Welcome to the Athenian part of our online platform 
As you know you are 12 trainees from different backgrounds and experience and we would like to invite you along with the Athenian partners, to say hi and share
We are excited to have you with us, in this first year of Trust in Play!
Hello beautiful people! I am very excited to be part of this!
I am Katerina and i have an educational background in Civil Engineering (BSc), Urban Planning (MSc) and Acting (BA). Amongst others, the last 3 years i am a core member of UrbanDig Project - an interdisciplinary platform dealing with community engagement practices, innovative participatory actions & site-specific performances in public space. One of our most important current projects is DeMOS_The game, a site-specific performative game that uses the city as a big floor-board and intends to support collective decision making and processing and begun in LABOURGAMES.
I love games and playful interactions in general (of course!) and while difficult to say just one, i will choose to refer to pen and paper games with a touch of surrealism, f.e. Creating collective surrealistic stories based on simple questions such as Who, What, Where & Why, Trying to guess the meaning of unknown words or A answering a set of questions such as āIf Mary/ Anne/ George etc was a fruit, which fruit would she/he be?ā. I hope we will have the chance to play them also together!
Last but not least, an area that inspires me is Kipseli and a part of Patisia as well. Apart from living in this area for 6 years now (close to the Areos Park), i love strolling around and and discover new paths or explore more the more familiar ones.
Looking forward to meeting all of you! xxx
Hello everybody!
I am Nikos, an architect with an Msc in cultural heritage management. Since 2016 I have been implementing gaming projects of various genres (casual, adventure, escape room, mystery etc) in order to highlight neglected places of memory - mainly monuments. My most recent project is called āThe mystery of the poisoned greek delightā (in Greek: Ī¤Īæ Ī¼Ļ ĻĻĪ®ĻĪ¹Īæ Ī¼Īµ ĻĪæ Ī“Ī·Ī»ĻĪ·ĻĪ¹Ī±ĻĪ¼ĪĪ½Īæ Ī»ĪæĻ ĪŗĪæĻ Ī¼Ī¬ĪŗĪ¹) which tried to raise awareness on local monuments in Thessaloniki through degustation riddles related to intangible culinary heritage.
A game (category) that I really enjoy playing is the escape room. Escape rooms can be intriguing immersive experiences that challenge players with riddles that occasionally require multiple skills to be solved. They can enhance interpersonal relationships and team building while at the same time they can teach people that looks can be deceiving.
The place that inspires me is Piraeus (its not in Athens but close enough)! Piraeus is full of abandoned monuments (archaeological, neoclassical, industrial, etc) scattered in its urban fabric that provide me with many cases to work on. It has an interesting history and a simple yet variable urban structure that can be fascinating.
Canāt wait for TiP to begin and to meet you all!
Hello all! So excited of being part of this, but I guess that goes for each one of us.
My name is Michalis and friends tell me that I am in a costant state of immersion.
I really love Earthdawn, an old school Pen & Paper RPG,
The āMinionā abandoned building in Patision (October 28th st). I am sure that children voices still echo inside. Maybe even my ownā¦
Hi @Katerina_P, @Nikos and @Lynx! Thank you for sharing, isnāt it interesting how the āabandonedā spaces are a big part of our memories regarding the city? They can be perceived as inviting pockets of altered reality experiences or bubbles of curiosity training, pick your metaphor. We maybe should start a list of interesting āabandonedā spaces in Athens and see where this will take us.
@Katerina_P we should definitely try playing this and even hack it to its limits especially regarding trust and group inclusion.
Hello glorious creatures :3
I suppose I am here for the LARP element, so I will expand on this:
I am one of the people who established Fantasy LARP in Athens 5 years ago, and since then I have been organizing, participating, travelling and presenting LARP in a vast amount of places and conditions. My biggest project is āLARP Project: Athensā, which I co-organize, but currently I am focused on āKult: Divinity Lost, Athensā, a new community project, based on an occult-noir RPG, that features a world-wide mythology, a āreality layeringā (re-magificating things/places/people that appear common), and a custom flexible system for urban events. (after a month, we locked the community at 35 people, and we have organized two seances, a by-the-sea event next to an abandoned church and five demos, it has been a productive month :3 )
I generally enjoy White Wolfās/Paradox/Onyx Path games. I love what they are doing with reality, and how they take exhausted subjects and revivify them in a way that can produce an amazing amount of stories. Specifically, I love Changeling: the Lost (for itās storytelling potential), Dark Ages Fae (for itās storytelling potential), Wraith: The Oblivion (for not shying against such a deep subject, and providing an amazing result), most Vampires - Requiem and Masquerade - (for teaching you how to see yourself as a part of human history), and Mage: The Awakening (for being such an amazing work of art).
