Posted by wcjord on Jan 14, 2013 in Uncategorized | 0 comments

On the 4th of the New Year, a few of us got together for another GameStorm. Our focus was to create a game that could fit entirely inside an 8oz tin, a fun little design challenge presented to me by Jess Hammer.

The guidelines for the challenge are here on a very mysterious WordPress site. It’s kind of like answering a pay phone and having a conversation with an anonymous and somehow compelling stranger that embroils you in a whole movie worth of escapades.

We had a great time and worked out all our creative muscles. When the dust settled, we realized we even had several interesting ideas worth documenting. Here they are!

Stones of the Deep

Randomly spread out all of the stones, which include 20 blue that aren’t tied to any player, and 4 each of 4 other colors. Each player is associated to one of the colors with only 4 tokens. Take turns closing your eyes and selecting a stone. Select 5 stones each.

There were a couple different thoughts for winning/scoring.
A) The person with the most stones of their color wins.
B) If someone gets all blue stones, it trumps up to three in-color stones.
C) Advanced rules = 7 Wonders-esque scoring mechanic:
a) 2 points for each stone of your color
b) 1 point for each stone not of your color
c) Stones of the same color (not blue): 2 = 4pts, 3 = 9pts, 4 = 16pts
d) Stones of different colors: 2 = 3pts, 3 = 6pts, 4 = 10pts, 5 = 15 pts
e) All Blue stones: 2 = 2pts, 3 = 4pts, 4 = 7pts, 5 = 11pts
*each stone can only be counted in one of the above systems–player chooses which one

A partially-conceived variation on the above game involved all players slowly breathing out as their eyes were closed and only inhaling when they opened their eyes on their turn. It’s not clear how this would work but it was cool to think of the game as a meditative exercise and players periodically ‘coming up for a breath.’

Savanna

Three yellow lion stones and one blue zebra stone. We started with an actual figurine for the zebra but decided to move to all stones to keep the abstract aesthetic.

This idea started with, ‘a lone zebra navigates through hidden lions,’ as far as I can remember it. It became a 2-4 player game. If there are only 2 players then one controls the zebra and the other controls the 3 lions. If there are 3 or 4 players, then the lions are distributed among the extra players and they cooperate to try and catch the zebra. The board is a 4×7 grid of playing cards. All are matching pairs and the cards start face down.

One player is the zebra and has to collect as many matching pairs of cards as they can. The other players are the lions and have to catch the zebra. At the start of the game, the 3 lions are placed on any 3 of the corner tiles, which are each turned over. The zebra is placed on any starting tile the player chooses, but that tile isn’t turned over.

The zebra goes first and can move 0, 1, or 2 spaces in any direction, including diagonally. When the zebra lands on a card it chooses whether to turn it over or not. The lions can only move 0 or 1 space either horizontally or vertically. Lions can never move diagonally. If they are travelling along a path where both cards are already turned over (face up) then they can move 2 spaces. When a lion lands on a card, it is automatically turned over.

If the zebra lands on a card that is a match for another card on the playing field (either both cards are already turned face up, or the card the zebra just landed on is turned over and found to be a match with another face up card) it can choose whether it wants to collect the pair or not. When the zebra captures a pair, and the card beneath it disappears, then it has to choose an adjacent card to move to (including those diagonally adjacent to it). The zebra treats the new card as if it just landed on it, and may choose to turn it over if it isn’t already face up, and use it to capture another pair if possible.

If the zebra captures a pair and the second card has a lion on it, then the player controlling that lion must choose an adjacent card to move to (horizontal or vertical movement only). If the card is face down then it is turned over. If there is no adjacent card to move to, then the lion is removed from the game.

The game ends when a lion moves onto the zebra’s space and captures it, or when the zebra has no more pairs that it can make (commonly because it has trapped itself in a section of the board with no more available paired numbers – or if it captures a pair and there are no adjacent cards to move to).

