HipBone: dreams and other reasons you might want to play…
Educators can use our games in the classroom to convey facts and generate new creative insights in an exciting and playful atmosphere of cooperation and competition, therapists find them helpful in conflict resolution and dream interpretation, businesspeople can use them in problem solving… and AI researchers may find them a challenging and insight-provoking “pocket universe” in which to study the basic, fascinating human thought processes at the heart of creativity.
There are any number of possible applications of our games: this is where you'll find them discussed.
They were scheduled to play one game for an hour and we ended playing two games, switching teams, for three hours. A smashing success.
– Tom Hall, GLICA Model United Nations trainer
The cognitive processes that you are interested in developing are critical to a decent education.
– Elliot Eisner, American Educational Research Association
Games with a psychological depth, unequalled as far as I know.
– Walter Logeman, psychotherapist
HipBone Games have applications in both education and therapy – from K-12 to graduate school, and from dreamwork to online counseling to creativity training, problem solving, conflict resolution – and no doubt other things we haven't even thought of.
Our games have been used to train staff members and to engage and stimulate students in a model United Nations program drawing high schoolers from Mexico, Canada and the US; to explore dreams with a psychotherapist, on a privately-maintained Internet mailing list; as an aid in conflict resolution and family counseling; and to teach creativity and the principles of aesthetics to students in a Los Angeles art school, under the watchful eye of a master painter.
We hope to establish our own non-profit organization to develop curriculum-specific materials and workbooks for K-12 and college level play. Our aim would be to provide these useful tools at minimum cost to school systems and educators.
Therapeutic, conflict resolution and creativity training applications also require special care and development, although here it is likely that a variety of task-specific boards will be the major innovation. Here, too, we envision making the results freely or cheaply available to interested therapists and trainers.
Sample Games
Here are four games: please understand that this is a limited sample, and that we hope to develop a more representative array of games with the cooperation of educators and therapists as time permits – but this brief listing should give you a sense of how the HipBone Games work in education, dream analysis and scholarship.
Second Grade is my first attempt at a game written with the classroom in mind. Unlike most HipBone Games, this one starts with a short quiz, and it's only when the “correct” answers have been written up on the WaterBird board that the links and connections between them can be seen…
Cinderella: A Second Grade Game was written to see whether a HipBone Game could be used to explore a single story in the classroom setting. Played on the WaterBird board.
Yeats and Jung is a high-serious scholarly Game exploring the fascinating parallelisms between the thoughts of these two Modern Greats. It was written in collaboration with LeGrand Cinq-Mars, on the TenStones board because both Yeats and Jung had an interest in Kabbalah…
Bear Madonna Game is my first attempt to write a game that explores dream imagery, showing one of the ways in which I believe these games could be of service in therapy. This particular game is heavily Jungian and archetypal, for those who like such things. It's the only game so far played on Psyche's board.
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