Students gathered for rapid prototyping around this theme.
Various Players | Immersive Activities, Card Games, Embodied Games | 10 mins to One Month
Going wide with ideas early on is almost always a way to get better ideas. Students gathered for a day-long game jam in April to learn about research our teams had done around work-life balance games, and then they used that information to create their own concepts.
A sandwich-making card and dice game with a fake-out moment: the game goal is to help colleagues make sandwiches so you can all go home. But almost everyone automatically tries to make the MOST sandwiches, which is one of the fastest ways to be eliminated. Realizing that this isn't a goal of the game opens up space for discussion on assumptions of productivity.
A blended facilitator-led structured naptime activity followed by a monthlong choose-your-own-activity picker. During the nap phase, participants are encouraged to visualize their feral self after learning definitions of certain radical rest terms.
Tell a shared story with up to 10 other players. You have some thematic goals for the story but others do as well. Some themes are aligned to work-life balance ideas, others are not. In the debrief, discuss how the game felt when you tried to take control versus trust others had your back.