Game of Life is something as uncommon as a dice-steered game for in-depth reflection on important questions in life. The game is an exceptionally flexible instrument which can be used for personal development, group development and teambuilding as well as being a support for decision-making and strategy-development.
The reason for this broad range of use is that Game of Life functions according to the principle ”as you ask so will you be answered”. Each game circles therefore around a central focus carefully chosen by the guide of the game along with the participants. The choice can be to investigate a personal problem or one which is shared by the whole group. And as long as the focus of the game has been well thought through and well motivated the game can centre on any problem at all which is judged to be in need of clarification and reflection.
In practice it is the sincerity and willingness of those taking part in the game to enter whole-heartedly into the game’s process which determines how profound the result will be.
The game is played either singly or in a group of no more than six persons. Games with larger groups can, however, be arranged but only after a modification of the way the game is played by adjustment to the size of the group.
Personal Development
As a human being each individual creates his life according to his choices. And each individual determines his choices in accordance with his ideas about the life desired.
Sometimes a person will be satisfied with the results of various choices. Life turns out as we would have it. But sometimes it feels perhaps that there is reason to be more worried about where life is heading. All of us certainly have now and then wondered whether small or large changes of course would be in place.
Perhaps you yourself are in such a phase in life where you are wondering what the next wise step might be. You are wondering maybe about yourself and your reactions and character patterns, you wonder perhaps about your close relationships or your relationships to friends, acquaintances and colleagues at work, or it could be you wonder about your job and career or even about the meaning of life.
If so, a single session of Game of Life would be most enlightening. It would give you an opportunity to investigate your questions in a psychological environment which almost always leads to liberating insights being catalysed.
Group development and teambuilding
We human beings, generally speaking, are not too good at cooperating in groups. It is rather the rule rather than the exception that much energy, power and intelligence is locked up in power-struggles, deadlocks over prestige and backbiting. But now and then groups can function in that exceptional way which justifies the thought that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. All those who work in such well-functioning groups know how stimulating and enriching it is.
The fact is that well-functioning groups are of very great importance not only for ensuring that tasks at work will be well performed but also for turning the place of work into a learning environment where an innovative climate will be combined with a sense of personal well-being.
Game of Life is a very effective instrument for dissolving blockages in the group-process so that members of the group get the feeling that thanks to the interplay within the group they function better than they would otherwise have done.
Support for decision-making and strategic development
All non-trivial decisions and all strategic development entails risk-taking: the decision-maker is accordingly confronted with uncertainty. This can neither be hidden or banished by either facts or arguments. The uncertainty is genuine.
This is known also to every honest, self-aware decision-maker. However sound an argument might be in favour of one thing or another, it is impossible to be wholly sure. It could be, for example, that one has ignored or misjudged the significance of something that in fact turns out to be the main point.
In reality the decision-maker must accept living at risk and in uncertainty. Decision-making and strategic development in point of fact does not deal with reaching the right decision or developing the right strategy in any kind of absolute sense but with deciding what risks it is suitable to take in a given situation.
This is not exclusively an intellectual task. Skilled decision-making and strategic development has in fact a decisive intuitive component. But true intuition always stands on the shoulders of the intellect.
What Game of Life can offer in this connection is to create through its genial construction a structured situation where intuition is allowed free play. If the relevant motives and arguments for the actual decision or strategic planning are openly ventilated, the special choreography of the game is able to release intuitive insights, and this brings it about that the group playing it can obtain the security needed to decide together how the decision or strategy is to take form.