Rules:
- Can have any number of players
- Each player was given a paper with series of instructions written on
- The Instructions include: action 1 & action 2 & conditions for triggering the actions
- For each player, he or she can choose to do either or both the actions, and they will get a reward at the end of each run according to which action they took, reward 1 for action 1, reward 2 for action 2.
The full set of instructions for all players:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fcdjXhREyVXV6qMxaQKIBC_AZHPX5uUvUZUH2bAL8JI/edit?usp=sharing
For example:
Player 1 has a piece of paper written with:
Do: Clapping
Or: Run infront of the person and clap
When you see a stranger with brown hair
Player 2 has:
Do: Jump 10 times
Or: Go next to the person and clap with the person
When you see someone claps
So once someone started the action, the “chain” will start going, player 1 triggers the condition for player 2, and then player 3…
I started with the idea of making a game about people have no idea what they are doing but they have to achieve a goal to overcome the awkwardness. The two moves on each paper were always divided into two types, one is something you can do on your own like clapping, jumping, smashing the table, and the other move is always something you have to interact with another person.
Why I made the rules this way is because I want to test out how strong the barriers it would be to go to talk/interact/play with someone you may don’t know in order to get a reward in a game, it seems difficult to convince me to talk to a stranger to play with me, and I am curious what’s the reason or motivation for people to play with audiences. For example in the performance art, audiences always play an essential role, in this game I want to find out the what effects the playfulness in between players and audiences since they are all strangers to each other.
The ideal scenario would be this game take place in a “serious” scenario, such as a meeting, a class, a conversation, and something triggers the head of the chain, and suddenly the entire room goes chaos..However I’m not able to make this happened, so instead I just tweaked the rules a little to make it fit the scenario I can have for the playtest.
The playtest went well in general but something I forgot to cover brought some confusion. First of all is the rule for rewards, I didn’t make it specific when it comes to the rewards so I just announced “every time you do the action, you can get a reward.” Which brings a bit of chaos in the end.
In the end nobody actually go straight up to a stranger and play with them, instead people tend to play with familiar people, which is not surprising, and I wrote the instructions intentionally vague so I can observe where the intervention takes place. For example, for some conditions, I wrote: when you see someone doing something cool, run around the person. I didn’t force that the person has to be a stranger, I want to see when players can cross the barriers to play with people they don’t know.
In the end unfortunately I have to admit that I didn’t find things I expected to see, there are also a lot of details need to be improved in this piece.