The Metaphor Game - by Arnie Sabatelli
I was thinking this morning of a game I used to play with my creative writing students I stole from somewhere/someone, but don’t remember now where/who. I called it “The Metaphor Game,” and it is designed to force students to turn off the logical parts of their brains and turn on the metaphoric, associative functions that are such an essential part of being human. With the advent of AI, I think this game/these aspects of HI (human intelligence) will increasingly become all the more critical to nurture.
The game begins simply/logically enough. One person thinks of a person and gives the rest of the group some basic information—living man, living woman, dead man, dead woman (and one could easily expand these gender designations if you wished). Now the rest of the class can ask questions, but here’s the rub: their questions can only be metaphorical, and the answers given must be associative/non-rational/metaphorical as well. Here are some examples of good questions: What season would they be—spring, summer, fall, or winter? PC or Mac? What type of shoe (you can’t answer Air Jordans, if it’s Michael Jordan; that’s too logical)? Ringo, John, Paul or George (assuming you’re not thinking of one of the Beatles)? Cat or dog? Straight up or on the rocks? Speedboat or canoe? And so on. The thing I love about the game is that the answers are almost as challenging as the questions, and the point starts to be who will come up with the most creative, most telling metaphorical question… Cheerios or Cap’n Crunch?
It’s not easy for students to come up with an answer, and it’s often very difficult for some students to even catch on to the spirit of the game. One would invariably suddenly blurt out, “What color is their hair?” Or “Are they an athlete?” And I would make a buzzer sound, “Bad question, too logical!” I would stand at the board and write out all the answers/metaphoric-clues, and they would often fill up most of the white board— “Ringo, Spring, Penny Loafers, Mac, Dog, Straight whiskey, Speedboat, Cap’n Crunch.” Then someone would suddenly feel the rush of an epiphany and blurt out an answer, and the person giving answers would say “yes! Oh my God, how did you get that?” and the person who guessed would say, “I don’t know. It just came to me!”
Then we’d step back and look at the board and think of how all these metaphorical references somehow pointed toward that person—and somehow see it without having to explain it. “Wow, yeah, they are Cap’n Crunch,” a student might say. “Definitely penny loafers.” At times, however, there would be conflict. “No way they are spring. That’s too new, innocent, fresh. They’re definitely green, alive, hot, but more like summer.” And sometimes the person answering would agree, “Wow, you’re right. I should have said ‘summer’.” Other times they would stick to their guns, “No, there’s just something about them that says spring, though I can’t explain it.”
While many never really got it at all and sat quietly stewing while the rest of the class were enjoying themselves in an activity that made far too little “sense,” for many the game was a kind of turning point. I quickly followed it up with a writing exercise, asking them to write a short poem using the same kind of thinking they had to use to play the game, and then we’d read some aloud. They were often much better than normal, though perhaps just as often they were just as uninteresting as ever—trying too hard to make a single point, too rhymey, too overtly sentimental, too statement oriented (all those things that are so hard to put aside, especially when school classrooms, grades, etc. push so hard the other way), but there was almost always something I could point to in the poems that provoked the mind in the same way the game did, that pulled us out of the world of logical, statement-based thinking and somehow made logically ineffable but metaphorically certain expressions, communicating meaning without the handholds of logic and reasoning.
I might then turn to a poem like this classic by Emily Dickinson (also a kind of guessing game poem):
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!
I would push them to talk about it without trying to solve it, to think of it as a starting point, an invitation to think rather than a call to action. We would work to trace the metaphors back towards something they were somehow “saying.” Some would invariably (with some prodding) turn the poem loose on social media, how “public” we have all become, vainly croaking out our names “the livelong June—/To an admiring Bog!”—the image of each on their own lily pads merely croaking their own name over and over again while the speaker of the poem urges a kind of namelessness as the better option somehow connected to the cold, simplicity of logic versus the unnamed and unnameable, more urgent truths that metaphor, poetry, literature, the arts convey.
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PS: I actually was thinking of someone in the examples I gave above, this living man. Can you guess who it is? Leave your best guess in the comments below, or click the link to find out (no cheating).
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