PODCAST
Ep.0. Introducing The Joyful Institute of Adequate Studies.
Ep.1. The Joyful Institute of Adequate Studies Podcast. Interview with Mathias Poulsen.
Ep.2. Malcolm Hamilton — Leaving the Malcolm Hamilton Show.
Ep.3. Kevin Donaldson — What If the Points Don't Mean What We Think They Mean?
Ep.4. Alan Grieve — You Have One
Ep.5. Karen Duval — Making the Door
Ep.6. Max Alexander — Slow Down and Shut Up
Ep.7. Anthony Schrag — The Questions Nobody Wants to Ask
Ep.8. Jennifer Williams — Holding Space
Introducing the Joyful Institute of Adequate Studies
Introducing The Joyful Institute of Adequate Studies.
Episode 1: Mathias Poulsen — The Worst Business Decision He Ever Made
Ep.1. The Joyful Institute of Adequate Studies Podcast.
Interview with Mathias Poulsen. Hosted by Anthea Moys.
My first CounterPlay was in 2017. It was a pivotal moment. I found other weirdos and play nerds just as fascinated by the subject as I was — the sheer diversity of all things play. Whilst I have a particular tribe of fellow players in South Africa, here I found another kind of play tribe. You can never have enough play tribes.
I was invited to give one of the keynotes — I don't think I even knew what that was. I arrived with a huge plan for a musical chairs game. And then I noticed that all the rows of chairs were locked together. The plan would not work.
With the help of a young fool called Robbie, we came up with something else. When my name was called, I pretended I was late for a concert and climbed over rows and rows of people to get to the front. Then I invited everyone in the conference hall to do the same: when the music played, to scramble, climb, push through — and when it stopped, to sit wherever they landed and draw a blind portrait of the person next to them. Eyes on the subject. Never on the page.
The portraits were terrible. Everyone laughed. Imperfect portraits for our imperfect selves. An acknowledgement of imperfection as a portal to shared joy. A joyfully adequate engagement — and a wink toward the South African philosophy of ubuntu: I am because we are. I exist through you.
We also flocked through the library together that year. And we did it again almost ten years later, earlier this year, in Kolding.
Mathias started CounterPlay in 2013 because he was bored of games as a delivery mechanism — game-based learning, serious games, play in service of something else. He wanted to go back to play itself, unjustified, unpackaged. So he decided to learn about it by creating an event where others could learn alongside him.
A friend offered him the whole library for free. He posted on Twitter. Within a week he had a full programme — sessions, speakers, workshops — none of which he had organised. It all arrived because people said yes.
His verdict on the whole arc: from a business perspective, the worst decision he ever made. From a personal perspective, probably the best. He holds both sides of that without collapsing one into the other. That is a kind of adequacy too.
He also said something I've been sitting with since: sometimes we overplan things. We describe them too much in advance. And what people actually respond to is the open-ended stuff. The gap where they can see themselves.
Finally, play is political.
Mathias is clear that play is not a ‘nice to have’ extra — a reward for productivity, a team-building add-on, a wellness intervention. It is a fundamentally different way of being together that challenges the neoliberal logic of competition, winning, and individual achievement at the expense of others. The drive to be the best, to suppress, to accumulate — the appetitive process of modern life. Play disrupts it. Not by arguing against it, but by offering something more compelling: the experience of turning toward one another again.
Playing unwinnable games together — games where winning is impossible by design — short-circuits the competitive reflex and invites something else: curiosity, trust, the shared pleasure of being in a thing together without needing it to resolve into a winner and a loser. This is not naive. It is, as Winnicott said, the place where we live — a potential space where nonsense helps us make sense of the world. Not escapism. Rehearsal, practice makes...
And it extends beyond the human. The playful imagination that asks what if? is the same imagination that can conceive of a more liveable world — for human and more-than-human life alike. JIAS holds that belief: that playing unwinnable games together, in our joyfully adequate selves, is practice for a different world, not a retreat from it.
CounterPlay began as a gap. JIAS began as a gap. Maybe that's the most honest thing I can say about both of them.
I also asked all the interviewees to share a game with us... Here is his:
Name: Bloody Potato
Objective: to avoid the dangerous ‘bloody potatoes’.
Rules: All players are regular, friendly potatoes, except a few bloody potatoes assigned by the person responsible for the game.
Demo: Everyone close their eyes. The ‘game master’ taps a few players, who are now bloody potatoes. Everyone walks around with their eyes closed. If friendly potatoes meet, they greet each other by saying ‘potato’. When they encounter one of the ‘bloody potatoes’, the normal potatoes die loudly. The dead potatoes turn into a choir of ghosts that can try to alert the surviving potatoes (without using any words). The game continues until there’s only one surviving normal potato.
Episode 2. Malcolm Hamilton — Leaving the Malcolm Hamilton Show
Ep.2. Malcolm Hamilton — Leaving the Malcolm Hamilton Show
He called in his seven associates and said: step in. And they did. And Play Disrupt stopped being the Malcolm Hamilton Show.
He's still not great at delegating. His words.
There's an exercise he uses called the Award Ceremony. You imagine the project has already succeeded — won every award, flamingos presenting, the lot. And by the time you're building the flamingos, you've already done serious futures work without noticing. You've back-cast from success. You've made a plan without it feeling like planning.
It doesn't announce itself as a game. That's the whole trick.
If JIAS has already succeeded, what did it win? Most Infectious Practice That No Longer Needs Its Founder? The Golden Carrier Bag for Most Stuff Gathered Together?