Players take turns as the zebra, and the player who makes the most number of pairs wins. Ties are possible.
The Noisy Dinosaur

This game is probably best described as breathing dinosaur Guesstures. Each player receives a card with a type of dinosaur on it, and tokens representing each possible type of dinosaur. The dinosaur cards gives the name, a picture, and short description of the dinosaur. The cards are all kept secret so no player knows what the others have.

What a dinosaur card might look like

Each player takes turns breathing like what they believe their dinosaur would sound like, and the other players give them a token for the type of dinosaur they believe they are. The goal is to have as many tokens of the correct type as possible. Each player draws 3 dinosaur cards and there are 3 rounds of breathing and guessing. Ties are possible.

Posted by wcjord on Nov 19, 2012 in Uncategorized | 0 comments

Last Friday, the LearnPlay meeting was led by TC doctoral student Jess Hammer in a GameStorm workshop. Jess studies conceptual change, learning and creativity in the context of play. She developed this workshop as a way of facilitating creativity to rapidly generate and prototype multiple game ideas in over just an hour and a half.

First, we set up three stations with three distinct assortments of prototyping materials. For instance, one table featured multicolored pipe cleaners, a bag of little lettered cubes, index cards, and some playing cards. Each station also came with a seed of inspiration in the form of some enigmatic image (ex. lots of numbered ninja turtle body parts).

Each person was given an idea or concept that they were charged with bringing to the design discussion. These were another seed of inspiration and “role” to play. These were things like curiosity, relationship, and simulation. You can see a number of them in the images below.

We designed in four lightning rounds. The first round was 20 minutes and seemed like it lasted about as long as the snap of your fingers. The image below is

Zombie Mansion

of a game that I know was developed in this first round (and with the materials listed above) because I was involved. The white cards are rooms of an ever-expanding mansion. The board grows and index cards are added as players go off the ‘map’ into new areas. There are zombies everywhere! To defend against the zombies, you have to put together whole ninja turtles. This is done by (1) rolling the die and trying to get a number corresponding to a good ninja part and (2) exploring new rooms where you are guaranteed to get a part but also likely to encounter more zombies. The win condition was something about getting an army of ninjas.

Below is the Thanksgiving game. Its a board game in which players divvy up

Thanksgiving Game

thanksgiving tasks such as setting the table, doing the dishes, making a dessert, etc. If you are the first person to land on a spot, you have to take the post-it there that lists the task. The goal is to get all three of your pom pom pieces to the end of the board (the turkey) in a sort of backgammon like fashion.

The second round was 15 minutes, third round 10 minutes, and the fourth round was just 5 minutes. By the end, we were just throwing things together. And, to our surprise, they weren’t half bad…

Looks like a zombie game

Not sure what's going on here

I’m not sure what this game was about. The zombie figures that you see in a number of the images were a last-minute add to the material by myself. Jess said we could grab stuff from around the room and, yeah, I’m one of those people. In hindsight, they may have been a little too ‘suggestive’ of game materials for the kind of open brainstorming we wanted to do. Each game that used them tended to resemble each other and other zombie games in many respects.

Matching Game meets procedurally generated board game

Last round, my group came up with a very interesting addition to the classic card matching game. In this image, you can see a bunch of playing cards laid out face down, the beginnings of a classic memory game. However, on top of those are some Sorry pieces for the different players and some pipe cleaners in player’s corresponding colors. We didn’t finish a comprehensive rule set but there were a number of interesting ideas. Players would move around trying to match cards. The pipe cleaners would be moveable and possibly extendable/malleable by some mechanic, creating blocks in the terrain.

For one game, we shot a quick video as documentation – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ks24KrNsrU

There were a number of other games as well that I’m not sure got documented including Lady Builders and Hurricane Zombies.

It was an awesome time! Jess will lead us in another Storm this Spring. Also, we’re going to put together a GameStorm kit with materials and instructions so we can have our own sessions.

