Improv is pure ludicy

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On Monday, I wrapped up my second term of improv classes. I came to improv not through comedic ambitions or an interest in performing for an audience. As a person who skews analytical and likes to plan, I am deeply interested in strengthening my muscles around play and flexibility.

Improv helps me train at accepting what is offered and reciprocating without judging what I give in return, skills that have felt increasingly relevant recently.

In our ludic era

In his 2013 essay “Manifesto for a Ludic Century,” game designer Eric Zimmerman argues that, after humans built systems of increasing complexity in the 20th century, the 21st century is asking us to engage with those systems as one would with a game.¹

"It is not enough to merely be a systems‐literate person; to understand systems in an analytic sense,” Zimmerman writes. “We also must learn to be playful in them. A playful system is a human system, a social system rife with contradictions and with possibility.”

This is what Donella H. Meadows, in Thinking in Systems: A Primer, calls “dancing with systems”: discovering how we can work with a system to bring forth something better than we could make on our own.

As systems like our information environment increase in complexity, Zimmerman writes, the way we communicate changes from traditional hierarchical, broadcast-style media to more interactive, game-like experiences, and the lines between game player and game designer start to blur.

Thankfully, improv can help us become better game players. Improv is about making one choice at a time and letting the scene unfold naturally, accepting and releasing energy and letting it flow through you. There’s a sweet spot of having just enough constraint that it focuses you (like “start each line with a consecutive letter of the alphabet”) while leaving the field open enough that your choices feel abundant.

After class, we remarked that we often laugh a lot but don’t remember what, exactly, we laughed about. Similarly, I could never repeat what was said in a scene to someone outside the class and make them laugh in the same way. That joy is relegated to the moment. It forces you to be present. It’s the joy of improv.

Permanence to evanescence

I’ve sometimes struggled interacting with people online because everything I write feels so permanent. If I say something stupid at a party, someone might remember, but they wouldn’t have proof. Not so online!

Improv has helped me to put less weight on each individual communiqué. A social media message is not a very tiny book that will be reprinted ad infinitum; it’s more like a nicety exchanged on a sidewalk between errands. And because of the sheer volume of information available, the nature of algorithms, and the disappearing nature of some media, each piece is less permanent.

L. M. Sacasas describes this phenomenon as driving a shift toward the oral societies of olde. In his 2020 essay “The Analog City and the Digital City,” he writes, “Although digital media appears to sustain memory, it is more like oral communication in its evanescence. The feed of our tweets and status updates recedes not as quickly and decisively as the spoken word, but with a similar effect.”

The way we interact on a daily basis is more like an improv scene (here one moment, gone the next) than a scripted play, reprinted and repeated.

This tension between permanence and evanescence poses its own interesting challenges. In a recent Atlantic article, “Archivists Aren’t Ready for the ‘Very Online’ Era,” Michael Waters writes about how archivists who are used to receiving physical artifacts when people die are grappling with the volume of data that’s now being donated. It’s a struggle both to protect privacy and to decide what’s important.

Our digital communications orbit us like electrons. Without us there to draw them into narrative orbit, the electrons scatter, and their meaning fades. Like improv, much of it only has meaning in the moment.

How to apply it

Improv performers often take suggestions from the audience. Reciprocity is fun and makes the audience more invested. It also guarantees and lays bare the impossibility of preparation.

What if you approached communicating with your audience more like a game that encourages their input? How can you encourage your audience to take a more active role in your communications?

Your product needn’t be a game itself. Instead, the game is the act of cocreation, building in community with your audience. It’s a shift away from “broadcast” messaging that emphasizes relationships and open lines of communication.

People increasingly trust content creators for health information and news. Where does this trust come from? Creators offer their audience an opportunity to give input and have their voice heard. They build trust by responding to their audience, and by interacting with content, the audience helps to shape the product.

Cocreation requires reciprocity. They say a line, and then you say a line, and you build from there. The more we learn to recognize and respond to each other’s needs, the more resilient we will become. Let’s build stuff together.

Worth your time:

• Word to the Wise is a free weekly newsletter for aspiring authors who want a sustainable, enjoyable writing practice. Dr. Bailey Lang offers research-backed and practical advice to help you take your book from draft to done, plus regular interviews with working writers.

• Read Eric Zimmerman’s “Manifesto for a Ludic Century” for lines like “dynamic interactive systems create beauty and meaning.” 💕

• Printing out and highlighting L. M. Sacasas’s “The Analog City and the Digital City” is a boss move.

• “Archivists Aren’t Ready for the ‘Very Online’ Era” made me think about how I’m constructing the narrative of my life and my family’s lives for my children.

1  The word “ludic” was invented by psychologists in the 1940s who were seeking a less-fun word for “play.”