The "LA" in "PLAY"

Top 3 Ways To Extend the Life of Your Annual Retreat

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 19:48:25 -0400

R.O.I. matters. If you’re not dealing in goods and merchandise, but rather you provide a service – like for instance, team building games – how can you demonstrate the service was worth the expense? Whatever measurement you choose will betray a bias before the measuring process even begins.

That said, when it comes to measuring R.O.I of a retreat, my bias compels me to favor time as the preferred metric. Whatever the desired result of the retreat may be, how long after the retreat are those benefits still manifest?

By the way, I’m using “retreat” here broadly to refer to any event where co-workers are together to share an experience that is not directly related to work, or at least not all directly related. This can be a half-day offsite, it can take place in the office or workspace, or it could be a two week stay at a resort. The resort sounds pretty good to me, I don’t know about you. Bartender, two pina coladas please.

Common goals for a retreat include educating the attendees or recreation. Most retreats incorporate both.

Consider the educational component of the retreat. Every teacher wants students to succeed, but not everyone learns the same way in a classroom environment. Neuroscience tells us people form memories better when the memories are tied to emotional responses. Though emotions like fear, disgust, and craven desire create the most vivid memories, for a corporate event it is more appropriate to rely on emotions like happiness and relaxation. The good news is, these positive emotions also aid in forming long-lasting memories. The longer the memories last, the more the educational component is providing return on the investment.

Now consider the recreational component. We know now the importance of discretionary effort in high-performing workplaces. A successful retreat reminds everyone of the reasons they like being around one another. When you feel you have someone’s back and that you are supported in return, you’ll go the extra mile to provide help. And when everyone helps one another, the work improves and benefits the company. Therefore the good tidings and camaraderie fomented during the recreational component of the retreat is returning on investment.

So however you look at it, extending the lifespan of your retreat increases R.O.I. How best to do it? Three suggestions after the jump.

1. Previously I mentioned that people learn in different ways. Some are visual learners. For all the participants, but especially the visual learners, think of giving the gift of photos of the group taken during the retreat.

A saying on the internet goes, “Pictures or it didn’t happen.” With every smartphone enabled with camera, there’s no excuse for not taking photos of the retreat. If there’s nothing on the agenda that would make a nice photo to look back on later, you need to rethink the agenda. It can be as simple as a dinner at a restaurant for which everyone dresses nicely and wears something that means something special, which can make for interesting chat with dinner or drinks.

Included free in all our games is a private photo album with all the teams’ pictures from the day’s game. We also offer premium packages with photos burned on CD-ROM or a memory book. Even if you’re not playing a Wise Guys team building game, you can still use easy online vendors like Zazzle.com to get photos made into magnets for the fridge at work or mouse pads for the desk.

2. There are also auditory learners. It’s a good idea to reserve a final opportunity before the retreat’s end where everyone gathers and has the chance to say a few words, if they wish, about what they’ll take away from the experience. This ritual can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Doing another digest like this some time after the retreat, like at the end of the following quarter, can bring back the memories of the previous talk and the context in which it took place, when everyone was feeling happy and relaxed on the retreat. You’ll be back at work by then and concentrating on some thorny problem, but wouldn’t you rather figure out how to solve a complicated problem with a group of people who feel relaxed, appreciated, and grateful to be together?

3. If there’s a web component to the retreat, such as a hashtag or Tumblr, use Storify to capture the events as they unfolded and send it to the participants the week after the retreat. Schedule it the same day as a company happy hour at a local spot.

What do you remember from the good retreats you’ve attended?

The Top 5 Best Places for Team Building in Los Angeles

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 18:09:00 -0400

The appeal of Southern California as a destination for team building is so obvious as to be nearly needless to mention. There’s great weather here all year round. We are home to some of the globe’s most frequently pictured landmarks, many of them related to the birthplace of the movies. At the other end of the spectrum, there are equally infamous qualities of the city, traffic being foremost among them. People who have never lived here complain about our traffic. Why? They aren’t sitting in it.

Anyhow, traffic is a big reason all our games are played on foot. On top of the liability risks. And looking for parking. And paying for parking. You know what, let’s change the subject, I’m sweating. Team building is supposed to be fun, not stressful, and that means no cars.

We have a saying, “Once you get into cars, the fun stops.” I didn’t say it rhymed.

Though you might have heard otherwise, LA is a pleasant city for walking or other high shoe-leather consumptive activities like playing an urban hunt game. The city has so many discrete zones that there’s lots of places to play: you can take your pick of local color and flavor. Here are the top five in Los Angeles.

1. The beach. I know this is a cop-out, but I could easily fill the whole top 5 list with just beach locations. My top beaches are Hermosa Beach and Santa Monica, but even that is a cop-out too because I like Santa Monica Pier games a bit more than Santa Monica Promenade games, though both are great. The Promenade game doesn’t actually include a beach, so its place on the top 5 list is questionable. Bottom line, you can’t go wrong at the beach. Some teams add bikes to their games and go up and down the coastline. We’re also planning a game that will be played at a popular eatery in Malibu that has a great meeting and dining space and access to top-quality beach. We’ll post photos when that’s done.

2. Hollywood Boulevard. I don’t say “Hollywood and Highland” because even though that is a grade-A destination, the name of the intersection is also the name of a shopping center there, which has sometimes presented problems. To be clear, Hollywood and Highland the shopping center has been more than generous and gracious every time we have worked with them, and I know they also work harmoniously with Accomplice L.A. and LARF.

But sometimes scavenger hunt companies who are not thinking of their players’ experience will put a clue or event in the Hollywood and Highland shopping center without clearing it with management first. The result is that sometimes players get hassled by security, when they were just following game master instructions. It’s a drag when your game gets interrupted by something so easily avoidable, and makes you feel like maybe your play is against the rules, when it’s supposed to be so fun you don’t care about the rules.

Sorry, that got a little ranty.

Hollywood Boulevard is an amazing place to play, but my top reason is not the Chinese Theater or the El Capitan, the Walk of Fame, the home of the Oscars, or the Egyptian’s majestic courtyard, complete with hieroglyphic puzzle grid. All those are great, but the main reason I love it is it’s so easily accessible by the Metro, our subway. And from there, you can quickly zip to many other terrific destinations such as…

3. Downtown Los Angeles. There is a lot of great play space in downtown LA and I don’t think anyone’s taking full enough advantage of it. The Historic Core is a great place for an urban hunt; I rank it higher than to LA Live, which is great for some things but a little too Downtown Disney-esque for a really good game. I’m also very eager to play a game in Grand Park. Who’s with me?

4. Downtown Culver City. Lots of murals and public art, lively nightlife, historic touchstones, a hotel that’s shaped funny where a lot of little people got busy during the filming of The Wizard of Oz. Peerless.

5. Alpine Village. Okay, I’m out on a limb on this one. Still waiting for a client to take us up on this. But the kitschy, miniature German town in the shadow of the 110 in Torrance wins me over, even though I know it’s not even considered a top destination among kitschy miniature towns in Southern California (Solvang has the edge). But if you call and ask me to do a game here, I’ll say yes.

What area should I do next? Leave your vote in the comments. Make it a part of Southern California. I’m not an authority on Reykjavik, or most of the rest of the EU for that matter.

Passing the baton So this is both a joke but also not: when we...

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 12:24:15 -0400

After! Ready for winners.

Passing the baton

So this is both a joke but also not: when we founded Wise Guys, our first time starting a business, we wanted to be environmentally responsible as much as we could.

Now we run games, and there are plenty of people who won’t play a game unless they’re going to win something. Personally, I feel that if you want to win a prize, you should go on a game show (especially if you live in LA, where it’s really easy to get on one). However, a team who excels at one of our team building games should be rewarded, and it’s always fun to hand out a trophy, and fun to receive one as well.

Trouble is, buying trophies in bulk is really environmentally irresponsible. They’re easy enough to get, all right, but they’re cheap junky plastic made in China, shipped over here burning fuels all the way, and then sooner or later tossed into a landfill.

Isn’t it better to pick used trophies out of a landfill, clean them up a little, and pre-cycle? That’s our tactic, anyhow.

