Pawns, 2025, found and altered objects, crate and trunk

Nanaimo Art Gallery and off-site
1 August – 5 October 2025

From Nanaimo Art Gallery website: League Nanaimo is a project led by Vancouver and Saltspring Island based artist Germaine Koh that unites creative process and play. Community members of all ages are invited to gather and exercise creativity by developing new games and sports through iterative, embodied activities. Games evolve organically as they are played, and strategies emerge through trial and improvisation, and sometimes new tools are invented on the fly.

Koh’s playful art installation turns Nanaimo Art Gallery into an experimental arena of sorts where visitors are welcome to jump, throw, dance, run, and touch; all actions that are usually frowned upon in art museums. In this space, that is a cross between a hockey rink, a dance hall, a tennis court, and an archery range, you are invited to interact with objects and markings, and with each other, and could find yourself developing your own games.

The Gallery also serves as a hub for community outreach as the artist and Gallery facilitators bring League Nanaimo into the broader community. During the run of the exhibition, League activities not only take place in the gallery, but also at Nanaimo parks. Listings of events are available on our website, and at the Gallery.

Launched by Germaine Koh in 2012, League is an art project that shares creative process rather than finished artworks. Processes of learning, adapting, and iterating are central to the overall concept. League invites us to experience the similarities between the improvisation, negotiation, reflection, and critical thinking that happen both in sport and art-making. The project is based in a belief that games, sport and play are serious forms of problem-solving and even problem-making.

League Nanaimo is the third exhibition through which Nanaimo Art Gallery asks the question: How can we play together?

When: 7pm Saturday 5 October to 7am Sunday 6 October
Where:  Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, 952 Queen Street West, Toronto

The n Games is a tournament of invented sports in which players test their teamwork, strategic skills, and adaptability by playing invented games they do not know. This version of The n Games will be presented in the courtyard of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art for Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, an all-night contemporary art extravaganza in Toronto.

It will be an ongoing pick-up game involving the audience as participants, as well as local teams such as the Toronto Roller Derby D-VAS. The games to be played will range from vigorous to cerebral, straightforward to strategic, and will ultimately test the players’ abilities to creatively tackle challenges with both mind and body.

The n Games is presented by League, a community-based art project that gathers people to play invented games and sports as a form of creative problem-solving. For the Nuit Blanche edition of The n Games, we have partnered with the Department of Biological Flow experimental research-creation collective.

Advance press

- Sue Carter Flinn, Toronto Life, “Nuit Blanche 2013 Guide: 15 must-see spectacles at Toronto’s eighth annual all-night art crawl”, 30 September 2013.
- Canadian Art, “10 Artists’ Nuit Blanche Tips & Troubles“, 3 October 2013.
- Murray White, Toronto Star, “Nuit Blanche 2013: Shots in the dark“, 3 October 2013.
Jonathan Zettel, CTV Toronto, “Scotiabank Nuit Blanche: 10 things to see at the art-after-dark show“, 4 October 2013.

Update

Germaine’s play report is here.

The n Games Vancouver edition

Were you looking for information about the inaugural Vancouver edition of The n Games this past September? Go here for information about the tournament and here for a tournament report.

Results

10:00 — Pool x Match 1
Rethink vs Theatre Replacement
Game played: Petri   Winner: Theatre Replacement

10:40 — Pool y Match 1
Roadhouse vs Double Rainbow
Game played: Extra Sensory Proprioception   Winner: Double Rainbow

11:20 — Pool x Match 2
Manhunt! vs Rethink
Game played: Field Pong   Winner: Rethink

12:00 — Pool y Match 2
Daughters of Beer vs Roadhouse
Game played: Petri   Winner: Roadhouse

12:40 — Pool x Match 3
Theatre Replacement vs Manhunt!
Game played: Scrumble   Winner: Manhunt!

13:20 — Pool y Match 3
Double Rainbow vs Daughters of Beer
Game played: Satellites   Winner: Daughters of Beer

Tie-breakers
Pool x: Manhunt defaults, Theatre Replacement won head-to-head vs Rethink
Pool y: Sudden Death Extra Sensory Proprioception. Results: 1-Double Rainbow, 2-Roadhouse, 3-Daughters of Beer

14:20 — Semi 1 (x 1st place vs y 2nd place)
Theatre Replacement vs Roadhouse
Game played: Whoseball   Winner: Roadhouse

15:00 — Semi 2 (y 1st place vs x 2nd place)
Double Rainbow vs Rethink
Game played: No Look Pass   Winner: Rethink

Consolation (y 3rd place vs x 3rd place)
(not played)

15:40 — Final (winners of Semis)
Rethink vs Roadhouse
Game played: Lotto Rules   Winner: Roadhouse

Pool x

Manhunt! Vancouver

Rethink

Theatre Replacement

Admins only: update

How To Kickstart

Tuesday 24 September
6:00-8:00 pm
Elm Park field house
Admission is free, but limited: get your ticket here

Recently expanded to Canada, Kickstarter is a funding platform for creative projects. Everything from films, games, and music to art, design, and technology. Kickstarter is full of ambitious, innovative, and imaginative projects that are brought to life through the direct support of others.

