Theory as Practise Seminar: The Open Games

Robert's seminar Lesson

Design games task

Today in Robert's seminar class were played two games that were are working with series of rules. Those games and scenarios are open work. You can go any way with this. We were in three separate groups of four because these games were needing team work. One of the games is called Beach and the other is Circle and we had a choice to pick which one we wanted to play first. These games were designed to get like a survey answer from people, I suppose you could say it was to teach us that we have to think outside the box. Many people usually always design surveys that have horrible questions 

 Beach 

Circle

The rules were simple for each game; the game has to be played by four players, each player has coloured pen which are green, red, blue or black and when the turns taking goes clockwise. Beach workshop is inspired by the concept of Charles leadbeater, as expressed in his essay 'The beach Ethic' A quote taken from his essay explains well the concept of the beach game is "Beaches are ordered without being controlled. No one is in charge [...] Underlying the beaches appeal is a simple idea: the beach is a commons where people can self-organise and play [...] There are no zoning regulations, fences, nor white lines to tell you where to go". One of the player have to take the first turn and place a dot then following clockwise turns the next player will need to place a dot in the centre of the largest empty space on the paper. We can stop drawing when we all think and agree the beach is crowded. I had fun with this game, it got more nerve wrecking when we began to run out space to place our dots as the aim was to get far away from the other ones. 

The same rules applies for the circle game as players taking turns clockwise. The aim of this game was for the players to be able to draw a perfect filled in circle under 30 seconds timer. This game was difficult in my opinion because we had under 30 seconds to draw a circle, so your rushing at the same time but it was  also fun to engage with other people. I must say our circle was the most horrible one drawn, not only did we not have time to fill them in but we also wonky ones. 

Overall I am glad I participated it was stimulating and would take the opportunity again. 

Reference: 

Maurer, L., Paulus, E., Puckey, J., Wouters, R.  (2013). Conditional design workbook. Amsterdam: Valiz.