So when Greg called me to say he’d purchased 3 bankers boxes of baton twirling trophies, used, I was ecstatic. Trouble was, they’d been collecting dirt since the 1970’s and they were disgusting. However, nothing we couldn’t fix with a little elbow grease!

A scrub scrub here and a scrub scrub there… we set aside 1 day, 1 bucket of water, 1 pile of rags, 3 empty plastic bins, and 1 movie neither of us had seen to get the job done. We wiped the trophies up and down while watching Disney’s “Wreck-It Ralph,” an appropriate theme of gaming and a Pixar-quality movie.

The results speak for themselves! These trophies look even better in person than they do in photos. But you can’t win one by going on a game show, and you can’t buy them from us. If you want a used baton twirling trophy from the 70’s, you’ll have to win one of our games. Think you’ve got what it takes?

Top 5 Good Ideas for Diversity Team Building

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 23:03:00 -0400

Here at Wise Guys, we’re fond of the quote attributed to Plato that goes, “You can learn more about someone in an hour of play than from a year of conversation.” But what exactly can you hope to learn from them? In many instances, you just might learn how much value they have to offer to you as a human and a teammate, value that might have previously gone unnoticed. Many workplaces do a great job prioritizing diversity but that can sometimes be forgotten with the day-to-day challenges of getting the job done.

We’re all guilty, sometimes, of mentally de-humanizing the people we work with. If only he were more organized, we could wrap this meeting up. If only she weren’t always using the fax machine when I need it. If only all these people would just leave me alone, I could get my job done. What’s needed, in many cases, is to get out of the office and leave the work on the back burner - say, long enough to play a game - to appreciate the marvelous diversity of the workplace.

Here’s how we bring diversity to our team building games. You should feel free to consider these guidelines when planning your own team building event.

1. Cultures cuddle, not clash. It’s great when players from different backgrounds come together with a common goal: there’s so much more wisdom to be shared. This is also what makes food courts great: tasty morsels from around the world, their aromas blending (metaphorically speaking) to enchant the senses.

Here’s a couple challenges we sometimes incorporate into our games to spotlight all the great interchanges that cultural diversity can foment:

Take a photo of two dances or customs from different cultures side-by-side. This is a fun and silly way to get the players getting physical, and teams really throw themselves into it! We’ve seen Russian bottle dances, Mexican hat dances, the tango, the Horah, and everything in between!

Have one member teach everyone a non-English phrase. Pronounce it, then illustrate it. Isn’t this what America, the melting pot, is supposed to be all about? Here’s an all-time great example of a team really throwing themselves into the spirit of things, with an interpretive dance flourish:

2. Trust falls are for kids at camp. Our games are for every kind of body. Whether you’re a triathlete or rocking four wheels, trying to drop a few sizes or gain them, you’ll never have to sit on the sideline for any of our games. There’s nothing worse than feeling left out, or worse being the butt of jokes, so even though our games comprise physical elements, you’ll never have to do wind sprints or tackling drills. Thank goodness.

3. With age, and youth, come wisdom. One of my favorite memories of running a scavenger hunt was a game I did for Toyota in Hermosa Beach. After the game was over, we did a debrief where the teams discussed what they got out of the experience. One particular team comprised a bunch of young hot-shots and a token, white-haired gentleman. The young bucks couldn’t stop bragging about how their team had been the only one to correctly answer a question at a particular bar, FFFF, which stood for Fat Frank’s Fabulous Frankfurters (or something). The question required you to know that “4F” was a term from the army that referred to being disqualified from the draft. And only their team had a guy old and wise enough to know the answer! He just beamed.

Another challenge we designed to spotlight diversity of age: Take a photo where the ages of the people pictured adds up to 111 years. This means valuing another kind of diversity: having someone on your team who can do math.

4. Everyone’s a hero. By now, you’ve gleaned that our games are a melange of challenges, with puzzles, camera stunts, and much more. We do this on purpose so everybody on the team has the opportunity for a “hero moment.” If you’re the egghead who does the crossword every morning, or the former high school athlete brimming with confidence who can approach a stranger and ask to pose with her boa (feather or constrictor), you’ll have a chance to shine. Remember, for every photo challenge requiring extroverts to pose and ham it up for the camera, you need someone on the other, safer side pushing the shutter button. Don’t underestimate steady hands and an eye for composition.

5. Aretha spelled it. The bottom line is respect. Whatever someone’s size or shape, wherever in the world their family may be from, treating someone as you wish to be treated is the first step toward reaping the benefits of diversity. When you’re doing something you’ve never done before, such as an urban adventure game, you’re all an equal footing: you’re equally green, no matter what color your skin might be. Starting from scratch together can be great, if you have the tolerance and wisdom to listen with respect to ideas from everyone on your team.

Fees and Smees on the high seas! Some of our games require 20...

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 21:00:05 -0400

Fees and Smees on the high seas!

Some of our games require 20 foot long Twister mats or specially made trenchcoats… wouldn’t it be great if we could invent something that required nothing more than a few pennies, or Post-Its or Splenda packets to play?

That’s what we’re working on now. We had a brave and seaworthy group of hardy play testers over to take it for a test drive. Yes, I know I said the game has no gear and yet the players are wearing hats. That’s a non-necessary embellishment because, c’mon, gotta have a little razzle dazzle, right?

The game is called Mr. Smee and it concerns a group of pirates whose captain was just eaten by a crocodile and now must come up with an equitable way to distribute their hard-earned booty. Or they could just throw everyone off the plank; that works too.

The first play test was very illuminating, and there’ll be future iterations before we take this thing public. The game is like a hybrid between the pirate ship problem from game theory and “Werewolf,” although I hesitate to place it in such lofty company. We were inspired by Werewolf because of how simple and infinitely variable it is; it’s ambitious to try to concoct a new folk game, but that’s our current goal. Wish us luck! And shiver your own damn timbers!

Poll: do you think there are too many pirate games already?

The Most Risky Way To Start A Presentation In October 2012 we...

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 01:04:53 -0400

The Most Risky Way To Start A Presentation

In October 2012 we appeared at the IndieCade Red Carpet Awards show. Three times during the show, we presented some interstitial audience participation games.

One of our games involved a coordinated balloon drop from the balcony overhead and another was a game masked in a fully producing musical segment, performed live by Andre Meadows of Black Nerd Comedy, with backing vocals by the Wise Guys.

But the game that was met with the most positive audience response was, of course, the one with the lowest production value and the one we gave the least thought to. This was a game that was pulled out of thin air and never play tested. If we had play tested it, we might not have had the courage to play the game.

If you want your next presentation, either at a meeting, retreat, corporate event, or just giving a talk in a board room, to start off in a way that is SURE to get your crowd pert and awake, here’s how we did it. Proceed with caution! Only the fearless can take a game of Fly Paper.

1. Split the crowd into teams. This game can be played with as few as 2 people or as many as a few thousand. We played the game house left versus house right, but you can split it any way you want: boys vs. girls, newbies vs. veterans, etc.

2. Everyone who plays needs 1 piece of legal-sized paper. If you are splitting the crowd by sex, for instance, you can give different colored paper to men and women (e.g., green for men, purple for women). This is a good idea we didn’t think of until after we played it.

3. You need a target. We used a hula hoop, but it could be a waste basket, or a shot glass if you want to make it really hard.

4. Tell the players: “The object of the game is to fold your paper into a paper airplane. The first airplane to hit the target wins the game for your team.”

5. If anyone crumples the paper into a ball and throws it, say, “I forgive you for throwing a wadded up paper ball, even though that can be perceived as a sign of disrespect, but I’m surprised you have so little confidence in your ability to fold an airplane.”

6. Give a prize to the winner. It an be a piece of gum or a diamond watch.

7. Depending on the size of the crowd, the floor might be littered with failed airplanes. This is part of the end game that we didn’t think about ahead of time either, so the stage was kind of a mess for the rest of the show. But you can bet your audience will be paying attention now.

The Most Risky Way To Start A Presentation In October 2012 we...

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 18:23:00 -0500

The Most Risky Way To Start A Presentation

In October 2012 we appeared at the IndieCade Red Carpet Awards show. Three times during the show, we presented some interstitial audience participation games.