Join Kickstarter Art Program Director Stephanie Pereira for a primer on how to bring a Kickstarter project to life. We’ll take a look at some favourite projects from across the site and discuss how to structure an engaging campaign, what kind of rewards work best, how to spread the word about your project, and other helpful tips.

The workshop will be followed by one of League’s play events, in which participants modify and improvise games as a form of creative problem-solving.

In the news:

• CBC, “Kickstarter now open to Canadian projects”

Other upcoming League activity:

• Saturday August 24, noon-5pm: Celebrate! Stanley Park events. League will be playing at the Brockton Sports Fields
• Sunday August 25, noon-3pm: League play day at Elm Park.
• Sunday September 8, all day: The n Games, an innovative tournament of invented sports pitting existing sports- and business teams from different backgrounds.
• Sunday September 29, noon-3pm: League play day at Elm Park.

League is available to facilitate workshops on topics such as play and creative processes, strategy, collaboration, and team-building.

Here are some images from recent workshops exploring games and process, with the teen scholarship program from Arts Umbrella.

After an introduction to the notion of creative problem-solving as a kind of play and to the game-like structure of much artwork, the students embarked on game-design exercises involving existing games or conventional materials. The objective was to find some productive ground between convention and invention.

The groups displayed quite different problem-solving patterns:

1. The everything-but-the-kitchen-sink brainstorming approach, in which a proliferation of ideas was unleashed before being reined in towards something coherent
2. A methodical step-by-step form of process that stays more or less on track, but might produce fewer unexpected surprises
3. A wild zig-zag following an ever-changing idea.

Of course there are other forms and patterns, and habits can be trained and changed. What are your own team’s habits?

We play-tested one of the two game ides they brought, and began to develop another from scratch.

Stuffie Wars

This was a game they had already discussed quite a bit, but had not yet tried playing. Kathleen, who had the initial concept, explained the guidelines they had developed as a group:

• The game is like dodgeball, but using stuffed animal toys instead of balls.
• If you are hit by a stuffie, you can no longer throw, and instead have to begin to act like the animal that hit you. You are required to put effort into playing your animal.
• Each team has a Psychologist, who is able to ‘heal’ her players. However, if the Psychologist is hit, she also becomes an animal and the team no longer has a healer.
• Besides hitting members of the other team to turn them into animals, a team can also win Invention Points through particularly good acting. In this way, a team that had apparently won by hitting the other team, could actually lose the match if the other team had performed very well on the acting front.
• In case of a tie there would be a sudden-death faceoff.

Development and adjustments

• The field was mucky so we used the tennis court, and then further reduced the size of the playing area.
• Neither team made good use of their Psychologist, so that role was essentially dropped after a couple trials. However, we needed some way for the hit players (animals) to be able to re-enter play or be useful in some way, so we made it so that they could retrieve stuffies that had landed out of play, and if they intercepted a stuffie that had been thrown, the person who threw it instead became the animal.
• We added the traditional dodgeball rule that if you caught a stuffie that was being thrown at you, the other person was out (became an animal).
• With the particular group that was playing, there was a tendency to get caught up in the competitive aspects of throwing the toys, but we were reminded that the acting aspect could be equally important. After that, we made sure the referees were keeping track of the acting, and at the end of the game, when one team had all been turned into animals, they decided which ‘animals’ had won their freedom through good performance. Scoring then became a matter of counting who was still alive or revived and who remained animal.

Character of the game

• This game included a couple really interesting premises. One was the idea of including a healer figure. This is a common feature of role-playing games, of course, but less so for active ones.
• Another innovative idea was to give significant weight to the acting element, to the extent that it could outweigh the athletic performance. It was a good way of tempering the cutthroat aspects of competition while suggesting other solutions to a situation.
• There was an elegant play of references within the game, drawing on the languages of hunting/targeting animals, healing, and play-acting.

Stuffie Dilemma

Although we were pressed for time, we also wanted to try to develop a new game from scratch. Since we had the quantity of stuffed toys on hand, Germaine suggested some kind of game starting from the basic game theory scenario known as the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Game theory is concerned with strategy and decision-making, and The Prisoner’s Dilemma is used as an example of a situation in which two players choose to cooperate or betray the other. In its classic formulation, two criminal accomplices are separately offered a deal: turn on the other by confessing and go free while the other is punished to the maximum; stay silent and receive a small punishment; or if both confess, both be punished but less than the maximum.

There are many variations of the prisoner’s dilemma. We came up with one, not unlike the dilemma a child might actually face, in which she must decide whether to share her toys, with the possibility that too-reckless generosity might be ‘punished’ by having her toys stolen by the other. Instead of gauging punishment, the two sides were essentially betting a finite resource. We had two teams start with a quantity of toys, and based on the combinations played, toys were taken or given to the other side. It was far from resolved as a game, but served as an exercise in considering how cooperation and selfishness might be weighed and valued.

