Games That Teach the Compassion of Possibility
Seeing the environment, each other, and ourselves in new ways
Two on-the-ground activists shared they “can’t” slow down in the past week. One cries everyday in her car. Someone else I know can study and teach a new game overnight but is too overwhelmed to discuss current events.
There are many psychosocial, cultural, political, economic reasons for this dysregulation, but this essay won’t go there. Last week I wrote about what it means to witness someone fully. This week, I discuss practicing presence and the compassion of possibility through play.
By playing with intention, we notice ourselves imagining beyond the stories that otherwise run on repeat. When with other people, games invite conversations you would have never had otherwise. Play can be a site for tired activists and concerned bystanders and everyone else to convene.
There are deeper conversations to be had. Half of this post suggests if we can play together, we build capacity to have them.
For the sake of this month’s theme of witnessing, the other half is a list of games that encourage us to see ourselves, each other, and our environments differently, and to become aware of how we look.
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Play as a Human Right
Games can be helpful, but aren’t required. Play is where the magic happens.
Systems, mechanics, rules, roles. These might fall on a bureaucratic spectrum between banality and violence, such as today’s dystopic cannibalization of the government. A good game designer can make systems learning fun.
For people who feel they “forgot how” to slow down, games provide a structured practice site. You are still doing something. For people who struggle to engage, stuck in scrolling and refreshing loops, games generate new ideas and new neural pathways all from within your own window of tolerance.
But ultimately, play is the human right, not games, per Article 31 of the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child.
1. States Parties recognize the right of the child to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child and to participate freely in cultural life and the arts.
2. States Parties shall respect and promote the right of the child to participate fully in cultural and artistic life and shall encourage the provision of appropriate and equal opportunities for cultural, artistic, recreational and leisure activity.
Play is not tied to games. It is tied to creating again and leisure. It inherently resists the embodied imperative to be productive. What many call “actual play” is content generation and live-show revenue.
Today, many are robbed of a human right in favor of games on screens, games that tell you the shape of your dreams and character, games with complete narratives already. Now, play feels strange, because most associate it with games with win-states and clear, rules-based guardrails.
It’s not that “actual play” is some kind of inherent evil. (I am a No Rolls Barred fan.) My issue is with the language. Play is leisure, not brand deals.
Meanwhile, mindfulness is not a static practice, nor is it done in isolation. It’s an ongoing evolution of engagement. Other kinds of active meditation, like mindful eating and speech—Insight Dialogue and Non-Violent Communication—are fairly easy to grasp conceptually.
They are harder to practice. I aspire to speak mindfully. Do I succeed? That’s a relational, situational question.
Let’s cover some ways to make challenge a trust-building ritual.
Consent, Safety, Trust at the Table
Making explicit trust-building a regular ritual helps build confidence and capacity to experience whatever arises more fully.
There are many, many tools to protect the play space and foster imagination. Jay Dragon’s Trust Palette Grid offers moveable indicators, specifically because people can struggle to put words to their needs, and because needs can change. Other people have come up with trauma-informed measures that stop play to discuss what arose.
With these practices in place, play becomes possible….but still deceptively difficult for people who associate games with win/loss binaries or social media gain. Play invites us to imagine outside current narratives, into the future, re-writing the past or maybe our place. In doing so, we can foster what psychiatrist and Compassionate Inquiry founder Gabor Maté calls “the compassion of possibility” in The Myth of Normal.
Staying open to possibility doesn’t require instant results. It means knowing that there is more to all of us, in the most positive sense, than meets the eye. […]
If we didn’t mistake ourselves or one another for whatever personality features and behavioral traits appear on the surface, “good” or “bad,” if in each person we could sense the potential for wholeness that can never be lost, that would be, for us all, a victory worth savoring.
Play can be vulnerable. Being “caught” playing is a common comedy trope because of the rupture between the works we can imagine and the world we live in.
It can help to be strategic with which tables you play at, the culture of play you create, and your ability to stay present with the play as it happens. It’s an experience.
Here are some games that help us stay open to possibility and to each other.
Games to See Space and Place
🏡 Map Your Home - $1
WhatNames invites you to imagine: “If it no longer looks how you are used to seeing it, what might you learn about the place you live?”
This business card-sized game lists three suppositions about maps: that they are political, that they are tools, and that they are strange. They will always be an abstraction of what is.
This map-making game asks players not just to see their neighborhood differently, but it teaches how to position oneself in relation to land and impact, even if those words aren’t explicitly used. In terms of which humans had what impact, the author writes:
Note: this game was created by an American. I’m working to decolonize all of my work, and this game doesn’t make sense without that framework in mind. If you notice something amiss, please let me know. I have much to learn.
Like any good map or honest human, everything is an ongoing practice.
📍Route Scouts - $2
Pandion Games’ exercise in seeing space differently.
Route Scouts is a casual walking game to map a secret route between your starting point and a destination based on intersections and turns, rather than distance and real geography.
In this game, players create a map based on their own movements, perspectives, and how they move through space. Instead of looking at street signs, players document human-made and natural landmarks to reconsider how they engage the environment.