3. You need a target. We used a hula hoop, but it could be a waste basket, or a shot glass if you want to make it really hard.

4. Tell the players: “The object of the game is to fold your paper into a paper airplane. The first airplane to hit the target wins the game for your team.”

6. Give a prize to the winner. It an be a piece of gum or a diamond watch.

Five Things That Make for a Great Team Building Event

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 12:26:00 -0500

Team building events have grown in popularity over the past few years as more and more businesses have realized their potential. With so many different team building companies now around it’s important to ensure that your event ticks all the boxes. Jenny Pink from Accomplished Events, a team building company in the UK, suggests 5 tips to make sure that your team building event is a smash.

1. Above all else a team building event needs to be fun so that everyone can engage in the activities and throw themselves into the tasks.

2. A great team building event tests key skills in a more relaxed environment that still relates to the participant’s role within the workplace. For example, an “Apprentice”-style event which includes
various business tasks to test key skills such as communication, team
work, delegations, pitching and presentation.

3. It’s really important that the event engages everyone from all age ranges and demographics. Not all groups will have people who are able to do particularly physical activities so if an event can appeal to all involved
it will be more successful. An event that includes physical, mental and
creative challenges will appeal to a larger group.

4. A great team building activity should achieve all of its objectives. For
example, whether it’s a laid back “reward activity” such as champagne
tasting or chocolate making to acknowledge great performance or a
highly facilitated team development workshop, the event should match
the company’s goals.

5. Last but not least, a great team building event should be memorable. In order for employees to take their experience back to the workplace and
be able to reflect back positively the event needs to have the “fun factor,”
appeal to all attending, encompass company objectives, and test key skills that can be applied in the workplace.

If Greg and I didn’t blog much in 2012, it’s because...

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 23:09:12 -0500

If Greg and I didn’t blog much in 2012, it’s because - in part, anyway - we were designing our first ever ARG. That’s a buzzword, and it’s short for alternate reality game.

We were hired by USC to develop a game for high school students that would get them excited about science and technology education. The game was a 6 week adventure where students were inducted into i4, a secret society dedicated to the preservation of reason. As they completed entrance tests and challenges, the training wheels came off abruptly as the forces of superstition and tyranny attempted to thwart them.

The students learned a lot, and we did too. There were times where working on this game was very difficult. Fortunately we had support and guidance from some of the creative team at No Mimes Media. No Mimes is a luminary in the world of transmedia, and thanks to Maureen McHugh, Steve Peters, and Behnam Karbosi, Greg and I got a crash course in creating an ARG and the Hybrid High students got a crash course in playing one.

The kids far exceeded our expectations in some pretty amazing ways. We created a “Level 5” achievement that we thought was unattainable. The joke was on us, though, because one kid achieved it. They solved just about every puzzle and challenge we gave them, and it became clear they were really invested in the story. Which was nice, because we were too.

Getting kids excited about science is something we can all agree is beneficial, and we hope to have the opportunity to work on a project like this one again. Check out the video: it’s very impressive.

What do you know about ARGs?

IndieCade 2012: The village and the firehouse

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 16:24:44 -0500

In between producing the Red Carpet Awards show, running Pickpocket Junction, and hosting Iron Games, I did get to attend some of the festival and play some of the games. Here’s my report, after the jump.

I’m all the way on the right, by the way, enjoying Rakete.

I missed Mary Flanagan’s keynote, the talk on world design with Sara Thacher, and Eric Zimmerman’s talk with Bernie DeKoven because they conflicted with the abovementioned parts of the festival. So that was sad, but I did get to see some of the inspirations panel moderated by James Earnest. It was a good talk but I actually wish the Cheapass guru had contributed more instead of passing questions to the panelists, who were also good. My favorite exchange:

Ramiro Corbetta: You aren’t a starving artist?

Ben Samuel: (channeling Crispin Glover as George McFly) Oh no, I I I I I I eat EVERY day.

I played Field Frogger, first as a truck and then as a frog. I played it on the regular level (instead of advanced) and I won, which I think is pretty remarkable since I never played regular Frogger. My mistake was saying that out loud and getting jeered by all the participants. It takes a lot of people and a lot of props to do that game: it’s really ambitious, but it’s quite a marvel. I should add that part of the reason I won is Peter let me have a do-over when I jumped into the water: I didn’t know you were supposed to jump on a log. Like I said, I never played frogger, and after avoiding the cars it seemed consistent, but I now see the logic of the proper way.

I played a bit of Gorogoa and I could tell it was stunningly beautiful. I couldn’t tell if the software got stuck or I did - safe to say it was probably me, but it seemed like the iPad. I had so little time at the firehouse: of course I know I would have been more contented to spend an hour curled up with many of the games, including this one, and I know that I can, but it turns out that’s just not the kind of game I make room for in my life. It is clearly beautiful though.

Hidden in Plain Sight: this game was drawing a big crowd of many ages. It was a great party game. I won once using a strategy so stupid I can’t even remember it now, but it worked. The whole crowd was shouting for the others to kill me, but they’d used up their shots already.

Killer Queen: Talk about bad strategy. I lead my team to 3 crushing defeats in this game, including being terrible as the queen and totally unable to defend myself. Thanks to Nick Fortugno for being such a sporting and selfless NPC bomb.

Night Lights: On the other hand, I was captain of a dominant team in this game. We had a great time, in fact I had so much fun I am playing it at Mindshare this Friday night. You should come.

Open Source: I was lucky I ran into Celia Pearce on my way to the firehouse. With her, we cut to the front of many lines, including this one. This game was really neat, and I totally creamed Celia. It sure doesn’t photograph well.

Rakete: I might remember this one the longest. It was amazing how simple it was and how it really got the crowd going. Played this at night games, which was fantastic this year: great job Robin Arnott and all the rest. In case you don’t know, this is the game where 5 people use a 5-pronged foot pedal to launch and manipulate a rocket. Its escalating difficulty is sneaky and addictive.

Staccato: It was really neat to play a new sport, and I was kind of good at it. I won with the help of my terrific teammate. Shame on me for not remembering her name. She had those toe shoes on.

Who Took the Apple? Played this game at E3 but not at IndieCade. Love this game! Will definitely bust it out at my next party. Those BUTTON guys are evil geniuses. Lau was the first friend I made at my first IndieCade. He played with the jump rope I brought.

Yamove: Played the game, got the wristband. I was great at this game. I teamed up with a lady who happened to be walking by. We made good dance partners.

What did you think of these games?

IndieCade 2012: Email to the girls

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 02:16:00 -0400

It’s been ages since I posted anything on the blog. Our work is seasonal, and the summer is when we always have the most clients. This year was no exception: we had loads of corporate team building clients and did games all over town, especially Santa Monica 3rd St Promenade. On top of that, we did the series of Westfield Games, a giant game in San Francisco, and a few other special projects. I hope I get to cover the best and worst of all those and more in some posts in the next couple weeks.

I could go in chronological order or any other order but instead I’m going to write about IndieCade.

Four girls I went to high school with and I have a little listserv, you might say: we email each other a few times a week, sometimes a few times a day, to check in about what’s going on. One of these girls is my wife. In recent years our email circle has seen its fair share of weddings, babies born, breakups, engagements being called off, as well as lists of what we ate when we were sad, danced to when we were happy, etc. etc. In my Gmail account I just type in Gi- and it auto fills in “The Girls [Group]”.

Like you blog readers, the girls didn’t hear from me much in the last few months and I resolved to write to them about some of the big things I’d done since I’d fallen off the map except to occasionally write a short email with a couple sentences complaining about being busy - very generic, not my best work.

Here’s the email I sent them about IndieCade, with as much or as little commentary as I may write before I go to bed.

Some of what I wrote will be edited to avoid hurting specific peoples’ feelings. The full text is after the jump.

I should mention that in an email sent to the girls just moments before, I had promised to spend 20 minutes writing about IndieCade and another 20 writing about my work with No Mimes Media before turning out the lights and going to bed at 12 midnight. As a new dad, much of my time is spent thinking about when I can get to bed.

