110505 Application Process and Timeline Puzzle Playtesting

19 weeks to go!

Allen, Erik, Melissa, Sean, Trisha, and Wei-Hwa present.

RECRUITING

Allen is devoting a lot of effort to recruiting for the non-puzzle roles, but only with limited success:

• One very promising candidate for videographer, a few other weak prospects
• Two promising actress candidates
• One lukewarm prospect for set designer
• No gadgeteer candidates
• No costumer candidates
• Two lukewarm candidates for graphic designer
• One lukewarm candidate for external web site design

No one objected to Allen posting again on the BayBang & TheGame groups for networking help.

• Allen will continue to follow his leads.
• Justin will try to recruit a gadgeteer at the upcoming Maker Faire.

Sean recruited another puzzle creator.

TIMELINE/DROPDEAD DATES/DATE OF GAME

Brief discussion of the spreadsheet of drop-dead dates by task area that Allen drafted (everyone should have access to it on Google docs).

Allen pointed out that we'll have to have the web site + application process done very soon if we want to give the players enough time to create their applications. And thus we'll have to have some of the graphic design done even sooner.

Erik reviewed the matrix of dates and thought that set design and construction will take longer than Allen expected, and thus recruiting the set designer (and gadgeteer and videographer) is nearly as pressing.

• Erik will take another pass through the drop dead date spreadsheet and revise
• At the next or subsequent meeting, team will review our target game dates and decide whether we need to push back

APPLICATION PROCESS AND CRITERIA

Everyone shared some things they liked and disliked about past application procedures. There was general agreement that the WHO application process required more work than we liked and required specific skills that it was inappropriate to assume that teams would have (such as video editing). There was also general agreement on disliking first come/first served systems.

Next we talked about what our objectives were for the application process. Why even have one? After some discussion, there was general agreement that the only things we really need the application process to accomplish are:

• get information we need to pick the teams
• get the players "in the mood" to play our game, i.e., establish their characters
• get teams to make science fair projects for our use in the game

There was general agreement that we are likely to have more applicants than spaces. So how to choose? We batted around a bunch of ideas:

• explicit objective scoring system
• subjective holistic
• random lottery
• random lottery with a bit extra weight given to those teams who have/will run games

Allen wanted to make sure we identified teams that would not have fun playing this particular game (since ours will be a bit unusual). It would be a real downer if a team realizes 12 hours into it that the nature of our game is not their kind of thing. But the others felt that unlikely to be a problem (especially if our external web site and application process clearly communicate the tone of the game because that will allow some self-selection and will set players' expectations).

In the end we settled on only asking the teams to submit:

• list of games run
• list of games played
• Character role of the team (scientists, journalists, government officials, investors, or other)
• in-character CVs for each player on the team--just a *short* paragraph listing the fictional papers they've authored or whatever achievement is relevant to the role they've chosen
• science fair exhibit
• which run(s) of the game they're available for

We will also interview each team with both interviewers and interviewees in character--like 6 minutes max. At the interview we'll ask them to present their science project. For those teams that find it challenging to interview in person, we'll also accept Skype interviews or a simple video of them presenting their project.

The hope is that the interviews will

• be fun for all involved
• communicate the tonality of our game and introduce them to the main characters
• give us information about which teams will have fun playing along with our plot
• get the players in character even before the game begins

We'll do our best to ask similar questions of the different teams. And we'll try to take careful notes and ratings from the interviews since it will be so easy to forget the details after we've interviewing 60 teams. We may even videotape the interviews.

Melissa expressed serious concerns about having the teams present in their game characters--does it make sense that a bunch of journalists would be presenting a science fair exhibit? She recommended that all the teams be directed to present in the character of high school students.

The others acknowledged that although it would be a bit weird having journalists present a science tabletop display, having the players take on the roles of high school students during the interviews would skip the benefit of getting the players into their final characters early. The thought that we'll be able to hand-wave our way through the incongruity of having non-scientists present science. For example, the investors could present one of their recent investments.

We hope that the selection process will go something like this:

• identify the teams that are not a good match for our game, if any
• identify the applications we all love so much we just have to have them in the game
• use contribution to community (games run) to help allocate the remaining slots.

We will emphasize to the teams that we will be looking for creativity and fun in their applications, *not* production values. We will explicitly encourage them to not spend *too* much time on the applications.

TIMELINE PUZZLE PLAYTEST

We completed testing the revision of the Timeline puzzle. With this set of revisions we now can complete it within an hour. We collected some suggestions for the graphical design of the puzzle and the final encoding scheme.

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As always, respond with your comments, clarifications, corrections, amplifications, etc.

Allen