The "LA" in "PLAY"

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

Playtest time

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 12:49:12 -0500

Myles and Greg, with some help from Myles’s wife Laurel and baby Fenton, prepare our new game to submit to IndieCade.

"You forgot to file your FAFSA!"

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:34:00 -0500

Crowing that gleeful declaration was one of the highlights of playing Application Crunch, one of the best games I enjoyed at last year’s IndieCade festival.

The good news is that this game is now available for purchase on Amazon. The bad news is that the Hatter’s Table, which shared some of the design team, did not meet its Kickstarter fundraising goal and remains ephemeral. However, we should focus on the positive. I just bought 2 copies of Application Crunch, one for me and one for my mom, a former college counselor. It is a highly enjoyable game, not least because it is a really spot-on analog for the actual process of applying for college.

Check this game out! It’s a great tabletop card game for a group of friends. I strongly recommend it. I hope to play it with my son (current age: one month) to help him get ready for the flurry of emotions, deadlines, and paperwork that go along with this huge responsibility we foist on our youth.

For more on Elizabeth Swensen, who had a hand in designing Application Crunch and the Hatter’s Table, visit here: http://elizabethmakesgames.com/

I very much enjoyed this talk by Nick Fortugno that I found on...

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:05:31 -0500

I very much enjoyed this talk by Nick Fortugno that I found on Twitter this morning. It was a good reminder, as I am considering what game or games to submit to this year’s Indiecade. To read more about the fun I had with Nick at last year’s festival, click here

Bell and Some Hessian: A New and Unsafe Game for 2

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:58:31 -0500

Hi everybody, sorry there haven’t been many new posts this year. I have a newborn son, which is not a game, but is a challenge all its own, and one I quite like.

However, I simply HAD to post this video. I’m not allowed to tell you too much about it, because it’s sort of secret, but suffice it to say this is a game that was submitted to a popular reality TV show as a potential challenge. Whether or not it will appear on the show will remain a mystery. Here’s the game:

Bell and Some Hessian: One player, the Chaser, is blindfolded. The other player, the Runner, has 2 bells: 1 bell is large and heavy and the clapper has been wrapped in knots and hessian (muslin). The other bell is attached to the Runner and makes noise when he runs. The Chaser is trying to tag the runner before the runner can untie and ring the heavy bell. The Chaser has only the sound of the bell attached to the Runner to guide his motions. If the Runner rings the heavy bell before the Chaser tags him, he wins. Play this with your friends!

In this demo version, the small bell is a simple hotel tap-bell and the heavy bell is from the U.S.S. Baffins, the navy battleship my paternal grandfather was stationed on during WWII. When the war ended, he took the bell with him and it hung in the kitchen of his house on 8311 Buckingham Drive. He rang it when it was time for dinner and you could hear it all over the neighborhood. I took ownership of the Baffins Bell when Papa John died and I used it for this silly game!

The video is taken on a cell phone. The Chaser is Greg. You can see me protecting him from running out of the game zone. The Runner is James Ryan. Video by Mike Boothby. Who wants to form a league?

Steve Jobs's Mind On a Bicycle

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 15:31:00 -0500

This video from 1990 shows Steve Jobs (not working for Apple at the time) talking about two of my favorite things: games and bicycles.

http://www.cultofmac.com/136734/steve-jobs-on-gaming-its-the-future-of-learning-video/

I’m using the low-expectations week between Christmas and New Year’s to watch some of the longer videos I have bookmarked and promised myself to watch, although this one is only 5 minutes long. Thanks to @BrainPickings for the link.

After you watch the video, please explore the rest of my blog. I add new posts a couple times a week about the value and pleasure of real-life gaming, specifically in Los Angeles my home (there are many such sites about New York games, and I often link to them from here) but I have struggled to find a reading audience that will engage in back-and-forth Disqus with me. Perhaps I’ll have more luck in the new year.

Visit again soon for posts about Black Letter game, a puzzle adventure by mail; Sarah Thacher on QR codes; corporate meeting engagement; and my recent experience contributing challenges to Survivor.