In October of 2010 I was walking around downtown Culver City and found a terrific festival was going on that included lots of video games which looked neat to me and plenty of the kind of games I am really interested in. The festival was called IndieCade and it was in its third year - its first in Culver City (the first 2 years were in Seattle, at Digipen, where I just went and appeared on a panel when I stayed at Piper’s place with her chickens). The inventor of CEO is Stephanie, and her 2 helpers who’ve been involved since the beginning were Celia and Sam.

My first year at IndieCade, Greg wasn’t there (cause I just found it) and I just checked stuff out and played games and talked to people.

My second year at IndieCade (last year) Greg and I had a game on Sunday morning (Dot Racing, AKA Twister Race) that not a ton of people came to play (it was too early but we got some great photos of the people who did play, including Greg’s roller derby buddies in costume), but we were highly visible at the festival, including playing audience games during the Red Carpet Awards.

The Wise Guys audience games at the Red Carpet Awards 2011 were a lot of fun for us and we got some great feedback. We heard a lot of people liked the variation on the massive multiplayer thumbwrestling, namely that when someone defeats you, you become the cheering section for that person, and so on, with winners of multiple matches gaining more and more cheerleaders. (I got this idea from James Bailey, director of ComedySportz LA, where I have done shows for 10 years now.) When the game is played to its logical conclusion, the whole room is cheering for 1 of 2 people, who square off in the final match-up. We made the editorial decision to let the game play for a few minutes but cut it off before 1 winner was declared. In retrospect it would have been better to let it play out, even if it had run long.

Our second audience game in 2011 involved a bit of theatricality inspired by Oprah: every team had to assemble a shuffled deck of cards in order. Figuring out the order was up to you, but we picked the easiest thing we could think of: A-K from bottom to top, spades then hearts then clubs then diamonds. We gave the hint, “Aces are low.” The correctly assembled deck had words written on 3 sides, so you could use the side with now writing as a key to orient the cards. The 3 words were “INGSAY ANGRYAY IRDSBAY” which is “Sing Angry Birds” in Pig Latin. We had intended for the winning table to sing the theme from Angry Birds, but instead the winning table had one woman who sang the words “Angry Birds!” in an operatic way, and we declared her the winner. I have an idea for a different phrase for the next time we play this game, but I will not reveal it here of course. The bit of theatricality is that after we explained the rules, we revealed that the cards were all hidden under the chairs they were seated in, around the tables. I would use this game again.

The third game from 2011 was called “Balloonacy” and it was a risk because we had never done a paper playtest and didn’t know if it could be solved. We put a box and a helium balloon tied to a little weight on every table. The game was one the whole room would win or lose: the object of the game was to have every table’s balloon be the same color as its box (at the start, none of them were). To achieve this, you could exchange balloons with any adjacent table. To our surprise, many solved tables deadlocked and did not play the game, even though the win condition could only be reached if successful teams temporarily traded away their matching balloon to receive it back later. Greg and I sweated for a moment, but the stalemate was broken when a group lifted their table and carried it across the room to exchange balloons with a farther one. This was a triumphant moment and one I will long remember.

So some people liked these games and some didn’t. I heard from people who said it was among their favorite part of the night and some who didn’t care for the games in theory, in execution, or both. But I was proud of the work we did. I wanted to be more successful this year.

The other thing I did at IndieCade last year that some people remember is I rapped about a game I have never played, “Parappa the Rapper” to win the final match of the Metagame at the closing ceremony. I wanted to top that this year too. Back to my email to the girls.

This year, my third at IndieCade, I was heavily involved and so was Greg. He was a Festival Director and scheduled programming, getting people to appear on panels and give talks, etc. I was producer of the Red Carpet Awards. Also, we had a big game on Sat AM that an OK amount of people played.

The big deal for me about running Pickpocket Junction on this occasion was that there was one round where the players included Sara Thacher, Gabe Smedresman, and Catherine Herdlick (who won handily with a terrific strategy). These are people I really admire and it made me feel terrific to have them play my game. It was also very warm and the game involves wearing trench coats. I am eager to play it in San Francisco in December, where I think it will be more appropriate.

Shortly after last year’s festival, Stephanie asked me to produce the show, and asked Greg to be a Festival Chair. I’ve been committed to the project for about a year but things ramped up as the festival got closer, of course. We were both on a lot of calls and video chats but different ones, and I was the one who first asserted I would do no more calls without agendas, and I was kind of a dick about making sure we stayed on the agenda while the call was going on. I liked all the people involved, but didn’t need to spend 3 hours on the line with them.

The festival is Thus - Sun. The kickoff night, the first night, Thursday, is the Red Carpet Awards. 500 people submitted games to the Festival. 36 of those were Nominees, eligible for awards in 10 categories. Something like another 50 games were festival select, that were featured throughout the festival and were eligible in Audience Favorite and Developers Favorite. Our game, Pickpocket Junction, was a selected game. The Red Carpet Show is when 9 awards are given out, including the Trailblazer award but not including the 2 Favorite awards, which are voted on over the course of the festival and are presented on Sunday night at the closing ceremony.

Oh gosh only 12 minutes left!

Remember, I was trying to spend only 20 minutes writing this email so I could go to bed.

Last year’s show was roundly criticized because the host made lots of jokes at the expense of gamers and the presenters were selected badly and annoyed the audience. The young woman who produces the show is named Leilani or Lani - she is Hawaiian and she is fantastic, and you can tell she’s going to be hugely successful in whatever she wants to do, and has been very successful already in 3 or 4 areas. In the weeks before the festival she began a full time job and entered grad school, while producing the awards show. She produced in the sense that she handled everything about the venue: the lights, the A/V, renting the tables, the food, everything about producing the event. I was on a committee with Stephanie, the CEO of IndieCade, Lani, a helper named Erin, and Mare, a game developer in Canada whom I have never met but who was a big help - she spoke for the voice of the community and helped us make sure the show was in good taste and would be well received. She did a great job polling people about last year’s show and their hopes for this year’s show, and helped inform me that, for instance, kicking off with a Neil Patrick Harris style opening number wouldn’t be well received. I still managed to get a musical performance in the show.

Mare solicited comments and feedback from indie game devs who had been in the audience and really helped tailor it to the audience. Also it was her compilation of remarks that made people really go, “Oh I guess we CAN’T make everyone happy” and I said, “I’ve been saying that all along.”

Since Lani was producing the event, that meant I didn’t have to worry about any of that logistical shit and instead I took on the job of writing the script and producing the evening. Making a red carpet show that people would enjoy, that would smooth over last year. I can’t stress enough how many times people stressed to me how we could NOT repeat what happened last year. I was there, and I felt the host’s jokes bombing and the presenters not winning over the crowd but I didn’t think it was THAT bad. Lani and I were there for each other through a lot of this frustrating repetition. Lani worked so hard on the show last year she would have considered not doing it again except that would have meant walking away on a poor ending performance and she couldn’t bring herself to do that: she had to redeem herself.

I’m going to skip ahead and say the show was a success. I aver immodestly that, given the opportunity to craft an evening’s entertainment with very little oversight, it turned out great. I would liken it to planning our wedding in 2008. My conceit for the show was this: people thought last year’s show lacked relevance and legitimacy. To remedy that, let’s have all of this year’s awards presented by duos: a significant designer from the world of video games coupled with someone from the wider world of gaming. I had a very ambitious list of who those people would be, and I ended up getting a lot of them: a Quidditch player from UCLA, one of Greg’s roller derby pals (a talent who has done motion capture talent for video game characters including Lara Croft), a former Survivor contestant (Stephan Fishbach, 1st runner up in Tocantins), and even some great last minute gets like this kind of locally famous but also famously quirky gal who runs the best pinball alley in town, who came in this great short pink sparkly dress and was a big hit.

This year, before the show was even over, Stephanie was telling me how great it was, and Sam and Celia came and did the same. Lani was so happy she quit next year’s show.

I wish I had more than 4 minutes because what I really want to do is bitch about how awful I got dogpiled on my script in the days before the show, days when we had to lock the script and I was getting awful feedback from people who have not learned the compliment sandwich. I also want to tell you about the host, Felicia Day, and how our first meeting went and how then on show night we bonded.

