Saturday, July 11, 2015

Can't Talk Now Boss Fight or Go Rogue - My Week's Twitter Games

Inspired by experiences like this and this, I have always wanted to try to create a Twitter Choose Your Own Adventure .  This week gave  me a good chance to try it out on a small scale.  I backward mapped it and then put it out there.  It didn't work as well as I had hoped, but I am not sure how I could have made it work better. Probably used numbers: 1 of 6, or studied better.  I should have studied, actually, rather then thinking I knew how to do it!  






My second Twitter game attempt was also a bit of an experiment.  I put out tweets asking for people to join four different games (TV Photo Search, Truth or Dare, Tag, and Marco Polo):

The one that got picked up was Marco Polo, and it turned out to be quite fun!

It was interesting as folks tried to figure out the rules (there weren't any). 

Here is the Storify version.












3 comments:

  1. Susan,

    Thanks for this post. I appreciate how you included the attempt at choose your own adventure. This focus on game design turned out to be an opportune space to think through how else Twitter might engage learners beyond the mainstream uses. I personally hope you keep trying with the choose your own adventure, since these make cycles are supposed to extend as long as you want them, too, and because I think you've got a group that will play test willingly.
    The Marco Polo game was fun and trying to figure out why it was is also part of the fun. See, complex!
    My first thought is that by taking a game children play with their eyes closed in pool and situating it on Twitter, the game really became an inside joke. The longer we played along, the more we were in on the joke pretending that the game worked on social media as well as it might have in the pools of our collective youth.
    I found myself laughing at the contrast between tweets that just said "Marco" and some of the more deliberate and "formal" Tweets we encounter all the time. I often see thoughtful folks Tweet things like "for the next hour I'll be tweeting about #edcamp". The opposite of that sort of politeness and consideration of audience is the ridiculous (and maybe obnoxious) digital footprint of marcos, polos, and POOOLLLLOOOOS.
    For me it was fun to momentarily take the discursive channels of Twitter and use them for playful mischief. There were no rules to our game of Marco Polo and when we play Marco Polo on Twitter, we test the rules there, too.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I saw the first game and didn't know who it was or what it was, and wondered, is this spam? Twitterspam? Twittergamespam? Twittergameclmoocspam? I could go on but I digress .... I clicked it anyway.
    Then of course, I loved Marco Polo and like Joe, I cracked up every time I saw it happening. That's the best part of a good game. The cracking up.
    I think I saw the third one, but then forgot about it.
    Good job, trying out Twitter for game design. Sort of confining and yet, freeing, too.
    kevin

    ReplyDelete
  3. So much fun - sorry I missed all this. It's even fun to go back into posts and see the play. What I miss out on I collect for school possibilities. CLMOOC is such a rich playing field. Thanks for capturing.

    ReplyDelete