Posted by wcjord on Nov 13, 2012 in Uncategorized | 0 comments

The Entertainment Technology Center Press has just released the Games for Learning and Society 2012 conference proceedings. Teachers College and the Game Lab were well-represented by faculty and students.

Joey J. Lee, Sam Ahn, and Emma Zhiyu Liao. Experience Points for Learning: Student Perceptions of Game Mechanics for the Classroom (p 191).

Joey J. Lee, Pinar Ceyhan, William Jordan-Cooley, and Woonhee Sung. Greenify: Real-World Missions for Climate Change Education. (p 183).

Seungoh Paek, Daniel L. Hoffman, Antonios Saravanos, Miwha Kim, and John B. Black. Multi-Modal Interaction in Digital Instructional Media. (p 245).

Selen Turkay, Dan Hoffman, Nilgun Gunbas, Pantiphar Chantes, Sonam Adinolf, and Charles Kinzer. Exploring a New Approach to Visual Asset Design. (p 299).

Sonam Adinolf, Selen Turkay, and Devayani Tirthali. In Torpor, Not Dead: A Look at a Collectible Card Game.  (p 41).

Check it out!

Posted by kmsudler on Oct 17, 2012 in Uncategorized | 1 comment

At LearnPlay this week we spent a lot of time handling business. And by handling business, of course I mean eating pizza:

But on a serious note, we spent some time while eating talking about our goals for the semester. First off, we agreed to having two meetings a week, so LearnPlay now meets Tuesday and Friday at 1pm (You can make both or either). Though both meetings involve a mix of learning and playing, Tuesday will be focused more on playing and Friday more on learning. Every week on Friday we will now have “Show and Tell” so someone will bring in a topic to talk about. This past Fridays topic was gamesforchange.org

After Show and Tell we played Magic, the Gathering and set our fearless leader on the task of unlocking all of the characters in Super Smash Brothers….

Why was he unlocking these characters? Well, we’ve got a Super Smash Brothers tournament in the  works and are also planning a date in November for a gamestorming session where we will have a special guest come in and help us to design games in a quick time-constrained session.

Posted by kmsudler on Oct 5, 2012 in Uncategorized | 0 comments

The past two weeks have been full of excitement for the LearnPlay club. First, we established a new time for club meetings. We now meet on Fridays at 1:00 and meetings usually run until 3pm.

This past week we watched a presentation by George Fan called “How I got my mom to play through plants vs. zombies.” which was all about the importance of having good in-game tutorials to help new players along, while still keeping them excited. If you missed out and want to watch it, the link is here:

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015541/How-I-Got-My-Mom

After that we also spent some time continuing to  playtest Artic Home, in the attempt to make it as good as possible for an event on October 6th where people beyond the lab group and LearnPlay club will get to try their hand at it.  This Friday we played again with a new deck of beautiful prototype cards!

Finally, some members playtested a board game that’s hoping to  teach SAT words to ESL teachers in a fun and engaging way. Though gameplay is a little cryptic right now,we remain strong proponents of the game and wish for it’s continued success and proliferation!

We’ll keep you posted on the development of these and more projects in the future.

Posted by wcjord on Sep 25, 2012 in Uncategorized | 0 comments

A few of us have revived the student organization, LearnPlay. Our mission is:

To play and learn about the instructional technology of games!

And we will do so boldly. We will meet 1-2 times a week in the Lab to play games of different forms, especially those that show promise as educational tools. We will also play-test and give feedback on the educational game projects or game-like curricula projects of the organization and TC community members. The organization will be a revival of a previous organization of the same name that existed at TC until a couple years ago when it feel into disrepair.

We met for the 2nd time this past week! We watched a good introduction video to the topic of educational games and had a rousing discussion in which many insights were had.

Afterwards, we play-tested the latest version of Arctic Home (described in an earlier post). We thought about the whole ‘record keeping’ thing after most action had subsided but here are a couple pics from the day.