Since I have a little more time, I will tell you more about my 2 days with Felicia Day. Lani and I met her at a coffee shop on Pico and I was pretty star struck because I love “Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog” and I’d been watching her weekly video feature, the Flog, all year to get a sense for her voice so I could write a script, and had come to really enjoy those weekly viewings: she’s like a pleasant person you invite into your home for a chat for a few minutes a week. So I was disappointed when our first meeting didn’t go well.

Not that anybody’s asked me to play shrink, but I think Felicia has been burned by a lot of negative comments she’s read about herself online. If I were her friend in real life, I’d tell her to focus on the positive things people say about her. She has many fans and has built a wonderful niche for herself based on her talent but also her natural charisma: people like her. It seems she focuses on the negative. I base this on a few things she said during that first meeting. It might also explain why I got a feeling like she had her hackles up. I also know that there are lots of instances of online places where video gamers leave comments of them ganging up on people or using exceptionally nasty language. This happens with other online communities too, I know. I’ve never been the target of it so I don’t know how it feels - I’m sure it isn’t pleasant.

All the same, I told her I was a fan and gave her the script I wrote. Something else Felicia said again and again was that she was very busy. After a while I was thinking, “We get it. We’re all busy. We’re all volunteering our time.” So instead of emailing the script ahead of time - it was short - I brought a hard copy and invited her to read it there. She read it through, snickered at a couple of the jokes I’d written, and said the script was good and that she would want to do a re-write to put it more in her own voice. She was true to her word and did this on schedule and what she wrote was fantastic. She killed, and her improvements to what I wrote were a big part of why the show was such a success.

So all that went fine - the problem came when I passed along a question I’d been asked to pose. It wasn’t my idea but I’d been asked to do it, and Felicia seemed to get upset because it seemed we were questioning her bona fides as a gamer, or her legitimacy (since that was an issue last year). If I had to do it over again I would not have asked the question at all, since her reaction was something along the lines of, “Look if you don’t think I’m legit you can get someone else to host the show.” Lani and I backtracked and emphasized that she was our top choice, and that’s the truth. But after Felicia left, we both let out a tense breath. It was a crummy note to end on.

After that, we communicated only with a few emails which were brief and professional, but courteous. When we met again on show night, I didn’t know how it was going to go, but I told her that I would rehearse with her for a couple hours to get her comfortable doing the show and that my #1 goal was to make her look good. By the time we were done with rehearsal, we were joking together and I felt like the walls had come down. I enjoyed spending time with the real Felicia as much as I like inviting her video blog into my study, it just took a while to get there. As I said, I think it is too bad that she’s had that reaction to the criticism she’s received and appears to let it cause her to act as though she has a chip on her shoulder, but I’m not inside her head and nobody asked me to pretend to be. What I know for sure is, she was a total star on our stage and whoever hosts the show next year will have some big shoes to fill.

A final word on web criticism: I read lots of things about the host last year and how unsatisfactory he is, but I read hardly anything about this year’s show. Maybe there were write-ups I missed, but mostly what I saw was lists of who won and not first-person accounts of the show itself. There may be many reasons for this, but I have to believe at least one factor is that everyone’s all too eager to dig in the knives when a show is bad but I don’t think there’s enough praise when stuff goes right. I try to represent positivity with the stuff I write online as often as I can and I wish more people would do the same. I appreciate those who do.

But I don’t have time for that - I just have time to tell you one last story about the Red Carpet Show and about the games that Greg and I did. The worst part of the show every year is thanking the sponsors: it’s a long list of names, it’s deadly dull, and it brings the show to a dead halt. Stephanie has had to do it every year and this year she insisted that she not do it because she hates being the worst part of the show. My bad case scenario was I could have just done a long list of names and asked Stephanie to do it again and that would have been no worse than years past, but I wanted to do better, and I foolishly left it til the very last minute with no time to think of a good idea, except to count the list of sponsors and see there are 26 of them

There are 26 letters of the alphabet. Also, and this is a piece of trivia I was hoping to turn into a puzzle someday and still might, Walt Disney received 26 Oscars in his lifetime, still a record.

So I frenziedly stayed up over many nights (Laurel can tell you I worked a lot of late nights and was stressed in a way that left me quite unable to handle much of regular life) and made a slide for each of the sponsors with the name of the sponsor and a single letter bolded, one for every letter of the alphabet

Playstation

Adobe

Culver City

etc

This meant taking the list of sponsors and rearranging them, while still keeping the sponsors who gave the most $ near the top, and I was able to do it with only a couple cheats: I added a K to MagicK the Gathering, and when that slide came up it got a big laugh, which was the goal, but not I think disrespectful to the sponsor. And Loot Drop, which was my Q. I put the slide up and then there was a pause and a mirror flip of the side which turned the P in Drop into a q.

Also each slide had the sponsor logo, some of which I had to chase down myself but most of which Lani gave me, and the 3rd thing on each slide was a still from 1 of Disney’s Oscar Winning films, which I did just about entirely so I could pair Cards Against Humanity (a sponsor) with Disney’s Oscar winning film “Der Feuhrer’s Face” in which Donald Duck becomes a Nazi. Seemed really appropriate.

Anyway, I was writing the script for this bit, to accompany the slides, longhand on a piece of scratch paper 20 minutes before the show began, and the night before the show I had asked Akira, director of gamemaker relations, to please appear on stage and do it and he said, “No problem.” He has worked for Nintendo and for Disney as an Imagineer and when I asked him how come he was so cool about it, he said that he was also in Iraq for a year so if no one’s shooting at him, it’s really easy for him to keep his cool.

I’m already over time but here are the 3 audience games that Greg and I did:

The first one was the one we got the most praise on: people complimented us on this all festival long, and it’s the one we spent the least time and thought on. There’s a lesson there. We came onstage and explained that at the Oscars they show movie clips, at the Grammies they play music, and at IndieCade we play games (same patter as last year). Volunteers gave a piece of paper to everyone in the audience. Greg and I explained the game was house left versus house right. Each of us held up a hula hoop for our side of the audience and said the object of the game was to make the paper into an airplane and hit it through the hoop of the correct side. First person to do so wins for their side. It was great - it was pandemonium. We didn’t think through the end game at all. People told me later that they were getting airplanes in their hair and throwing them forward. Someone else said that the guys in their row started making airplanes before we’d even said that was the object of the game, which I think is a credit to us for anticipating what the audience would enjoy. Brandii from DigiPen later suggested that 2 colors of paper would have been a good idea, which I agree with. The best part was after about a minute went by and the second wave of planes started coming. The first minute were crappy planes from people who rushed, and wisenheimers who crumpled theirs up into a ball, which was totally predictable and of course did not trigger a win. Eric Zimmerman, a sophisticated game designer from NY who would go on to win 2 of the night’s 9 awards for 2 different games, ran all the way up to the stage to throw his airplane through the hoop, which of course is a good move. Greg and I both had a winner at about the same time so we went for a second plane - house right won. And then the audience was all armed and the stage was littered with paper airplanes. I said, “You have 10 seconds to throw the rest of your planes” and it was a blizzard all over again. The planes on the stage remained there: set dressing! And some clever person saved his airplane until the next time we were on stage and threw it at us then.

Tracy Fullerton from USC paid me a particularly nice compliment about this game, which was just lovely. She is a splendid woman.

The next time we were on stage, we played a game called Rapcom (the previous game was called Fly Paper by the way). We were joined by Andre Meadows from ComedySportz and Black Nerd Comedy. This was a bit that I produced: the musical number. Andre performed an original rap he composed along with music he’d put together himself, including SFX from Mario Bros. In the rap, he had hidden the names of 12 classic Arcade Games (Punch Out, Pac Man, etc). Greg and I backed him up, Beastie Boys style. Then we put a phone number up on the screen and the first person to text all the names to that number won. Then we did a gag (Andre’s idea) where he did the rap a second time but we forced him to do it faster. We rehearsed for about 90 minutes on the day of the show and it went perfectly. This tied in well with a thing I did last year where I rapped at the festival and people still talk about that, but I don’t have time to tell that story. There’s a video out there somewhere. I think we impressed the audience with our skill at this performance - and somebody totally won with 10/12 and we put that guy on stage and gave him a trophy and he had a huge smile, he’d come from Norway - but they didn’t like it as much as paper airplanes. Also someone texted in the answer was “butts and farts” which wasn’t even close.