While this could be a multi-player game or a solo documentation, Pandion Games has explicitly invited sharing of routes, “like geocaching secret routes and destinations.”
What I particularly like is the “Route Scout Code.” Relevant here, it begins with trust. It also includes the line: “Nature is not an obstacle, but an ally. A Scout respects the land, the trees, and the paths, documenting what is meant to be found, not altering it.”
Games to See Each Other
⏳The Time We Have - $20
Elliot Davis’ two-player game about brothers saying goodbye.
This is a dyad game that asks the players to witness without looking. The players portray brothers in one of several provided worlds (or, of course, whatever they make up), wherein a disease (zombieism) has broken out.
Through a shut door, the players/brothers recount their lifelong relationship. They are bound by physical and familial proximity, but cannot see each other.
One of the brothers is infected. The other is not.
The prompts correspond to a standard deck of playing cards. Some prompts will tell one of the siblings the disease is progressing.
Anyone familiar with zombies knows how this will end. But that’s when Davis asks the surviving brother: will you open the door?
⚧️My Lover’s Body is a Temple (and together we make Miracles) - $8
Reverential trans-centric game about worshipping each other’s bodies.
My Lover’s Body is a Temple (and together we make Miracles) addresses bodily discomfort, shame, and trepidation via non-pathologizing rituals of care. This was a joint project between Logan Timmins and Nimaël about one player, the temple, being worshipped by another.
Temple comes with three safety rules: Care, Reverence, and Consent. Players are asked to read the descriptions of each before proceeding. For example,
Reverence: In this game we will revere each other. We will hold the other as sacred and wondrous and inherently worthy of respect and love.
Bodies might be physical or they might be played on the provided blueprints for temple areas like the “genital spread,” the “hand spread,” and the “facial spread.” The worshipper uses tarot cards to “kneel at the altar deep within,” interpreting and praising the various “rooms” of the temple’s body.
The grayscale layout is haunting and gorgeous, with the text caressing the outlines of ancient ruins. The game includes a gentle post-play debrief between the two players.
Games to See Ourselves
🚸 The Present
My own game 🤠🥳 on sending compassion to one’s younger self.
The Present is a solo journaling experience designed to help you reconnect with your younger self with kindness, compassion, and awe.
This game was heavily influenced by Marta “Minakie” Alfonso’s Hang In There, Little One. (As such, if you’ve already purchased and played this 2024 offering, I encourage you check out its inspiration.) Minakie provided a generous review of The Present:
The Present is a lovely solo game about supporting your younger self. The compassionate tone in which the text is written helps convey a sense of acceptance and security, which are pivotal when creating a game around such a theme. [...] The Present is a heart-warming game that absolutely nailed its execution.
Like Hang in There, this game features the Second Guess System. Unlike its spiritual predecessor, this game features non-dominant hand drawing, and physically embodying emotional memory, plus writing notes of compassion toward your younger self. You can pay the suggested amount ($5) or grab a free copy here.
📝Revisions
Maggie French’s wallet-sized game of self-care.
I had the privilege to bring this one to the folks at Los Angeles’ Downtown Women’s Center.
The game itself is capped at 36 words and the whole thing fits on the size of a business card. I still carry the one I wrote at the DWC with me in my phone case.
The game begins with a prompt to write a sentence about yourself. French guides you through the revision of that single sentence until it is something kind and caring.
I left the DWC with the sentence: “We, including me, are worthy of care.”
In this sense, what other games deserved to be gifted this year? Please shoutout your pick below (I’m always looking for new cool stuff).
✨Bonus! How to Gift a PDF
So like…do people really want all these PDFs? Do I “gift” a single sheet of paper?
I asked folks on BlueSky how they gift PDFs. (While many encourage sharing at the table anyway, I realized in retrospect that this could definitely seem like it’s ripping off designers by sharing their work illegally. I meant no harm.)
Responses primarily revolved around USB sticks. One person painted one to look like a TARDIS. Another suggested getting an empty book and sneaking the USB inside it.
My own idea was to create a little booklet (zine? scrapbook?) with QR codes and personalized, hand written notes with why you think the recipient would like each game.
In many cases, these games are also available as hard copies (by which I mean: they often look like chapbooks or academic journals). Hard copies are more expensive—and will add bulk to one’s material overhead—but are somewhat more “gift-friendly.” They also financially support designers more than grabbing a free PDF, so if you find one you like, I encourage looking for a hard copy.
Will a game stop my friend from crying in her car, or help the other finally discuss what’s happening in the world? Probably not.
But they teach the capacity to see that there’s more to all of us than meets the eye.
If we can create spaces to be more fully witnessed ourselves—to practice staying present with discomfort, to exercise our imaginations, to build dignity within and among ourselves—then maybe we build capacity for what comes next savor and celebrate all we have right now.
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I love these game ideas and congrats on yours, Logan! Thanks for sharing. I really like the idea of maps in relation to land, landmarks, and people, vs objective, "from above" views.