Feb 14 – 20
As soon as our main designer returned, we went into full idea evaluation gears. This was a lot more difficult than it sounded, and we ended up spending 2 whole days just expressing our ideas in the template Jessica Hammer gave us last week. Evaluating it using her criteria took another day, as we tried to make sense of the connections between the transformation, the strategy and the mechanics of each game.
This is what we came up with (pink – idea, orange – fail, yellow – pass):
Notice the idea with 2 yellow stickys? That’s the idea which all of us really liked and decided to go with: “Give me your gun!” The transformation we wanted was to teach people how to change their communication styles – too often this topic of gun ownership degenerates into name calling and finger pointing.
This idea was inspired by the improvisational acting game “Out of that chair”, in which a player sits in a chair while other people try to get him out of it. The rules are that everything which the players say are considered to be true (e.g. “The building is on fire! You need to get out of that chair and leave now!”), the player in the chair cannot be a sociopath (e.g. “I don’t care if I die.”). In addition, the http://getzonedup.com/ player in the chair cannot block what has just been said (e.g. “No it’s not.”), and needs to come up with a reasonable justification for staying in the chair (e.g. “Oh great! Now I can test out my new fireproof suit!”). If he can’t, he has to get out of that chair.
In a similar fashion, “Give me your gun!” would place a gun owner (actor) in a chair, and have the audience speak to him and convince him to give up his gun. The main difference here was that once something has been said, it remains as “the truth” over the course of that round, i.e. if somebody asks if the actor has a child and the actor says yes, he cannot later retract that statement and say no.
We bounced this idea off our faculty advisors, and they were both pretty excited about it, especially Brenda, who is an improv actor. Our client also seemed intrigued by this, and so we decided to go with this idea and develop it further.