There were about 12 submissions from audience members, including 2 jokers.

Our last game used the natural features of the space because it involved dropping balloons on the audience, and there was a balcony overhead. We played a balloon game with the audience last year and it was called Balloonacy, so this year’s game was called Balloominati. We told the audience it was a house front vs house rear game of hot potato with balloons: at 1 minute, the side with more balloons on it was the loser. We played some music and people stood up and batted the balloons around, and then at time I boomed on the mic, “HUNGER GAMES STYLE RULES CHANGE: the balloons are now GOOD. You want the balloons.”

Then explained the rules:

There are 5 balloons each in 1 of 4 colors

Get together with the other people who have your color balloon

Pop the balloon: inside is a letter

First team to unscrambled the 5-letter solution word and shout it out all together wins

The green team won: they figured it out and yelled “BRAIN!” This is a game we used at Mindshare in the spring, but we didn’t have a balcony and volunteers to drop balloons from overhead, we just kind of dumped them into the crowd from the 4 corners of the audience. And there was ONE GUY who was at both events, which we didn’t expect.

OK I’m way over time and there’s no way I’m going to write about No Mimes tonight, so IndieCade is what you get. But since I’d planned to email for 40 minutes and it’s only been 33 I’ll take a little time to forward you some of the dogpile emails I got.

One of them contained a criticism of a line I wrote for Felicia: “I’d like to thank you for all your elbow grease and sweat equity, all the blood, tears, and energy drink you pour into your projects.” Standard awards-show joke. I got a note that said this line made it seem like the audience was all a bunch of energy drink swilling losers who live in their basements and don’t have girlfriends.

Did I write ANY of that stuff? No. So I changed the line to “almond milk,” and Felicia said it and then made a joke about it being weird that indie devs drink almond milk, and then did a bit about milking an almond - it killed. So that was a negative that became a positive. I hope almond milk becomes the new video gamer stereotype beverage.

Love you guys,

M.

This is all very vain, of course, because I didn’t even write about THE GAMES I played at IndieCade, or the great people I hung out with over the weekend, and I will get around to that, but I’ve read a number of posts in that vein and nothing yet about the show I worked so hard on, so there it is.

If you’ve read all this way, you have to have a reaction to something above, or just an incredible amount of stamina. Please post a comment.

The next blog post I write will be shorter. I cannot say the same for the next email I write the girls. I still owe them the email about No Mimes.

Photo

Sat, 26 May 2012 16:20:21 -0400

May's Days

Fri, 18 May 2012 01:28:00 -0400

What do “Bachelor Pad” and “RuPaul’s Drag Race” have in common? For once thing, both called recently to see if I was available to produce challenges and games for them over the summer. And while normally I like taking TV work - well, clarification, I like getting paid TV money - there is TOO MUCH going on at Wise Guys for me to check out for a few weeks. That’s a pretty good feeling.

How much is too much? If you asked me a couple weeks ago what I had going on, I would have said to you: “We’re preparing a cell phone scavenger hunt for a professional group of women who work in construction; an Olympics themed game for high school kids attending DeVry; and a team building game for the librarians of the city of Pasadena.” In fact, I know that’s what I would have said to you, because I said it to a bunch of people in the last few weeks, and even that only describes the first half of the month.

Now that all those games are through, if you want to read about how they went, click below the jump.

We played Clockwise, our cell phone scavenger hunt, for the first time in Newport Beach’s Balboa Fun Zone - the inspiration, so I’m told, for the banana stand from “Arrested Development.” The client was a group of women in the construction business, and they were a great group: bright, spirited, and feisty.

This game went really smoothly so there isn’t much to report. Only two details stand out. Firstly, every neighborhood in which you scout a game is different, and the Balboa Fun Zone was full of people who were really, really friendly. Friendly and laid back. Everyone who we asked if we could put a clue on their store said, “Okay” and when I said I’d call the day before the game to remind them, they said, “You can if you want, but it’s fine. I’ll just be here.”

Secondly, the challenge that Clocky presents the teams involves performing a stunt and getting as many people involved as possible. One team engaged this challenge while in a park where two young moms were relaxing with their infants. “Let’s get the babies to do it!” the team cried, so I in my giant clock head costume accompanied the women who accosted the mothers and asked to include the babies in their shenanigans. As chance would have it, this particular team had just an hour before picked their team name and, no joke, it was “Stealing Babies.” I’m happy to say they did not live up to their reputation.

How do I know this took place? As a small business owner, I wear many hats and one of them is a giant clock-shaped headpiece with eyeholes, so I get to play with our clients personally.

The next morning we got up very early to prepare the Olympics-themed game in the parking lot of DeVry’s Pomona campus. This was a new game with mostly new material, including a number of games, such as the rubber-ducks-and-fuzzy-dice relay race that had never been tested, exactly, per se, in so many words. I mean, Greg and I tested them, and that was hilarious in its own way. I wish I had video. But many of the events were untried, though we also had some proven winners, such as Dot Racing (neé Twistianapolis 500).

This game went off without a hitch, though there was one big change-up: we’d prepared a game for eight teams of 5 students each, and instead we had two. That’s right: 10 students down from 40. Whether it was because of prom weekend, Cinco de Mayo, or each student’s own individual situation, for whatever reason, we had a 75% drop off in projected attendance. But just like I learned in my theater background, we turned a negative into a positive and had a day-long showdown between Brazil and Argentina. We had hired more staff than we needed to pull off all the games, so our personnel became the cheering section for the players, and we were able to give extra personal attention to our two teams. They started out a bit skeptical - isn’t that just like young people today? - but by the time we got to the second or third event, they were really throwing themselves into it, and we had a very fruitful debrief session after the game was over. For a day that began with so much uncertainty about how it would go, it was a big triumph once we made the decision not to let the unexpectedly low turnout get us down.

After a couple days’ rest we played with the librarians of Pasadena. They are not as quiet as you might think! This gig came about when we got a call from someone on the planning committee for the daylong program. She told us morale was low, there had been layoffs, and at last year’s event, everyone wanted to go home after lunch so they were looking for something that would pep up the participants and make them glad they’d come.

Greg and I were happy to take the gig, as we are both lifelong library members and supporters of the library system. And besides over the course of our lives we’ve paid tens of dollars in fines, so of course we seized on the opportunity to get some of that money back. (Kidding.) The game we selected was Play Stations, because it works so well in a park. The teams were funny, organized, and smart: I frequently had a hard time keeping up with them while facilitating my challenge.

Two big take-aways from this game: one, there was a woman I’ll call Kay who, I think, based on some cues I picked up, may have been developmentally disabled. Due to an actor we had booked on this game who got in a car crash an hour before we were scheduled to begin, I stepped in to host the game Chairman Cow, one of the challenges players tackle during a round of Play Stations. It’s a fast-paced game of quick listening and reaction, where I point at you and say 1 of 2 words and you must say the other and do a corresponding gesture. Usually it’s played with 2 teams and I eliminate players who make mistakes until one whole team has been knocked out and the other team is the winner. But as the game was drawing near a close, I had 4 teams playing this game at once, including Kay’s team. I knocked players out left and right but Kay stayed in all the way to the end and ultimately was the winner of the entire game.

When we debrief Play Stations, I like to start by giving team members the opportunity to brag about someone else on their team. It usually gets the ball rolling, and who doesn’t like to pay or receive a compliment? The very first brag I got was from a member of Kay’s team who complimented on her triumphing over everyone else in the game of Chairman Cow, and she got a huge round of applause. It just goes to prove what I tell all the teams at the beginning of every game: you simply never know which member of your team will lead you to your next great victory.

