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.