I don't know yet. But imagining it helps.
Ps.
I also asked the interviewees for a game, if they wanted to share one.
Here is Malcolm’s:
Episode 3. Kevin Davidson — What If the Points Don't Mean What We Think They Mean?
Ep.3. Kevin Davidson — What If the Points Don't Mean What We Think They Mean?
He told me this without drama. He's probably been underpaid for most of his career. He's also, genuinely, mostly fine with that.
Kevin never calls what he does play. He calls it a quiz that ends up as a game show. A Ceilidh. An interactive focus group. The artistry is in the setup, not in the announcement. You come in through the side door, and by the time people notice, they're already playing.
Somewhere in the middle of our conversation, we started building something together: a game about the money conversation. About how to read a room, know your walk-away point, ask for what you actually need. We didn't finish it. It's still half-formed.
We're calling it the Money Game. Come help us make it.
Episode 4. Alan Grieve — You Have One
Ep.4. Alan Grieve — You Have One
He turned to Shona Reppe and said: that's it.
They spent a week volunteering on it. Getting its rhythms. And then they built their own version — funked up, with headphones and scratch-and-sniff postcards. They gave everything away for free. The slogan was: you have one.
Alan has failed spectacularly twice. Got asked to leave Edinburgh College of Art in third year. Lost the first salon to mismanaged funds. He is not ashamed of either. He quoted Beckett without fanfare: it's all failure, so it's cool.
The hairdressing salon he rebuilt in 2011 is the financial engine of everything. Cut enough hair. Put on the events. Don't waste time on things that don't sustain you. Alan is workspace dunfernline.
There is something so fundamentally adequate about this model that I find it fabulously moving.
Episode 5. Karen Duval — Making the Door
Ep.5. Karen Duval — Making the Door
The word adequate comes from the Latin adaequare. To make level. To put on equal footing. That's what happened in that ward.
Karen's job at Tonic Arts is partly about making the door exist in the first place — slowly, relationally, through showing up and being trusted and coming back. The pathway into NHS arts work is not a form. It's people knowing you're there.
The most useful thing from our conversation came almost as an aside — and it came from me, not Karen, though Karen's honesty is what prompted it.
Do we ask enough? Before we arrive with our plans already made, our outputs already described — do we actually ask what people need?
Probably not. But we could start.
Karens game is:
Contour Portrait Race
Objective: Draw a portrait of a friend in 60 seconds.
Rules: Look straight ahead, only at your subject (not your paper). One attempt only. No cheating!
Demo: Keep it simple. Grab some paper and a pen. Work your hand and eye coordination - let the right side of your brain take over!
Episode 6. Max Alexander — Slow Down and Shut Up
Ep.6. Max Alexander — Slow Down and Shut Up
What it became is hard to describe. Which is probably appropriate.
The most useful thing Max said: slow down and shut up. That's it. That's the core of working well with neurodivergent adults. Not a framework. Not a toolkit. Less talking. More space.
It sounds simple. It's extraordinarily hard. Especially when your instinct is to fill the silence.
Max knows when a session is working because it feels like the wind dying down. That lull where your whole body goes: oh. That's when you know something is happening.
The reliable income, for the record, is training and talks. The work Max cares most about requires seeking out and funding. That gap between what pays and what matters is one of the most honest things in this conversation.
Episode 7. Anthony Schrag — The Questions Nobody Wants to Ask
Ep.7. Anthony Schrag — The Questions Nobody Wants to Ask
He's spent his career asking the questions nobody in the room wants to ask — including the tension between artist-as-social-worker and artist-as-social-wanker, which you should read if you haven't, and not in a meeting, because you will laugh out loud.
He now leads the MA in Participatory Arts at Queen Margaret University — Scotland's only dedicated postgraduate programme in the field. So he's made the move many independent practitioners wonder about: from freelance practice into institutional life. And he's doing it while still holding a critical, trickster relationship with the institution from the inside.
What does that look like day to day? What gets easier? What gets lost? What do you have to keep smuggling in?
This is the conversation.
Ps.
I also asked the interviewees for a game if they wanted to share one and here is Ants:
Sock-put
To throw your socks as far as possible. (Inspired by David Sherry’s “Throw Your Shopping In The Air”)
Rules: Take your socks off (if you were wearing any. If you weren’t, go find someone who will let you steal their socks), and throw it as far as possible. You can compete against yourself, or with others. Consider if you want to add elements such as ‘aesthetics’ or ‘form’ to the competitive element of distance.
Episode 8. Jennifer Williams — Holding Space
Ep.8. Jennifer Williams — Holding Space
She has been at the University of Edinburgh for ten years, which she says happened in the blink of an eye.
She told me that adequacy, for her, is about choosing joy as a practice. Not as toxic positivity. As commitment. As the thing you return to, again and again, even when everything around you is pressurised and difficult and collapsing a little.
I participated in a Utopia Lab last year. We breathed. We moved. We picked weeds and painted them together and explored what it means to do nothing. It was, in the middle of a very busy life, a radical act.
Jennifer closes this series not as a conclusion but as an opening. In November, we'll be holding a Utopia Lab together — about dark play, the trickster, and utopia. The conversation continues.
Ps.
I also asked the interviewees for a game if they wanted to share one, here is Jennifer’s:
Feeling Your Heart
Objective: Remember That You’re Alive Right Now
Rules: Don’t worry about anything!
Demo: Stop whatever else you are doing, put your hand on your heart, feel your heart beat. You can take deep breaths. The game is finished whenever you feel calm, or as if waves of joy are washing through your body.