'Tis the season

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 13:00:06 -0500

Well, it’s the wrong season, but it’s the season all the same.

Congratulations to the winners of the Gameful Summer Challenge Series! The winners and their games are listed here:

http://gameful.org/blog/2011/11/01/gameful-summer-challenge-series-winners/

Now the next challenge will be… who will be first to play all these games?

16 days to go!

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 13:00:06 -0500

Hey everybody, let’s fly to Scotland! Come on! Who’s with me? But look at this awesome new games festival they’re having on January 1st!

http://thenewyeargames.com/

Given that my wife is likely going to deliver a baby 1 week after this, maybe I should save my airfare dollars and just wait for next year’s IndieCade to come around again. Unless I get a teleportation machine for Christmas.

Anyone going to this?

The Island of Broken Games

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 13:00:06 -0500

Jesse Fuchs - Monopoly : Part 1/2 from New School Game Club on Vimeo.

Jesse Fuchs - Monopoly : Part 2/2 from New School Game Club on Vimeo.

One of the stand out talks at the debut “Practice” conference in New York a few weeks ago was Jesse Fuchs’s two-minute talk about Monopoly. This is the more complete version of the talk addressing this comprehensive subject. I love the idea that New School has a club for broken games: it’s like the island of lost toys.

Mr. Fuchs clearly has given the matter plenty of thought, but I’m going to give the last word to board game maven Scott Nicholson.

Speaking in mime?

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:00:06 -0500

Practomime, that is

Practomime is a new word for what stories, games, and many other kinds of works of art have in common: they all involve creative activity in a cultural zone regulated for play. In plain language, that means that the Iliad and the Odyssey are really the same kind of thing as some of the most popular video games today.

The ancient Greeks learned most of the stuff that made them able to found Western Civilization from Homer. Kids and grown-ups playing video games are learning a lot more than most people think.

Well now I can’t turn off this gray stripe, but that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. The Pericles Group is one of a few innovative organizations around the country trying to transform education. And anyone who saw “Waiting for Superman” will tell you, that’s a very good thing. Learning Roman isn’t always as much fun as it looks in “Monty Python’s The Life of Brian.”

We learned about this innovation, the brainstorm of one Latin teacher, from KQED’s “Mind/Shift” blog. We say three cheers to anyone who’s trying to education children using game play. We are doing the same for adults, mostly, but we’re all on the same page, whatever language we’re speaking.

The December Game at a fancy Beverly Hills Hotel

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 19:38:44 -0500

Check it out!

See more photos here. Get our own December game here!

Mind, games

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 13:00:05 -0500

Jane McGonigal was right!

Fourteen-year-olds who were frequent video gamers had more gray matter in the rewards center of the brain than peers who didn’t play video games as much — suggesting that gaming may be correlated to changes in the brain much as addictions are.

[Source: Los Angeles Times]

As I believe I’ve mentioned before, my wife is a neuroscientist, and she would explain this with the old saw, “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” Well, it’s a saw in the world of brain science. It’s the old Skinner box schtick: an unexpected reward gives your brain a bigger hit of dopamine than an expected one. Do that often enough and you’ll wear a groove in your brain like a wagon wheel on a dirt road, only instead of a groove, it’s the synapses in your brain fusing together. What all of this means is somewhat up to interpretation. Are gamers just another flavor of addict, like alcoholics? Are they a super-race, with brains that have been transformed by stimulation? Yes and no, to both. How unsatisfying! Well that’s why my wife is the grad student and I am not.

By the way, if mind games are what you’re after, you must watch ABC’s misbegotten game show “Million Dollar Mind Game.” I wrote for this show: not the version that aired, but the episodes that got it on the air when it was still in development at ABC. If it comes back, maybe I’ll write for it again! They only made 6 episodes and they buried them (by broadcasting them on Sundays at 1 PM against football) but they’re all watchable on YouTube. Here’s the best one. Enjoy!