Saturday, June 10, 2006

outside of normal time?

ok i know this is weird (it IS a homework blog after all), but i'm actually voluntarily posting today (hard to imagine, no?)

anyway, i've been given the task to come up with some games for my church retreat (me and my big mouth about taking gaming mods). sad to say i didn't manage to come up with anything from scratch (instead 'kopping' games from some other camps i've been to).

and before someone decides to kill me with the "but i thought you spent a whole semester learning how to develop games, how can you NOT come up with any of your own" argument, i must say that i still do remember some stuff (like how i was explaining flow and positive feedback to my friend in the course of rationalising why i couldn't implement certain rules though i thought it would make things more interesting).

and here's the gist of it...

i'm sure most people know the newspaper game. you know, the one where everyone tries to squeeze onto a sheet of newspaper and every so often the paper gets folded into half? well i wanted to use questions as a means to get the newspaper folded. answer wrongly and your newspaper shrinks. answer right and well... nothing happens. its 2 groups competing against each other, so that makes things interesting.

so then i thought of this brilliant 'double or nothing idea'. your group gets a hard question. the decide to go for a double or nothing by throwing it to the other team. they get it wrong, and their paper gets folded in half. they get it right, and your newspaper becomes 1/4 its original size (in other words double penalty. 1/2 of 1/2 is 1/4). this obviously leads to too much positive feedback (i'm guessing most of you should be able to see why).

so yes, believe it or not, i've been having to apply this stuff outside of NM3216 (in a camp no less). at least its something usable, unlike other stuff (which i'm not implying isn't. just that its not as usable).