Game
Amidst ambiguity and design, we meet our fourth session: “game”. A play of ideas, a game of thought—what if game were not something to do, but something through which doing becomes possible? A reflection on systems, gestures, conditions, and meaning. Join us as we map thinking within, against, or perhaps beyond (the) game.
Plan
📍Casino for Social Medicine (Sonnenalle 100, 12045 Berlin)
📆 Wed. 19.11.2025
⏰ 18:30 - 20:30
gaming
Rules
Boundaries
Imagination
Otherwise it wouldn’t be there.
The rules are there, announce your game
Becoming common knowledge,
Everyone’s playing.
Spontaneity —
The boundaries themselves changing
Fun.
The longer the easier
Cheating? Corruption?
Is cheating allowed (is an interesting question)
Challenge, tension
Into a contradiction
Uniqueness more than random
(not just bumping and hitting, but flipping a pencil)
Looser, loser
Nostalgic mind
Bad intentions
Who is really playing? And why?
Memory (of)
Childhood
Perpetual encircling
Two dogs spinning around, and
Cats.
When does it all change?
Bump, and roll
a ball of yarn that unravels
A boundary that maybe moves
How many ways are there of moving the board?
Pick a point
And moveit
What remains are only lines.
Two dogs smelling each other’s asses.
This time,
The café, which is us,
More structured than ever before
Before, nothing was allowed.
This time,
Only certain gestures
Movements, steps forward on the count of four
A game flashed into the event,
Allowed.
Revelry: One cannot play without playing
Cruelty: One can be played without knowing.
It’s all about “Game”. There are referees; it can be playful; somehow it demands participation, even if you don’t show it’s likely you like it. Some take it passionately, some take it personally, others consider themselves as team players. Deep down, stopping for a moment, you might ask yourself if that’s not what life is about. Cheering and being cheered, Game triggers curiosity.
Game, it only happens when it’s happening, there are no non-participants: you are either in or out. Common knowledge is implied and unfolded by Game,, yet the longer it goes on, the easier and more often it gets corrupted. Agree, and with the right attitude, you can play. It comes with rules (even, especially, unspoken ones), opening the yield of playing and winning and questioning the exclusivity of those options. Game seems to slide and balance between childhood and adultness, can turn itself into an addiction and is not always is fun. Game, your imagination follows its own paths! Game activates memories, Game traces boundaries that allow more than they restrict. Game is the mirror in which I look at myself, a mirror that draws a fine line between what is allowed and what’s not, and I sometimes become a bad loser. Game offers roles and demands one from me. Game asks me if I would like to cheat… and I can’t think of a correct answer! Game joins as much as tensions, flirting with competition as well as with contradictions. It can be democratic because it invites us to engage and to participate, calling out the spontaneity that sometimes is too deeply hidden. Game challenges us to explore and teaches us about coordination and other skills we didn’t even know we had/needed. The joy and the competition of Game translates our passion and puts it in action.
Game demands us to be aware of the action of Game itself and carries on an interesting tension between a supposedly needed strategic dimension and the simple feeling of doing it just because. Is there a “good loser”? Are not all losers good losers? Are there bad winners? Why the need to adjectivize what comes only as derivations of Game, yet themselves don’t belong anymore to Game? Game has no winning or losing, they are its externalities. Maybe Game is a call for our perception, in the sense it all depends on the perspective: even in the middle of Game, it is only Game if being inside one, one perceives game as such. That is to say sometimes Game happens around us and without us. But if that is the case, could I even name it Game?