Tag Archives: unconference

I made a game for GameCamp with Lego

Posted by under game design

So we did another GameCamp. Number four in an ongoing series of games-based unconferences, the third with the current management team, and twice the size of the previous one. It feels like an age ago now but in fact it was only a month. It went really well—we relocated to the roomier and more central spaces of London South Bank University, and a quick google will bring up many happy reports and postmortems. We are chuffed.

There will be another GameCamp in the autumn but that’s not what I wanted to write about. It’s a mini-tradition that we give away neat freebies to everyone who comes to GameCamp: for GameCamp 3 (‘BoardGameCamp’) it was a pair of dice custom-engraved with the unconference’s logo and motif. And we had to find a way to top that.

What I did was… You’ve seen the Lego collectible minifigs, right? Sixteen to a series, but you don’t know which figure you’re getting till you open the pack. And very cool offbeat non-standard figures too—zombies, clowns, Mexican wrestlers, aliens, sports stars and even a dude in a gorilla suit. They are excellent.

So I went into a toy-shop and bought three hundred of them, at which point my inner eight-year-old fell over and died of joy. When I was eight I knew that grown-ups secretly did stuff like this. Now I had proved myself right. Both of me wins.

Then I designed a little game to play with the minifigs. How little? Small enough to fit on a sticky label on the front of the pack. Three rules, each one line long. And because we wanted to give people an excuse to mix and talk to strangers, it’s a social game—and because we wanted people to keep playing it, there was a prize at the end.

Here are the rules:

  1. Make deals with other players to swap a piece of your minifig for a piece of theirs.
  2. With each player, you can EITHER swap one piece OR exchange your entire minifig.
  3. The player whose minifig looks most like them at the end of the day wins a prize.

We did get some spectacularly clever and accurate entries. A couple of people threatened to wrap themselves in loo-paper to resemble their mummy minifigs, but nobody went through with it—I’d said to the committee that if anyone painted their face yellow they were getting an instant win from me, but nobody did that either. I didn’t get the name of the eventual winner but she’d come in full fantasy LARP gear complete with swords, and her minifig was spot on. Somewhere there’s a photograph but I don’t have it.

The game fulfilled its objectives brilliantly: it was an ice-breaker and conversation-starter, and people broke out of their usual groups to approach strangers on the pretext of swapping pieces, but it wasn’t so absorbing that it detracted from the main business of the day. Plus we got to be the unconference that gave away free Lego.

The only downside, really, is that we’re going to have to come up with something better for GameCamp 5.

How Interesting

Posted by under conference, world of warcraft

Saturday was the day of Interesting 08, the second unconference organised by Russell Davies (no T on this boy) at Conway Hall in London. Thirty speakers gave talks on subjects close to their hearts, the only common linking theme that the topics were—and the speakers should be—interesting. Possibly it was the best not-a-conference conference I’ve ever been to.

I presented a very cut-down version of my current paper (a geophysical survey of the World of Warcraft, which will be appearing here in the near future) and was gratified to get laughs in places I wasn’t expecting laughs. I was kind of surprised that, at a conference that was inherently playful, I was the only person talking explicitly about games. The closest were Roo Reynolds who spoke about Lego, and Collyn Ahart Chipperfield who talked about spaces for the fantastic.

What do I mean when I say the conference was “playful”? Several things.

It wasn’t serious. ‘Serious’ is not the opposite of ‘playful’, as anyone who’s ever played Diplomacy will tell you, but an absence of seriousness can certainly help create a playful atmosphere. The hall was decorated with bunting, the catering was biscuits, cupcakes and apples, and the event kicked off with a singalong version of ‘The Final Countdown’. From the get-go you knew this was going to be infotainment in its purest form.

Almost all the talks were short. I asked for ten minutes and got five. The weakest presentations were (with one exception) the ones that noticeably overran their slots. It encourages focus and attention to core points.

It was a lucky dip. When a speaker stepped on stage, you had no idea what they were going to talk about. Topics included what spooks horses, toilets, the history of vacuum cleaners, zoetrope animation without the slits, the role of booze in the development of society, guerilla geography, favourite words, beating insomnia with bad audiobooks, odd communities on Flickr, and much more. The guy who designed the ineffably cool new UK coinage spoke; so did the guy who did the remix of Radiohead’s ‘Nude’ using obsolete computer hardware.

Nobody was trying to impress you or sell you anything. It was about the joy of enthusiasm and communicating that joy.

And perhaps most importantly, even though almost all the speakers used PowerPoint or similar, everyone presented their material differently. Roo, who kicked off, showed 30 slides in three minutes—you can see it here but he’s cheated slightly by re-synching the sound with the slides. On the day the slides appeared automatically and he had to speed up or slow down what he was saying to match each image on screen. (He alludes to this at one point on the soundtrack.) It didn’t make his presentation more smooth but it made it more exciting, more of a competition, Roo against machine.

All the PowerPoint presentations were in a style that, if brought to a regular meeting or conference, you’d be asked to leave. Lots of full-screen pictures with no captions. Cartoons. Elegant graphs, often with slightly irreverent captions. A good number of images from classic SF movies. Nothing that was there just for teh funneh, but plenty that was meant to amuse as well as inform.

For the audience, barring the ‘Final Countdown’ singalong and one item that called for volunteers, it was also entirely passive. You listened or you didn’t listen, you enjoyed or you didn’t enjoy. You were not called to interact, but you felt involved. Playful, yes, but elements of direct or indirect play would almost certainly have spoiled the experience.

How does that work, then?

There’s a theory that says visualising walking, step by step, burns almost as many calories as actually walking. I can’t find any links to it and have no idea if it’s true, so take it for now as a metaphor. Everybody at Interesting 08 was thinking of what they could talk about at Interesting 09. It was the number one topic of overheard conversations. Even though non-speakers couldn’t play this time, their head full of thoughts about being up on the stage made the experience of watching others speak vicarious.

Secondly, because the talks were short and had to pack a lot into their time, they tended to be strong on wide-ranging high-points. Finding links between the different talks became a game, whether conscious or unconscious, and as the day went on the links coalesced into a web that felt like a tent covering all of us, the same way that a really good multi-stranded novel pulls all its threads and characters together. No coincidence that the bunting criss-crossing the hall looked like a net. It was an enormously unifying and satisfying feeling: not playful in a conventional sense, but playing with ideas is still play, and Interesting 08 was packed with ideas.

Links to the Interesting talks will be up on the Guardian website soon. Meanwhile, kudos to the organisers, congratulations to the speakers, and thanks to everyone who laughed at my jokes.