It's Allen Cohn in a video of his presentation at GC Summit 2011 about the upcoming Doctor When Game. Click that link to see the video and/or read these here notes.
- Wei-Hwa's advancing the slides today.
- We're talking about Doctor When.
- You want to run a game, but you think it might be difficult.
What do you do if you're not experienced? Recruit a bunch of folks,
at least some of whom are experienced.
- Put out a call on the mailing lists: got a bunch of responses. Hey, that works. An assorted bunch: one person from this team, one from that team, etc.
- Some tricky bits:
- Folks aren't used to working w/each other.
- If, say, DeeAnn helps but Curtis doesn't, how much "karma" accrues to Team Snout?
- Does it make, say, Team Snout want to play the game less if DeeAnn is spoiler-ified and thus can't play with them?
- Recruiting more GC! [As I type up these notes a few months later and peek at their web site, I see that they're still recruiting folks with set design &set construction skills, also costuming, special effects, and video production.]
- The game will have a strong story. There will be puzzles, but those puzzles will advance the story.
- Many people involved. Function leaders:
- Trisha Lantznester, puzzles
- Erik Stuart, admin/financial
- your name here , technical director
Contributors: Justin Graham, Lisa Long, Acorn Pooley, Dave Shukan, DeeAnn Sole, Melissa Wilson - Still need set designers and builders. Actors, too. Any of you puzzle nerds ever hang out with the drama geeks? Anbody know anybody?
- Let me seed the question pool: What do you think about this idea of a GC that's a person from here, a person from there, etc? Oh, and how do we encourage cooperation and story-telling from all these teams of competitive puzzler nerds?
- Question: I pointed out: if I wanted people to pay attention to the story and role-playing instead of the competition, I'd do some obviously-random unfair stuff. If it's obviously an unfair competition, folks won't be competing.
- Question: Dann Webster: to encourage cooperation, give an
incentive. Hogwarts game had house points. If you were on a Griffindor
team, all the other Griffindor teams wanted you to do well so that
Griffindor got more points. Another idea: maybe have a scoring system,
but not based on puzzles-solved. Instead, base it on whatever
behavior you want to encourage.
- Allen Cohn: Yeah. Like in the DaVinci code, our hero doesn't think I'm solving puzzles. He's figuring out "Oh I gotta do this thing to figure out where they hid the thing."
- Erik Stuart: So, in Hogwarts, what was the motivation? Was it the point system? Or was it the game's "flavor"? The story had you in there with other Griffindor teams. If there hadn't been house points, would you still have felt that allegiance?
- ???: What motivates our team? You solve a puzzle, your reward is another puzzle. [It's not an addiction. It's a lifestyle choice.] If you want a team's motivation to be something else, you gotta let us know. In a musical, there's a song at the beginning just devoted to telling you what the main character needs; e.g., the little mermaid wants to be human. And if you want the teams to cooperate, make sure that there's some clear over-all epic goal that they're all trying to accomplish.
- Queston ???: My wife and I tried to run a game that was story-driven. The only way we came up with that worked was: have players take on character roles, as in a murder mystery game. My brother ran a hunt for me in that style: folks kinda forgot about the puzzles, but they had a blast.
- Question: ?Kai Huang?: My team's non-competitive. We aren't motivated by beating other teams. But we want to reach the end of the story. So give the slower teams a way to finish in your time frame.
- Question: Brent Holman. You've already done the most important thing: you told teams your intentions. If you say "It's not a competition", then teams know it's not a competition. You might think "Oh, they're intoverted xenophobes. I can't just tell them it's about role-playing." But it actually works better than you might expect.
- Question: Bill Jonesi. Wow, you've never done anything like this before? Maybe you should run a mini-hunt a couple of months from now. Once you run your first rally, you learn a lot that you apply to your second rally (if there's a second rally).
- Question: Linda Holman. I'm giving the opposite advice. As I've said before, you don't gotta run a BANG before you run a The Game. Sure, you learn a lot by running a game, but we all start somewhere. Don't exhaust yourself running a three-hour game which is half the work of a 30-hour game.
- Question: ??someone from CRANEA?: We'll forgive you if it's not perfect. We've never played an overnight game before.
