone else their warehouse. So very few of these belonged to Amazon themselves. They became the portal for purchase which cut overhead heaps while taking a percentage of every sale. As happens with many innovations, Bezos and company caught a lot of criticism (read euphemism for bucketloads of opinionated crap and rigidly fixed to the previous modality viewpoints) about the viability of the idea and the difficulties of monetizing it. After all, it's been done that way for hundreds of years successfully and ... (Insert your favorite version of "If it ain't broke, don't break it.") But he and they did break the model and hmmm...some years later, ALL the booksellers are now trying to get some of the online sales of their own. Ooops! So much for "If it ain't broke..." The point is...the game changed. ALL games can change. Your game(s) can change for the better as well. If you know about what makes games work, if you know how to Uplevel them, and you know how to have a masterful experience in the playing, your life will never be the same. Method #2 - The Beyond What We Can See View. **Spoiler Alert** this could be "deep" or challenging for some of you, or not, depending on your previous orientation. It's probably not news to you that there have been many scientists seeking the understanding about the holographic nature of the universe, among them quantum physicists. At the same time the spiritual world asserts its perspective and sense of order on our daily experience. For both of these groups, however, there is an intersection. It can be found in the statement, "it's all made up." For the spiritual crew, the making up part is usually about a God, gods or some other cosmology of how the universe came to be. They would assert that 'God' made this 'game' all up. For the physicists it would appear that the entire universe is one big energy wave of intelligence in-formation, ever evolving and self creating. What we in the Game call GameSource™, is constantly evolving, shifting and changing the game we all experience as real, no matter how much of an illusion it ultimately is. And, if we're really, really, really, good at playing it, we can learn to flow with it all, instead of creating huge amounts of disappointment, frustration and general mayhem by trying to become 'Masters of the Universe' (please read with appropriate stentorian echo chamber tone). We see it like the holodeck on the StarShip enterprise, or the world in the movie, The Matrix. It looks real, tastes real, and yet when you get down to what's behind it all, it's simply energy, informed and informing itself, and playing the constant game of making it all up with its, yes I'll say it, divine intelligence. And I'd rather be conscious that it's a game and play it than be unconscious to the awareness that it's a game and have IT play ME. So whether you come down on the side of science or spirituality, it's still all made up. Feel free to vote with whichever group fits best for you. If I had to choose between playing in the world as a Game that has the fluidity of the ever-changing universe or living in the world full of rigid rules, concepts, limiting beliefs and quasi 'facts' as reality, then I will choose play every chance I get. It doesn't mean I don't play seriously and with great intensity at times, but it's still in the context of a game - playing. I leave you with this quote from a Zen Buddhist text. "The person who is a master in the art of living makes little distinction between their work and their play, their labor and their leisure, their mind and their body, their education and their recreation, their love and their religion. They hardly know which is which. They simply pursue their vision of excellence and grace in whatever they do, leaving others to decide whether they are working or playing. To them they are always doing both."
There's actually no reason why anyone should come. This experience is not a fit for everyone and we don't pretend it is. However, the main reason people do come is for... Fun. There's no better reason for me. However, for those who want some reasons that others have played, here they are:
So...
What do I need to do to prepare? Just showing up is big. It's also useful to be as clear as possible what focus you'd like to use the Game Experience to play with. It might be a large focus like the Game of Your Life, or it might be smaller, like the game of cleaning my garage (not my garage, yours, unless of course you have nothing else to do and have a compulsion to clean others' garages for them). Either way it's up to you. You can just decide in the moment when you get to the Game. That works too. Also, make sure you don't come naked. It's not that kind of game.
Who can participate and how can I use it after I leave? Hmm...well, people who are addicted to the notion that life MUST be 24/7 serious aren't really a good fit here. Besides, most of us already know how to do that masterfully. As for the age of players, age isn't really a deciding factor. If a person's attention span is okay with 2 days of a Game Experience, then they'll be okay. People use this in many ways after attending. Here are just some of the applications:
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