Week 2 — Remote Ideation

I started this week by grabbing some of my old ideas and thinking about which ones might work for activities. NSN seemed like a good idea for Distance, and is on this weekend so it’s been ticking over in the back of my mind. I’d love to do something with Social Strata, Physical Geography and Time as distance (particularly in Woolloomooloo), but I don’t have the skill set yet to do that justice.

Forum post:

Background/logistics (feel free to skip to the process):

I initially started with the idea of solving an issue of synchronizing start times on opposite sides of our game map, in one of our offline Games (I occasionally run 30-player Nerf games, it’s like paintball but the kids toys. It’s very helpful for testing game design ideas).

I initially thought some kind of musical cue might be helpful, as the whistles we sometimes use I worry about annoying the neighbours at night, and was interested to see if we could use the site’s existing wifi network, combined with Google Home speakers, might work (we do use CB radios but I worry about the range on those being _too_ great and some of the odd chatter gamers do might be distressing for truckers on the main road, or might get misinterpreted by police). Bluetooth’s range is too short, and is expensive to overcome through daisy chaining.

Method:

Yurika Method — we have until Saturday to solve this or it might be another few months.

I had been working on this idea on the train to a creative gaming thing I do with friends. There was a bit of a lul, and I pulled out my laptop, and I realized that we ca maybe solve it creatively by doing instructional startup videos on how to prep for rounds of the games, and the rounds themselves, so coordinators aren’t trying to explain the game when they should be listening for the coordinating signals.

What I actually came up with:

Instructional Videos of what each game round is like. Like a Video Game Tutorial.

I don’t have time to write a proper script, but I can film the setup for each round and dub over an explaination so people can use it to show their friends. I’ve coded the Mindmap so it hopefully shows some of the weird ideas and decisions that I made along the way. This is very piecemeal, but it’s basically a structured flow of why/how I made decisions.

Also I found out some interesting stuff around drone insurance along the way, and may have gotten myself some cheaper personal injury insurance while I’m at it.

Communicating information over a distance of 30 meters in a timely fashion that is still fun and immersive. Who knew that was complicated?