A couple of us ‘players’ came together to form a small cohort known as Permission to Play. The idea was quite amusing, for it followed a very familiar chain of thought. How many times in a day, week or month do we give ourselves the permission to play? You may find out somewhere or hear about an event happening somewhere at some time and must align your schedule, show up at the venue, get comfortable devoting your time and energy and finally you would have given yourself the permission to have fun.

We played a couple of games between the Permission to Play team, to realize what we want to work towards in terms of workshops and critical factors. Nigel played a game about memories, Shivani took it forward and materialized it onto a map to gamify it, when it was my turn, we had the Experimental Bakery. The other two put together six random people from India who filled out a form stating their occupation, favorite skill and an interest of theirs. With this information, we kicked off the game with a couple simple instructions on how to interact with the game. Since the game was entirely held on one weekend over a WhatsApp group, the interaction had to be consistent, productive and to a certain extent curated, in order to accomplish more in less time, and remotely.

“Congratulations participants, welcome to the Experimental Bakery, you applied for a role to be a chef, and the six of you will run this bakery. Since this is our opening weekend, we are only serving three layered cakes. The bakery gets wacky orders from wacky people, it is your duty to arrange yourselves according to your areas of expertise to efficiently bake each layer of the cake. Good luck chefs, if we get enough 5 star reviews we will officially open and you chefs will build the menu together!”