The Budapest game was drawing on the tradition of “majális” (May Day), that is still present in contemporary Hungarian culture. It is a yearly festival where some streets and public spaces turn into into a parade with various booths, activities, catering and concerts, granting opportunity for a day of family outing. This recognised and still strong cultural tradition provided the frame to the game. It included mini stations that contained collaborative building activities or were mini games in themselves. Participants received a passport upon entering the game, in which they were collecting stamps upon visiting the different stations and engaging in the activities. People who collected all the stamps entered a raffle at the end to win prizes.
During the Budapest game, people built a compost hive and three pallet benches. They were stencilling watering cans and textile shopping bags which they kept as a memento, whilst discussing issues around water and plastic waste and packaging. There was a game taking people on the journey of water, calculating their individual water footprint (e.g. brushing teeth, flushing toilet) and calculating how much rainwater they could collect in their backyards and gardens, then calculating how much water could they save. We also had a waste quiz with interesting facts and different waste materials that people had to pair up. Furthermore, the liveable city stamping game, where people could create their ideal urban landscapes whilst thinking and talking about their ideas and perceptions. As an unintended and beautiful outcome, people took the spray paint cans and designed their own wall art which they created in one of the walls of their new community space.
Thanks to the kind generosity of the municipality of Pesterzsébet, the game took place in an underutilised municipality plot, and the municipality gave permission for the local community to use the space as a community garden in exchange for the community looking after it, as an open-ended experiment. As the municipality endorsed the project, they made it possible in this case for the “temporary urban interventions” to remain at the location for a longer period of time, beyond the day we played the game.
The Garden of the Malawans - Beirut Game was developed partly based on Augusto Boal’s concept of the theatre of the oppressed. Boal’s concept uses theatre and performance techniques facilitated by professionals with an open and co-creative approach to acting out scenes to allow people to interact with the play, create dialogue, propose acting out systemic issues, problems people are concerned with. In this way, provide space for critical thinking and discussions and allow spectators to influence the actions played out or even become actors themselves. It is all happening in the safe space of theatre and facilitated and mediated by the so-called “coringa” who is impartial and also tasked with dissolving any arising tension.
We created a story and the imaginary world of the Malawans and invited game participants to explore it and play in our forum theatre.
This world consisted of the art food garden, the token generator (bank for currency), souk (market) and the factory area. The Malawans are hard-working and cheerful people, upcycling, composting and minimal environmental footprint are amongst their core values. They keep on building and nurturing their art food garden, but for some reason there is an area that can never be filled – the participants were invited to live amongst the Malawans for one afternoon, do what the Malawans do and help them out in exploring why their garden can never be completed, as if it was complete, it would feed everybody.
Players received tokens in the beginning of the game and they had to pay for certain features throughout the gameplay. They could get tokens by visiting the token generator and completing small fun games and exercises (e.g. juggle three objects for ten seconds). With the tokens, they could buy goods (which were “waste” items and herbs and edible plants) in the souk, from which they could create their own art food pieces in the factory. Once they finished their piece, they could decide if they wanted to keep it, place it in the garden, or sell it. There were changes in the rules as the gameplay unfolded, eventually arriving to a point where the system was blocked and could not move forward. This was the moment for a big collective discussion, facilitated and mediated by the coringa. Here everyone’s thoughts, proposals were listened to and people were invited to critically think about things and engage in stimulating and constructive dialogues. After the discussion, the coringa invited everybody for a collective dance. Then everyone was called to continue the work on the garden together, from this moment on, the players’ proposals and ideas were to be tested in practise. The game arrived to a closure and everybody had dinner together. This act also symbolized that the collectively completed garden feeds everybody.