Game - Part 1
As I write this, I am recovering from a weekend of workshops given by Elana Fishbein in DC and Baltimore, so while I had a bunch of other thoughts about Game when I originally put this into drafts, I think a lot of those thoughts are still marinating in Fishbein. The first workshop, on Saturday, was Slacker: Two Ways, which was a Powers of Ten moment.
Game clicked for the first time for me on Memorial Day, May 25th, 2025. I was in 401, Group Games, with my teacher, Danny Hughes. This was only three weeks after my 301 (scene work) showcase, when I pulled my 301 teacher aside and said I didn't know what I was doing and that my brain was too full to perform. If you haven't had moments of being absolutely lost, confused, or panicked by the things you're learning, then are you learning? So, it's Memorial Day, and we're still meeting, which is bananas, since there are only three people in class. Also, it's group games with a number of people that barely qualifies as a group. Instead, Danny just has us do two-person scenes. A lot of them.
In one of the first 401 classes, I was called out for trying to write scenes in my head while doing them. I initiated a scene as if it were a sketch: Bert Bachrach vs. Billy Joel, you know, the mythological archetypes of history. It was too big, too much, and I was expecting—in a way—my partner to know what was in my head instead of discovering something together. After that first class, I decided to stop trying to be funny, to prove I was bad at improv, and badly help set up a base reality, badly yes, and, badly find an unusual thing. A night of reps on a Memorial Day, which I lucked into, was all I needed, apparently.
I wish I could remember the scene, but I can't, and it also doesn't matter. But I do remember my grasp of the pattern, or—at least for me—the negative space around the pattern. Also, I realized I didn't need to throw away what I knew about the comedy patterns I'd picked up from watching sketches over a lifetime of watching comedy, but instead of writing, I listened, let go, and built something very rough and rickety with my partner. It was a Powers of 10 moment, where everything either zooms out or zooms in and my perspective changes.
This weekend I struggled to play game in a way I haven't before. We were learning to play in a Slacker format, a format entirely based on tag edits, and I tagged into a scene with what I felt was a strong game move but the move only heightened the game of the scene and the exercise was to establish a game of character. But tagging in, I had to draw the spotlight away from the game of the scene and pull it over to myself. I didn't realize just how powerful some of these tools could be. That I was only playing with a small part of what a tag could do.