And for the last word on this game and in this blog post, I’ll turn it over to the client:

Hi Greg,

I’ve heard nothing but wonderful comments about Staff Development Day – the term “the best ever” comes up frequently. I talked to others on the task force, and we were all very pleased with the whole day – especially the games in the park. Having it out of doors was a great idea. I heard grumbling about it beforehand, and nothing but praise afterwards. Thank you for making our day a huge success!

Going to Pomona! This is what we loaded the car up with to do an...

Mon, 07 May 2012 17:16:30 -0400

Going to Pomona! This is what we loaded the car up with to do an Olympics themed game for DeVry University. Usually Greg and I include a few puzzles in every game we do. Puzzles take up no room when you are packing them. If the game is all physical stunts, it requires a lot of gear. It’s like the circus packed up for a beach vacation.

Hexagonals: This breaks my recent streak, but I want to post...

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 01:57:07 -0400

Hexagonals: This breaks my recent streak, but I want to post this video anyway. Confession: I watch tons of Fort Boyard on YouTube every week. I steal stuff from this show and pitch it to Survivor all the time. There are some great games, and this is one the best ones I’ve seen this year. It seems clearly unfair - rigged in favor of the contestant - but I like it anyway.

Fort Boyard, for those who don’t know, is a French game show filmed on a decommissioned military base on an island: like Alcatraz. The island and the facility are owned by the television production company, and they sell licenses to TV stations all around the world, which means crews of various nationalities are always coming to the island to film. There are many games in different rooms, and some of them are played against a masked confederate, who is part of production. This would never fly on American TV but it’s too bad because games like this afford a lot of opportunities.

The other reason a game like this would not make it past the Survivor challenge room is because there is too much chance involved. Besides which, they are really shying away from purely mental challenges. They don’t do many of these aside from the Concentration game every once in a while.

Stage play

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 23:48:22 -0400

Thanks for the quick and positive feedback, Jed. I will continue in this vein. Here’s the story of the mischief we got up to on Thursday night.

If you’ve ever read our newsletter, you know we present games for the public every month at Mindshare, a downtown salon for outgoing, progressive, inquisitive types. There are TED-style talks, art, music, a bar, and for almost a year now, there have been games from Wise Guys Events. Greg goes more often than I do: in our organization, he is the vice-president of Mindshare, just as I am the vice-president of blogging. (We have a lot of vice-presidents, but not president.) The theme at Thursday night’s gathering was “Play” and since that’s our specialty, we asked if we could deliver our game to the whole audience at once, from the stage, instead of having a booth, table, or station where we can invite people to play, like usual.

And also we asked if we could play 3 games instead of 1. Dougie Fresh, the Czar of Mindshare, gave us the green light all the way. He is a notoriously good sport.

We started with a game called “Majority Rules” that Greg and I think we learned from Colleen Macklin, but we aren’t sure. Greg tucked 2 pieces of paper under every seat: goldenrod and baby blue (go Bruins!). We explained that the game had only 1 rule: no communicating with the other players, which was everyone in the room. On the count of 3, everyone was to hold up one of the two pieces of paper. The object of the game was for the whole room to show the same color. All good games involve the choices the player makes; this is a very simple game, made of 1 very simple choice, but the choice of each individual affects the outcome for the entire group.

In our intro, we explained that one of the best parts of playing games is winning, and if this game worked, we would all win. That got a cheer from the crowd.

The disappointing thing is, one player, who I think was trying to be funny, called out “Yellow!” just before we played, so there wasn’t really a pure experiment. What we expected was that one color would appear to be the majority on the first trial, and then with subsequent iterations we would closer and closer to unanimity. And this did happen, but there were a few players who chose to throw blue even when the rest of the crowd was trending yellow. They got booed by the crowd! I liked the engagement. I called the audience a bunch of losers. Hey, if you play, sometimes you lose. We gave it about 5 tries, and at the end of that time everyone was yellow except for about 4-5 independent-minded blue-throwers. Pretty fun.

The next two games were not corrupted. The middlemost game involved dumping a bunch of inflated party balloons into the crowd. I suggested we call it “Balloonacy.” During our prep session, which we did over video chat, Greg said, “Haven’t we used that name before?”

He’s right:

We played a game at last year’s IndieCade red carpet awards ceremony that we called Balloonacy.
Last year I pitched a stunt called Balloonacy to a game show for kids (called a “shiny floor show”), that involved rubbing balloons on your head and sticking them to the wall. This was eventually replaced with a game in which you sat in sticky syrup and then sat on toy dogs in an effort to get them stuck to your rear. It was called “Butt Pugs.” I’m not kidding.

So we picked a different name.

The first part of the game was like Hot Potato: all the balloons were batted around the crowd, merrily. The DJ cued up “Yakkety Sax” from Benny Hill. The balloons mostly migrated to the front of the crowd, but Greg sportingly went in and helped swat them so the rest of the room got some love. You could bat the balloon or pass it: if someone passed it to you, you had to take it. If it hit the floor, it was your responsibility if you were the last person to touch it. We had help from confederates, who dumped 2 garbage bags of balloons into the crowd from the back of the room while we threw another 2 from the stage.

After about a minute or so, I interrupted in the mic with the announcement: “Huger Games-style rules change: You now want the balloons.” A great roar went up from the crowd, of betrayal and covetousness. We did a complete 180 on the object of the game 1 minute into it: diabolical! “If you have a balloon, stand up with it. It’s yours. Get together with the other people who have the same color balloons as you: there are 5 each. There is a letter inside every balloon: pop them, unscramble the word, and be the first to have your whole team shout it out to win.”

There were five colors of balloons, so five groups formed, each group trying to be the first to call out the 5-letter solution word. The sounds of balloons popping came from all around. We canvassed the crowd, asking for predictions of which color would win. Yellow and Blue had many supporters, as did Green. Nobody seemed to be rooting for red, who haplessly still had 2 balloons unpopped while the other groups were already working on their scramble.

The group that had gathered in the center of the aisle had it first: I couldn’t see them because of the light in my eyes. One team member called out, “BRAIN.” What I should have done was insisted the whole team yell it out. Instead, in my giddy excitement that the game had worked (we never play tested it), I declared, “Brain is the correct answer!” Thank goodness it was actually a solver and not just somebody randomly yelling “hey” or another word that sounds like Brain, or I would have given away the whole thing.

Now here’s what’s peculiar: the winning team was Yellow. We brought them up onstage and gave them prizes. There were only four team members. I saw one of them holding the slips of paper in his hand, spelling out Brain. After giving them ray guns and swords (to really drive home the Hunger Games tie-in) (no, not really, that’s just what we had lying around in the Cavern of Wonders that is our garage office), I went back to my seat. And there, on the floor by my purse, was a yellow balloon. It had the letter A in it. The Yellow team had solved the scramble with only NIRB. But then how had one team member had all 5 letters in his hand? I am perplexed. The only explanation I can think of is that the balloons’ colors aren’t as clear in the auditorium lights as they are when we’re blowing them up in full lighting.

And that was the game of Balloominti, who may be the only ones who know the real answer.

The last game we played was kind of more like a prank. It was called, perhaps, Barnyard Olympics, or Tortoise and the Hare, for it was about racing animals, but unlike hares and tortoises, animals that make NOISE. The audience was divided up into 4 sections, representing Chickens, Monkeys, Lions, and Cows. One racer on stage embodied that animal: me, Dougie, and 2 audience volunteers, who were excellent sports. I briefed them on the game while Greg coached the audience in their animal noises.

All racers started all the way upstage. The audience would make their animal noises on cue, and whenever one animal group was louder than the others, that animal racer would move forward. Who ever made it all the way to the downstage side, closest to the audience, won.

Only it was all a sham: I explained in the huddle to the other 3 racers to just play it for show, move forward a little, then stand still and let someone else go. We’d all drag it out, and reach the finish line at about the same time.

And that’s sort of what happened.

The audience went nuts with noise, which we knew they would, and it was just a din, no specific sound discernible. So the racers start to move forward, all the while doing their gestures, and the crowd gets louder and more incomprehensible as we all move closer downstage. Except me. Did I mention I was the chicken?

