Imagine you attend a party in the late seventeenth century. You are in good company; you have plenty of time and you want to enjoy it to the most. You are a wit, among a group of four or five other people, you don’t want to miss a chance to show how smart and subtle you are.
That’s exactly what literary games will do for you: provide you with the possibility to display your wit and skills in storytelling. So, let’s play literary games!
On a sunny spring afternoon, we gathered for a game. We had decided to play the Game of Metamorphoses. We sat around the table on which some objects were placed, and each player was asked to explain, in turn, how one of these objects had transformed from a human/animated figure into that object. From a strange baby-sitting experience to a failed attempt of colonization in a galaxy far, far away by way of a medieval scriptorium and the boudoir of Charles Dickens, we travelled in time, in space, in genre. Sheep took a trip to Paris, and divinities were created.
Every participant embodied his or her story, gave it shape and presence in front of our eyes. We saw the « puff of smoke » of the transformations filling the air of the meeting room around us and move from a storyteller to another, and from a story to the other. We saw them weaving carefully around familiar motives together into stories. We heard laughter and comments, we heard the storytellers wondering about where a name or a detail was coming from. It was the transformation of an experimental pilot into a salon.
We will continue posting about our pilots for the JEUX experiment on this site.