What agency looks like

Written By Meredith Lewis
Image courtesy of Amble Studio

It was another facilitator who first introduced Amble Studio to me: on her recommendation I signed up for their Game Design for Facilitators workshop.

It was excellent, providing interesting and implementable insights into how game design can be used in facilitation in a well-designed and expertly facilitated session.

Since then it has been my privilege to actually work twice with Amble as one of a team of facilitators leading The Adaptation Game (TAG), first for members of the community at Melbourne’s CERES, a community-centred environmental hub, and then for local government workers at Merri-bek City Council. TAG is an exercise in interdisciplinarity in and of itself, melding the disciplines of gaming, climate action, transformative facilitation, futures literacy, and collective imagination into one activity. And, I was interested to observe, the mix of council workers who gathered to play it were from a variety of disciplines including, but not limited to, urban forestry, community development, emergency services, aged care, building maintenance, climate resilience, and libraries, to name a few.

Given all of this, Amble Studio was a shoe-in for inclusion in my current project of research the role of artists and creatives in multi-disciplinary and multi-sectoral collaborative teams.

During my recent conversation with Logan Timmins, game designer and Director of Amble Studio, we discussed the interdisciplinary practice of Amble and, more generally, we touched on the tendency of people who work in the arts to be in interdisciplinary practice, anyway. This is something that also came up in my interviews with Melissa Delaney from ANAT and producer Olive Moynihan and musician / filmmaker / storyteller (see what I mean?) Lamine Sonko. Part of the reason why is because we want to be – I think we’re hard-wired to want to explore and find ways of creatively expressing ourselves. And part of this is because we have to be in order to manage our practice – grant writing and composing, for example, are worlds apart in terms of the mindset and skills required but a professional artist has to be able to do both.

In Amble’s case, facilitation and games might seem to be quite disparate, as I initially (naively) presumed but, as I realized when I shared a room with other facilitators at Merri-bek Council during our TAG session, tabletop role-playing games have their own convention of facilitation. The two facilitators who had backgrounds in this were able to feed in notes about how facilitation fed into game design, and vice versa, during our debrief.

“Our main two disciplines are game design, facilitation. I think we've found that people don't always put those two things together, but when you explain it even in just a couple of sentences, people go: ‘Oh yeah, I guess I see that’. So, they meld together well enough that when we're talking to other people about it, they get it fairly quickly. And internally we have a lot of overlap. So that's been quite easy and really beneficial to work with, to ebb and flow and lean on different people for different things. But game design and facilitation are not obviously linked in the wider public thought. You know, when you pull out the board game for the first time, someone who's played it before is explaining the rules. That's basically facilitating. Right?” – Logan Timmins

Right.

There was a lot to unpack in our conversation and I look forward to feeding it into the Near and Far text about using creativity as a transversal mindset and skillset that I’m working on right now.

But I’ll end this blog with one insight from Logan that I think is a gem. I asked him about agency, explaining that I think that creativity and agency – the ability to make informed choices and the empowerment to implement them – are indelibly linked.

After pointing out that storytelling games – a specialty of Amble Studio – design around the agency of participants – Logan talked about working as part of an interdisciplinary team and said that:

“I think everyone has, depending on the context, a different understanding of what agency looks like. And so, I guess from a story game perspective, agency looks like having lots of choices, whereas from a different perspective, having any choice could be seen as like, ‘Whoa! That's massive agency’. So, it's interesting to hear what agency looks like and learn that about whatever business, what agency looks like in that culture.” – Logan Timmins

What looks like a good choice to me might look like a bad choice to someone else; what empowers me might constrain someone else. I really like this idea of having an understanding of what agency might look like to different people. It sounds like an essential step to understanding a collaborator.

Curious? The come along to the free online event I am facilitating to talk about what I heard during my research. It’s on at 6pm, 28 February 2024 AEDT. I’d love to see you there.

And, of course, I would also love it if you bought the book! You can do so HERE!

Meredith Lewis
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