Where:  Elm Park, Vancouver-Kerrisdale
When:  Sunday 8 September 2013, 10am-5pm
Cost:  Free. Spectators are welcome to bring a lawn chair or blanket

Solve for n

The n Games is an innovative tournament for teams from different backgrounds. It asks: what kind of team would be best prepared for unexpected challenges? A youth sports team or a finely-tuned business? A pick-up team of artists, or a leading ad agency? A performance troupe, a group of gamers, or players of obscure sports?

On 8 September 2013, different sports, cultural, and business teams from across Vancouver will compete against each other in The n Games, testing their teamwork, strategic skills and adaptability by playing invented sports they do not know. The games to be played will range from vigorous to cerebral, straightforward to strategic, and will ultimately test the teams’ ability to creatively solve different types of physical and mental challenges as a group. For some games, there may be opportunities for the teams to recruit from the public.

The tournament will take the format of two round-robin pools, followed by a playoff. The teams will not know in advance what games they will be playing; for each match, the game to be played will be drawn and rules explained a matter of minutes before the start. The tournament unfolds in Elm Park and is organized by League, a project for playing invented games and sports, launched in 2012 within the Vancouver Park Board Field House Residency Program. The n Games and League value play as a form of creative problem-solving, unconventional approaches to challenges, and tackling situations with both mind and body. Examples of the types of invented sports that could be played at The n Games are documented on the League site.

Competing for The n Games Cup, playfully devised by celebrated contemporary artist Brendan Lee Satish Tang, the participating teams represent a wide range of businesses and sports in the city of Vancouver. The award-winning advertising agency Rethink bring their nimble creativity to the field, while veteran game producers Roadhouse Interactive boast a deep knowledge of game strategy. Double Rainbow Dodgeball League, a community-based dodgeball league for all genders, hope to outshine the competition with their bright combination of agility and rainbow spandex, while Manhunt! Vancouver bring crafty tactics honed through their urban sports events. The friends behind the Daughters of Beer craft-beer blog have assembled a team of fellow cultural administrators and curators to bring their self-described “over-thinking skills” to the tournament. Finally, with their focus on creating theatre from the everyday life around us, Theatre Replacement, bring well-practiced performance skills.

View the schedule

Teams

Daughters of Beer & Co.
http://daughtersofbeer.tumblr.com

We are creators, competitors, curators, coordinators, commissioners, consultants, cultural planners, and cat owners – who share a common connection as capacious consumers of craft beer.

Special skills: strategic and easily distracted; over-thinkers skilled at guesswork; exhaust easily by our ambition; physical and fond of naps; overly organized for the unanticipated; competitive in non-confrontational incidents.

Double Rainbow Dodgeball
http://www.doublerainbowdodgeball.ca

Double Rainbow Dodgeball is a 19+, non profit, inclusive community dodgeball league that encourages fun, positivity, safety, fitness, inclusion, and fair play in a drug & alcohol free space. This league is for all genders and is both queer and trans positive.

.

Manhunt! Vancouver
http://www.facebook.com/ManHuntVan

Manhunt! Vancouver is an organization dedicated to urban sport and games, reclaiming public space, and building an inclusive and safe casual sporting community.

At Manhunt! we play a variety of games from capture the flag, ninja chess, camouflage, sardines, dodge ball and of course, manhunt – catch us if you can.

Rethink
http://www.rethinkcanada.com

Rethink “has helped elevate Vancouver’s advertising scene onto the worldwide stage” (BC Business) with its work for local clients such as Playland and Science World, winning Golden Lion, Juno, and scores of other awards along the way.

Rethink uses a ping-pong table as a boardroom table, an analogy for their approach to communication.

Roadhouse Interactive
http://roadhouseinteractive.com

We make games for ourselves and others. Roadhouse Interactive is an end-to-end producer, developer and operator of games for mobile and tablet. Our team has delivered or played key roles on some of the most well-known and successful game franchises of all time.

.

Theatre Replacement
http://www.theatrereplacement.org

RECOGNIZE. MAGNIFY. REPRODUCE.
Theatre Replacement builds performances that react to contemporary existence.

When making this work, we recognize the accomplishments and failures of the world around us; use biographical material to magnify these events through extended collaborative processes and training programs; and reproduce the results for local, national and international audiences.

Theatre Replacement  is an ongoing collaboration between James Long and Maiko Bae Yamamoto. Whether working together or apart, we use extended processes to create performances from intentionally simple beginnings. Our work is about a genuine attempt to coexist. Conversations, interviews and arguments collide with Yamamoto and Long’s aesthetics resulting in theatrical experiences that are authentic, immediate and hopeful. For The n Games, we have assembled a team of TR staff, board members, friends, and collaborators.

Press, Sponsors

Vancouver Courier preview

The n Games Toronto

League will also be presenting a version of The n Games as part of Scotiabank Nuit Blanche in Toronto, overnight on 5-6 October 2013.