Several years ago, in a Level One improv class at I.O. West, I did a scene with Parvesh Cheena where he and I were given the situation of being trapped together in an elevator. I immediately began McGuyvering my way out of the situation. (”You got a paper clip? We’ll pick the lock on that panel and…blah blah blah.”) Big rookie mistake. Our teacher, Sarah Gee, said to me, “If you get out of the elevator the scene’s over. Show us who you are to one another while you’re trapped!”
This broke today over CNN. The 33 men trapped in a Chilean copper mine have begun to assume different roles that will help them survive the time, estimated to be months, it will take rescuers to drill through 2300 feet of solid rock to rescue them. This is brilliant. They’re designing a game to help them get out alive without going batshit crazy while they’re waiting to be rescued. This is going to give us all a good look at how a game works, and how it informs and inspires group strategies. One thing is already clear: There are some good improvisers trapped in that mine.
To review, here are the elements of a game: Environment, Roles, Rules, Objective(s).
Let’s begin with the Objective. Simple: ‘Get out of here alive without going crazy.’ Same as most survival strategies.
The Environment of the Trapped Chilean Miner Game could not be more starkly defined: A pool of darkness deep beneath the surface of the earth, and the rest of the world watching up above. The contrasts between the Down Below and the Up Above are extreme, an archetype embedded deep in every human’s subconscious. The Well, the Fallen Rubble, the Cave, the Mine–all tap deep into our unconscious, where our memories of the womb are stored. As my friend Richard Wynn Taylor says, “It will remind us of something we’ve never seen before.”
The Roles, as stated in the CNN story, are developing. One of the miners has become a spiritual leader. Another an entertainer who sings Elvis songs. Expect that all or most of the miners will eventually define roles for themselves, some as group characters (’peacekeepers,’ ’storytellers,’ ’spokespeople,’ ‘mediators’ etc. etc.) Some of the miners will play more than one role, depending on the scene they’re in. Eventually some of them may trade roles, taking turns speaking to the media, for example. What’s also interesting about the roles element of the game is that all 33 men trapped in the cave will, for the duration of their rescue, abandon the roles they were playing when they went Down Below: None of them will be playing the role of a miner. Note also that ‘trapped miner’ is not a role. It’s a circumstance. Your circumstance does not define your role; it’s your behavior in your circumstance that defines your role.
Expect that in the coming weeks, we’ll be hearing about the Rules of the TCMG. These Rules will be designed to create agreement and establish ground rules for the miners’ interactions. The rules will initially address the fundamentals such as sleeping, eating, sharing resources, communicating with Up Above etc., and then get more detailed. The rules of a game will not be designed to create sameness or repetition, but to liberate performance, by empowering players to play their roles well. The miners cannot afford to get weary of their roles. It will be interesting to see how many rules will be set or influenced Up Above.
Unlike a reality TV show like Jersey Shore, where editors manipulate the juxtaposition of shots to create scenes and the sequence of events to construct a narrative, the ‘live-ness’ of this scene will demand improvisation, and that means the miners will be the primary architects of their narrative.
The intense focus on this particular scene by the world media, is going to make the elements of the game highly visible. We will be able to track how well the trapped miners are doing by how focused and productive they are in playing their game.
What’s going to hold our interest about the Chilean Miner scene will not be the drama of whether or not they make it out alive. The objective, the ‘Will they or won’t they’ aspect of the narrative, will only carry it so far. What will hold our interest is how the miners behave in the meantime. How well we get to know them. Who they are to their families, and to one another. What kind of character traits emerge. This is true of any narrative. If you want to hold your audience’s interest, don’t focus on how you want it to end, but on how you want it to be.
When the miners’ survival becomes imminent, their game will transform from a survival strategy to a business strategy. To the objective of ‘Get out of here alive without going crazy,’ they will undoubtedly add, ‘Make Money.’ When the miners finally walk into the light, the game may change, but it will not end.
Buena suerte, Mineros!
The originators of these programs are as guilty of their crimes as Smith & Wesson are of the next murder committed with one of their handguns, which is to say they cannot be held accountable. “That’s just the way the game is played,” say the originators. Exactly. This does not mean, however, that the way the game is played is any good, or helpful to the 95% of U.S. households that, together, control as much wealth as the top 1% do. What the programmers call ‘innocence,’ and ‘what no one could have anticipated,’ and ‘God’s work,’ is actually ignorance by design. What comes across as confidence is actually just a con. On Wall Street, nobody really knows anything. The machines are in control. So don’t bother asking.
A friend of ours working inside a large U.S.-based organization marvels at how much time gets wasted on what he calls Empty Arguments. Empty Arguments, he observes, result in too many unfocused meetings and conversations involving too many people, and require too much follow-up and clarification.
5. How to spin a story. Scripting, editing, re-writing, getting bottlenecked on approvals, and then spinning a narrative for your audience is a really Empty Argument. As much as I abhor her politics and her prideful ignorance, Sarah Palin gets a lot of credit as an improviser. The reason she can stay relevant and a beat ahead of the news cycles is that, unlike John McCain and most other politicians, she’s not scripting or trying to spin anything, she is relating to her environment in real time, in her own authentic way. It drives the liberal news spinners crazy. (President Obama does the same to the righties.) Nosy neighbor? Build a fence! When Palin makes notes on the palm of her hand during a speech, the Ivy League-educated (I do not include Brown grads in this) grademaking machines in the liberal media try to spin it as “Doesn’t do her homework.” Palin, however, knows intuitively that 90% of the people who see this image will have it made this move themselves. We can relate. The lesson: Living your narrative is more effective than trying to live up to a narrative you’ve scripted, then convincing others to buy into it, too (see Woods, Eldrick “Tiger”).
Hildy Gottlieb, President of the Community-Driven Institute, recently made some potent observations in a blog post entitled 
This story broke in the L.A. Times a couple of days ago
The most basic concept in all of improvisation is ‘Yes and’. If we are in a scene together and you make a statement, it is my obligation as an improviser to ‘yes-and’ your statement. By ‘yes-anding’ you, I not only agree to your reality, I add to it with perspective of my own. In this way, we can ‘triangulate’ on the problem to be solved, and also bring dimension, and new levels of collaboration to the scene.
Our November GameChanger of the Month selection was a slam dunk. Barack Obama is going to be America’s first baller president, and he’s going to be its first Improviser-in-Chief.