I like charged locales. I am a firm believer that each place holds itās own energies/even personality. Itās what the Latins called āGenius Lociā. They are, generally, everywhere but if I had to pick one, I would choose āDimos Sxistouā (ĪĻĻĪ±ĪÆĪæĻ ĪĪ®Ī¼ĪæĻ Ī£ĻĪ¹ĻĻĪæĻ), a hidden valley in the middle of Athens.
Nice meeting you all ^^
George
Hi, Iām Jonah!
I have a bit of a different situation than most others so Iāll take a second to explain. I am an American and september will be my first time in greece. I was looking for a place to live abroad for a year and found Trust in Play as a great opportunity to do that while connecting and collaborating with a group of likeminded creators. Iām so excited to meet everyone!
I am a composer and sound designer, and a programmer so a lot of my work involves a marriage of music and technology. Most of my current work is purely digital but Iām really interested in using more hardware and maybe getting into physical installations.
It seems like this background is quite different from a lot of you (at least those whoāve posts Iāve seen here so far) which is really exciting! I always find that being around people of totally different backgrounds is a great way to shift your own frame of reference and start thinking laterlally
A game that I love is the word Game āContactā. I think itās American but Iām not sure where it actually originated (I learned it from some kids in California and I have yet to meet anyone who knows it before I explain it to them, but it is documented on the Internet). The rules are a little hard to explain in writing but Itās a great example of a game that has been designed with incredible precision and is brilliantly balanced and replayable, but is entirely based on a spoken tradition. It only survives through people teaching it to others and playing it. And it evolves as it is passed along over time (see Richard Dawkinsā original writings on a āmemeā as a āunit of cultural transmissionā )
if anyone is interested in trying it out, these rules are similar to the way my friends and I play. (theoretically this should also work in any language not just english)
as far as a place in Athens that inspires me, Iām hoping that all of you can help me when Iām there!
just found another good explanation of Contact from Reddit:
James, the āWordMasterā or āItā, thinks of any word he wants. The longer or more unusual the word, the better, as it means itāll likely take longer for others to guess it. Also words that contain unusual sounds/spellings like āphā tend to stump people longer. So letās say James picks the word āPhytoplankton.ā (Would James ever pick that word? Unlikely, but itād be a good word to pick-- long, odd letter combos.)
You need two or more guessers (you could have 10 guessers if you wanted! 50! 100! but the game might get sloppy then). To make it simple, weāll say Nat an Nicole are playing.
The game goes on this way until either Nicole or Bridgette gives the clue for the āItā word, Phytoplankton. Whoever gives the winning clue becomes āItā next.
Hello everyone! I canāt wait to meet you all in person, but for the time being here is small introductionā¦
I am Isavella from Trikala, Greece (the new smart city of Greece, close to Meteora and with the Mill of the elves during Christmas timeā¦just so that you know where to come 
). My educational background is on Architecture and Cultural Management while I have a continuous interest in contemporary dance and of course in play!
There are so many games to think ofā¦but I will go with Jenga ( 
) and treasure hunts.
Since I am not a local Athenian and never actually lived in Athens, there are no hidden gems that I could think of. But profound places like the Syntagma square and especially the historical triangle have so many stories to tell that are always a good start in my mind.
So let the āgameā begin and see where it will lead us!
Hello everyone!
I am also an architect i am currently doing my master in architectural research. I can describe myself as an āanalog" person. I have a constant feeling of loss in the digital world of social media and I have a need to return to the specific place and time. The importance of praxis as an action here and now that sets our body in a movement was revealed from games. Specifically as a part of group psychotherapy āwhich is called psychodrama- process I have experienced the role of games in the process of creating links between people. The common āmatrixā āas it is called- of a group of people is elaborated through games that include haptic, acoustic and visual exercises.
