the game of life

inventing a game for teambuilding and leadership

Familiafeliz is a decentralized community. Its purpose is to deliver joy and happiness and share values like honesty and trust and peace with others, equal, whether they are part of the core group of members or associates or just visitors for short or longer time in one of our home units or elsewhere in the world.

For this also our activities are not sticking on one plot on this planet! We are engaged in various countries rolling out social activities, creative workshops and innovative gatherings.

In February of 2019 we invited adults and youth for a workshop about how to create a game for trainers and teams running a summer camp.

The motivation for these theme is based on our experience in Bucharest with the NGO Apeal/CTS. They are offering summer school activities since 2010. And there are highly interested in having train the trainer sessions.

Enjoy – the game of life will be a tool for any train-the-trainer workshop to develop skills like organising groups, planning events, evaluating social activities and creative leadership in general.

the book of rules team thinking about a guide for playing the game

14 people from Bucharest and villages nearby came together for two sessions of each 5 hours to organize themselves and start to develop the game. After 14 intensly hours we where able to play with a unfinished prototype a first time the game, discovering all missing rules, tools and handy documentations we need to add later to accomplish the task.

grabbing a video about how to explain the game

In many circles we discovered step by step all these little pieces of information we needed to bring together to create the game really.

documentation from the beginning

In a high dynamic session of a workshop in which the members are working constantly and intensely on the subject a good documentation is mandatory. The high speed of short interactions in the teams needs also updates in having milestone exchanges with the other teams based on profund documentation.

the question of evaluation

On the way everybody discovered that creating a game is a huge target. Design icons to guide visual, redesign it again and again by following the milestones of the other teams, inventing rules and explore its frictions and developing a clear language to transport as much as possible information in few words, thinking about main questions like why somebody should play this game, what he will learn from it, how he could develop, what should be the values he should meet on the way…how to develop social competence and measure it…. a lot of very important questions.

At the end of the day the game was played once, unfinished and full of gaps in description, design, rules and construction. But everybody committed himself to the fact that he would like to play the game and some of the group decided to go on in developing the game in their own environments (NGOs and schools).

We will continue to work on it and we hope to publish it soon as a useful and free tool to develop leadership for youth and adults in companies and other places in which social interaction and management is highly requested.

To do this as an artist embedded in abeautiful alternative living community is a great pleasure, as well as working together with engaged people like Serban and Sorina from Apeal / CTS here in Bucharest (Juan Petry), Thank you for that!