If you liked playing “telephone” as a child or enjoy dreaming up imaginative stories with your friends, Western’s Game Lab may be just for you.
And if those aspects don’t draw you in, the laughter might.
Game Lab, as its name implies, is where members of the Western and London community gather to invent, workshop and play games – together.
Sheila Heti (Christopher Kindratsky/Western Communications photo)
It’s a concept developed by Sheila Heti, Western’s 2023-24 Alice Munro Chair in Creativity, who hosts the weekly sessions every Thursday from 1:00 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. in Room 3100 at University College.
Heti came to the project with two goals in mind: “To have fun and to create something ‘made at Western’ to put out into the world.”
“I didn’t want to create something that was just about art, or just about English. I wanted something that a science or an arts student could come together to enjoy. I thought games would be fun, and about how it’s a game to make a game.”
The result is Likely Story, the working title for a game a group of regular Game Lab attendees have been creating and refining, with help from drop-in and other trial players, since the fall.
Early sessions of Game Lab involved trying different ideas and strategies. Each successive week brought interesting iterations and a surprise for Heti.
“Towards the end of last semester, we settled on something, and we’ve managed to come up with what I think is a good game,” she said. “I wasn’t really sure that would happen, so it’s been exciting.”
Playing the game
The basis of the game involves the art of storytelling, something Heti, an author of 11 books, knows a great deal about.
Her latest release, Alphabetical Diaries, even incorporates an element of play. Heti collected 500,000 words from a decade’s worth of her journals, put the sentences in a spreadsheet, and sorted them alphabetically. Cutting those sentences down to 60,000 words resulted in what The New York Times calls “a powerful, intimate and profound experience.”
In Likely Story, players tell a story together, drawing on cards for prompts. Directions on the cards send the story on fast twists or slow turns, challenging memories as each player’s tasked to carry the plot as the story makes its way around the circle. Like many games, the first person to get rid of all their cards is the winner.
“The game is very interactive, extremely funny and has elements of chance and luck. Now we’re just experimenting and refining it to make it the best game it can be,” Heti said, adding that the next phase of thinking and research will be figuring out how to design, package and release the game to a wider audience.
Equal players
In creating Game Lab, Heti was eager to offer an environment where everyone plays as contemporaries, whether they are faculty or students, or part of a group of “regulars” or “drop-ins.”
“It’s attracted graduate students, undergraduates and professors,” Heti said. “That’s what I wanted – all sorts of different people, participating in this as equals. No one has more authority than anyone else. It’s just everyone bringing their perspective.”
Guorui Du, a third-year medical sciences student, appreciates how Game Lab gives her an opportunity to “de-stress” and to meet new people.
“Other clubs I attend include medical sciences students and the same people I see every day, so it’s nice to interact with a variety of different people,” Du said. “It’s a really nice community and what I really find interesting is how different people’s minds work to integrate a story together.”
(L to R:) Visual arts student Ambar Kaushik, English and writing studies professor Aaron Schneider and medical sciences student Guorui Du play “A Likely Story”, a game created in Western’s Game Lab, hosted by Sheila Heti, the 2023-24 Alice Munro Chair in Creativity. (Christopher Kindratsky/Western Communications photo)
Ambar Kaushik, a visual arts student, has attended Game Lab since it started.
“It’s been exciting to see the ideas evolve and go in different directions,” Kaushik said. “I also find it comforting to be around people who share the same drive to be creative.”
Heti said the group will continue to hone the game, a process that’s even drawn input from Harvard.
“I was there in the fall giving a talk and after the faculty took me out to dinner, I made us all play the game. They gave me a lot of thoughts about how to improve it and it was really fun,” Heti said.
And fun’s the object of the game in this project designed by Heti, who wraps up her term at Western with the Annual Alice Munro Lecture on April 3, 2024.
“I just wanted something that would bring people together,” Heti said. “It was inventing something from nothing. People have to have a certain chemistry to make something together and I think we found that.”
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Game Lab runs each Thursday until April 3, 2024.
Register for the Alice Munro Lecture
