Abstract
This chapter is a response to the impact of the prevailing neoliberal discourse of corporate managerialism in universities. It contains the authors’ communal experimentation with collaborative gameplay as an intentional and collective form of arts-based activism and intervention focused on subverting and unravelling the finite and managerial games at work in their universities. As a way of giving pause to how the pandemic and related workforce crises have intensified power dynamics and precarious work, authors use arts-based and poetic offerings to reflect on the role of power operating in their work/lives. Their creative methodology provides a site for playful protest and resistance to the competitive individualism and win/lose outcomes so treasured across the academy. It also offers space for authors’ realisation that while they desire to be radical, they are mostly compliant in their academic work. Subsequent insights about their ‘playing with power relations’ but also how they are ‘being played’ by succumbing to managerial demands helps them stop and ‘ask questions’ and ‘think outside the game’.