Executives are being asked to make AI judgment calls their organisation has never made before. The scarce thing is not information about AI. It is rehearsal.
School of Play is a five day residential cohort that puts senior operators and graduate students in the same room and has them practise deciding under real uncertainty, through play rather than through slides. Play is the method because it is the only format that lets a person be wrong at full speed, repeatedly, in front of peers, and learn from it the same afternoon.
The pilot cohort runs in Kyoto, October 5 to 9, 2026, and closes with a field day at the Nintendo Museum in Uji, the one place in the world to encounter the Nintendo design lineage in person.
Program lead and founder of Echo Collective LLC, New York. Leads the synthesis days and the Nintendo Museum field day. Full biography to come.
Co-faculty. Co-founder of Cross Labs in Kyoto and President of the International Society for Artificial Life. Biography to come.
Twenty executive seats and a smaller student cohort. Executives who carry decision authority over how AI is used in their organisation, and graduate students working on the research side of the same questions. Both groups are in the room on purpose: the exercises need people who will be held to the decision and people who will argue with the premise.
School of Play is operated by Echo Collective LLC, a New York company. Invoicing for the Kyoto cohort is in Japanese Yen.