I have lived in Athens for all my life so different places are linked with multiple emotions and memories so it is difficult to summarize. This period I live close to āLarisa stationā a neighborhood that it is not affected āthat much- by the gentrification process. In areas like this I personally find an authenticity of everyday people struggling to survive in the contemporary metropolis.
I am very happy to meet you!
Hi @GiorgosPapavasileiou, @jsenzel, @izabel.k and @nikolas_kan! After reading your posts I feel that we could benefit from making a map of Athens and its different neighbourhoods, vibes, emotions, ācharged localesā as @GiorgosPapavasileiou mentioned (you should definitely tell us more about that when we meetup) and stories. It might be really useful to the ones that live in Athens and the ones that have visited or never been there yet. Inspiring us and helping us to get to know the city and one another.
It could be our first team assignment if you think it is interesting to you. Anyone that has any ideas on how we could proceed? Digital and analogue ideas are more than welcomed.
@jsenzel we should definitely play this game during our first meetup. Getting better at explaining game rules can be one of our early goals.
@izabel.k organizing an event @ Trikala is not a bad idea at all!
@nikolas_kan it would be brilliant to know more about this process and maybe you could offer some exercises in September and during our training week.
hello everyone!
Iām Katerina, also an architect based in Athens. I love wondering around the city, spotting details and imagining stories that could have happen there. I like to think of the city as a huge playground, full of endless possibilities.
Right now, Iām organizing a treasure hunt with some friends. Weāre collecting spots and places in order to plan a route that will end up in a secret location where we will have a cocktail party. Iāll let you know, when itās ready so we can all play it together.
Another game we like to play with friends is bux de lux. A drinking game in which the players are divided in two teams, standing in opposite positions and they try to hit a bottle that is placed in the middle of the distance that separates them. When a team hits the bottle, they start drinking their beer, until the other team runs to the center to place the bottle properly again and shout to the other team to stop (drinking). The winning team is the one that finishes all their beer first. Itās a funny game and it is open to people passing by to participate and play.
(hereās a gif, I once made in order to explain it)
A place I like in Athens, is the park of Saint Nicolas in Exarchia. It is a park that a lot of people donāt know because is hidden behind a church in a quite street.
Looking forward to meet you all and play together!
Hello everybody!
I am Lydia and I am excited and overwhelmed to be part of this team and anxious to meet you all and play and design play together.
I am an architect based in Athens, I commute by bike, I am moving around the city all the time due to professional reasons and I am often surprised when discovering new urban neighborhoods and the way people inhabit and interfere with urban places.
I was grown up in Thessaloniki where I used to play outdoors in urban environment. This is a missing opportunity for children in the city today. Whereas there is nothing that can offer the same freedom feeling as free play outdoors.
I enjoy playing with space in my everyday professional life, I take life as a game and games as life, I rediscovered the fun and power of play with my daughters and our friends. Play can positively transform us, it can create new meanings and new perspectives. I believe in the power of play as a transformative power for our well-being. I sense that fun is missing and play can be a facilitator for fun. My recent play story has to do with designing play and playing design, creating space plays for groups of children with the intention to understand and play with space so as to be more conscious about it, motivate and demand for better urban built and unbuilt environments. When playing anything can happen and that leads to open possibilities and freedom of creation.
I love treasure hunts and traditional outdoor games like hide & seek. There are a lot of variations that are created from different groups that play them and I have this feeling that traditional games are alive and evolving and can interfere with urban environments to offer new urban experiences and relationships.
My favorite places are usually open spaces with characteristics of closed spaces that create the sense of indoors outdoors like small scale squares, which we can find mostly in older parts of the city.
I live in Metaxourgeio-Akadimia Platonos neighbourhood where I always enjoy the human and building mixtures and contradictions. Akadimia Platonos Archaeological Park is a place where I find peace and relax.
I am looking forward to meeting you soon!
@MariaS and everyone! You are already welcomed in Trikala! More than happy to facilitate an event here!