I flapped my wings and pecked at the air and gave the audience dirty looks, as if to say, “Why can’t you cluck louder? Everyone else is leaving me in the dust and I’m stuck here acting like a chicken for no reason, like an idiot.” And I dragged it out and then, when the other 3 were starting to get close to the finish line, I just walked all the way downstage and won the race. I basked in my unearned victory and did a very unsportsmanlike victory dance. Because when you make up the rules and compete in the game, you are highly likely to win, especially if you are a cheat.

Afterwards I had a woman tell me that I was such a funny chicken she was laughing too hard to cluck, which I thought was a wonderful compliment.

We’ll be doing some more shenanigans at Mindshare 50 next month. I hope you will join us.

Rainy day recess, sunny day raincoats

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 17:56:07 -0400

It’s too late for a new year’s resolution, but my new goal is to write more posts to this blog that reflect my own personal experience as a game master, as opposed to re-posting articles about the state of gaming today.

I start with a story of failure and a story of triumph.Well I don’t know if it was failure or not. Perhaps putting it in writing will help me think it through. The job was a team building event for a group of drug counselors with a toxic workplace. Workers from different divisions or of different ethnic background treated one another with open hostility. Our event had to be moved indoors due to thunder showers, so we were crammed in a very tiny conference room with barely enough room for everyone to fit.

Greg and I got to the client’s workplace and spent an hour scouring nearby places of business to see if anyone had a space they would give us for free or cheap. Greg found a church who asked for $100 and I found a restaurant that would give us the room for free. The church was 2 mi away but I decided against moving the whole group by car for fear of losing momentum, and when I proposed the restaurant, which was across the street, the client told me he didn’t think he could get them to go out in the rain, since most of them didn’t bring umbrellas. In hindsight, I think I should have insisted we not do the event at the workplace. It wasn’t that the space was so small, although that certainly didn’t make it easy, but people would try to sneak out and go back to their offices - presumably to look at Facebook - and we’d have to pull them back in, and it became very bad for the morale in the room. “Hey where’s so-and-so? She left! She’s not allowed to leave, this is mandatory. If I have to be here…”

There was a participant who was griping so loudly that he was drowning me out, and this was in a tiny room. I paid him a lot of special attention and tried my hardest not to allow him to derail the momentum of the workshop, but he was pretty determined to be disruptive. The group in general was quite prone to chattiness and I was glad I had brought my train whistle, which I had to use several times. That’s a lesson I’ve learned from doing ComedySportz remotes in people’s homes for groups of teenagers.

I perspired a lot during this workshop and I didn’t leave feeling like it had been a few success. But at least once during the debrief for each exercise, someone offered a genuine comment that shed light on the larger purpose behind the games. And during every game we played, many people showed that they were committed to playing the game as best as they could. So I liked that part of it. But mostly I liked when it ended.

And then yesterday was our scheduled play test of Pickpocket Junction. It was a beautiful day, sunny but with a breeze. Greg and I began to set up our game in El Pueblo de Los Angeles, across from Union Station, fittingly enough.

The trouble began when we drew on the ground with chalk. A man came over and asked if we were going to clean the chalk when we were done. I told him honestly and in an attempt to have a fruitful discussion, “We hadn’t given it any thought.” He told us that the city had no budget for cleaning and if we, like some chalk artists who had come through, were going to draw on the ground with chalk we’d have to clean it up after. He showed us the faucet - no hose - and gave us his conditional blessing. Greg and I talked it over and decided we’d give it a go and figure out how to clean the chalk after the play test.

Then when I opened our suitcase and took out the trenchcoats, a security officer came over and told us we couldn’t do our performance.

What happened next made me really angry.

I told him there was no performance, that we were playing a game. He said we had to have a permit and I told him he was wrong, that you don’t need a permit to play a game. He said we were going to draw a crowd - I said no, that the game was for 6 people. He said we were going to take money - I told him no, that it was just a game, that we were in a park, and that parks are where people play games. We went round and round with him being completely deaf to anything I said to him. More security people came over and each was more piggish, cowardly, and and dense than the one before. It became clear that our attempt to play a game had become an act of civil disobedience and that to the people who worked for the security company it was a matter of ego. We decided to relocate, but not before I told them what I thought of their pitiful ignorance.

Perhaps I was naive not to expect such a confrontation. It left me so angry that I had to make the conscious choice to change the channel in my head or the whole day would have been spoiled.

But then the play test of Pickpocket Junction was so lovely, with a group of eager kids rowdily playing and squealing and having a good time. It made for a fantastic day.

Even though the drive home from downtown LA took me an hour and a half, I was happy, because the play test went well and I had bought lemon meringue and Mexican chocolate pie from The Pie Hole before driving home. Any real place named after a place in Pushing Daisies is okay by me. I wish Jim Dale had served my pie and said, “The facts are these: four dollars and nineteen cents is your change.”

And in my mind I’d pretty much decided that was the end of it. One game went badly, the other went well. You win some, you lose some. But do you know what happened today? The client from the difficult team building called me. He said that the feedback from the players was positive, that some people who had been in conflict had made up with each other afterwards, and that he thought the way I’d engaged and turned around the difficult player was really good. They want to hire us for another gig to continue the work. So I guess that game is going in to overtime.

Games exist in a finite, contained space and time: when you’re playing Monopoly, you can’t build houses and hotels on the table and chairs around you, they can only exist on the board. Likewise, if you show someone a Community Chest card hours after the game is over and expect to receive $25 for coming in second in a beauty contest, you will be sorely disappointed. The analogies in this paragraph demonstrate how Monopoly has much more value as a metaphor for all games than it is has as an actual game. Much like how Russian nesting dolls are better for purposes of rhetoric than they are as actual dolls.

Things that aren’t games, like businesses and interactions with people you know and don’t know, aren’t so easily contained. So the choices you make, which, if you were playing a game, would lead you to success or defeat and you could chart the reasons why in hindsight, will have consequences that unfold more like a waterfall. And like a real waterfall, there can be snakes who live behind it. I reached behind a waterfall when I was a kid in camp, maybe 11, when we were on a day hike, and a snake crawled out on my arm. When I told the other kids and the counselors, noobody believed me. There, that counts as a more personal blog post, doesn’t it?

Under the Boardwalk

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 21:05:48 -0400

Pictured: Big Dipper, the old rickety wooden roller coaster in Santa Cruz. People still ride it to this day. The reason why is beyond me.

Safer by far to enjoy Rides by Fourth Wall Studios. Ever since I saw Elan Lee at a Transmedia LA event talking about his experience creating The Beast and other game-changing events, I have been very interested to follow what Fourth Wall is doing, and now they have a Tumblr.

http://fourthwallstudios.tumblr.com/

If you haven’t the first ride, “Home,” set aside about half an hour and click below.

Something's Fishy

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 21:53:40 -0400

Last night Wise Guys continued our monthly residency at Mindshare, LA’s premier edutainment salon. My words, not theirs. This month’s theme was The Vast Blue (the ocean) and there was a fantastic collection of speakers talking about harnessing wave energy, how Greenpeace led to sustainable sushi restaurants, and of course hermaphroditic sea slugs. The real star(fish) of the show, of course, were the players who came to our table to check out our latest game: Fishionary.

It is played like Pictionary, but instead of drawing your clues, you had to shape them using goldfish crackers. We had a big bowl of them to use for playing - and a smaller one for eating. Teams faced off trying to shape such ocean-themed clues as OCTOPUS, SEAWEED, and TITANIC. Any guesses on the shapes above?

As the players stepped up their game, we increased the difficulty of the clues leading to some hilarious match-ups like GUMMY WORM vs. TOAST. One of the best pictures of the night was this amazing rendition of a SCUBADIVER by Ashley Booth:

More pictures can be found on our Flickr page. Don’t miss your chance to play with us at the next Mindshare, Thursday, April 19.

Can’t wait for that? Play at home and post pictures of your best Goldfish creations in the comments section below. We’ll award the best picture with tickets to the next Mindshare.

Play the Great Urban Race in Santa Monica

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 10:00:06 -0500

Greg and I played this game a couple years ago in Hollywood and it was a ton of fun. We hope you play this game and enjoy!

http://greaturbanrace.com/event2012_la_santamonica.php