"Confidence 100, LoL 100, Bananas 10"

This first entry is also a write up for Silas, who was at a Robotics conference in Vienna and unable to attend.

We had a number of workshops throughout the two days, as well as getting a little bit more familiar with all the people and some of the kids we'll be playing with for the course of the Sandbox. The first day was mainly gaming; something I'm really used to, but with two quite different groups of people. For me, it's always interesting to see how people play games, as well as what they play, so this was a great day with some interesting and unexpected outcomes.

After a rather terrifying introduction (where it because rapidly apparent that we were all fairly equally frightened of working with the kids, for all sorts of reasons), we settled down to a couple of party games with Rosie Fairchild of Splash and Ripple. Frankenfoot, that devious beastie, was really playing up (I fell into the street two days previously and was possibly only saved from a break by my Terminator-esque ankle, which is almost entirely metal now), so I was hoping for a minimum of running about. The two games were Lemon Jousting (which I'm really awful at), and Babel, which was a CtF artifact/comms game and did have a lot of running about, but could be played without having to do that. 

Babel is a pretty easy game to break, but surprisingly no-one did - even though there was a large frieze in the room where the bases were, and also that everyone stayed in their bases / didn't interact with the other groups in the room much. I was surprised in fact, that throughout both days there was a distinct difference between the adults, who wanted to play games all the way through, were a bit fixated on the rules and didn't usually metagame, and the kids, who were really interested in how the games 'wouldn't' work, or could be broken / cheated / beaten. More about this later, but it's probably fair to say that although lemon jousting had a fair amount of emergent play, there wasn't all that much at all in Babel, and actually the adults deliberately stayed away from the more deviant rules (like being able to look at each others' maps, or metagaming the artifacts by just standing over them as a spy / hiding them very very close without bothering to hide them, and raking up a hi score). Aren't we all nice people...

This sounds a bit mean spirited, so let's fast forward to the workshop, where we were working with our team for the sort of first time. Silas and I have Team Cookie, this time minus the slightly younger member, Seren. I LIKE Team Cookie. They are all what other people were politely calling 'strong personalities' (ie. they are very loud, argue with me and each other, and are pretty physicall), and they are at the slightly older end of the group. They are also very engaged with the idea of Mighty Minis - they 'get' the idea of the project as a toy, and they really want to be involved in it. Pretty much as soon as we got into the workshop they were demanding finished ones for free and yelling out suggestions for the anime/adverts/product packaging/expansions - so they've clearly been thinking about the project, and whilst they have pretty overinflated ideas about what the final product is going to be (although we talked about that), they certainly have a deep familiarity with the genre and how it functions.

So my exercise was a fairly simple one, based on Anne Fine's book Flour Babies (wow, I'm glad I never read a book with that cover - it's AWFUL!), in which a group of students have to look after bags of flour for three weeks. Since the Soul is going to be egg shaped, I went for...eggs. SOME of these eggs were hardboiled, but I told the kids they weren't, and to proove to them I wasn't bluffing, I cracked a raw egg into a glass and showed it to them.

(I don't know why these images are sideways, btw)

The kids also had some spray paint top 'cups' and napkins provided.

Here is what our test subjects did, during listening to the other group talk about their swings project:

Suggested that MM should have a friendship dynamic 'befriend your friend' that made the 'egg/soul' different

rare eggs and colours

Named the eggs: 'Nigel Jonathan Junior III' 'Eggbert' 'Edgar' (these last two slightly later when they got the pens, and they didn't tell me)

Put the egg in his shirt pocket

Used the paint-top as hats

Hid the egg inside the paint-top

Made a sort of Russian doll (photo) with the egg inside two paint-tops; one on top with the egg inside and then a paint-top cover. (this kid then forgot about the egg and started paying attention to the other exercise more).

Charlie banged his egg on the table and cracked it. Egg 2 dispatched!

Used the napkin to wrap the egg

Used the napkin to make a 'nest' for the egg inside the lid

Lots of taking the eggs out, holding them, rolling them in hands, turning them around and looking at them.

Drew faces on the eggs (all of them except C, who had the egg in his pocket)

Dew on the nests and named the two other eggs.

Tapped them on the table.

tapped them on themselves, hands, head, cheeks.

Egg 2 died a sad death at this point. Egg 3 dispatched.

Alfy's egg also broke. Unlike Charlie, he noticed that the egg was hardboiled but didn'y query it at this point.

Both girls pushed their eggs a bit further away to stop themselves poking them.

Knocking the egg with fingers

spinning eggs on the table.

At this point all the kids stopped the other exercise and made the following points:

The souls need to be really strong, because 'we aren't really playing with them all that hard' 

Asked what would happen if you threw a Soul against the wall (a: it would break)

Discussed whether the Soul should have a flattened base, to make it more stable.

Suggested a pod for keeping it in

Or a loop or hole, on the Soul itself, so it can be hung from a belt loop or similar.

Thought about materials - rubberized so it would bounce. 'It would have to be really strong'

Asked about swimming again.

They also all agreed that they get up to a lot of activity, and that this means whatever the Soul is made of needs to be really robust.

They couldn't agree on size. Addy liked the egg size, Alfy thought it should be smaller, Charlie and Caitlin both thought it would depend on what went in it. 'Pocketsized is all different'.

Independently they started asking about cheating again 'what if we are on a plane?' 'what if I give it to my Dad?'. This preoccupied them throughout the session - they kept on coming back to it as a theme (even with the swings project). A lot of this was about experimenting and trying things out (asking us as well as doing it themselves).

The kids had by now rumbled that at least some of the eggs were hardboiled. Alfy and Charlie started to take theirs apart. Charlie coloured his in (the inside). Addy and Caitlin both asked at the end what sort of egg they had. My feeling is that the boys weren't too bothered about this; Charlie asked why his were all hardboiled and I told him it was because he kept on trying to break them (and that the Pervasive Media Studio probably wouldn't be too happy with raw egg all over the carpets!) but as the owners of the unbroken eggs, Addy and Caitlin both cared that the eggs were raw inside.

I want to just go back to a previous incident that happened in the game playing session earlier that day. Everyone had been asked to bring in games. I'd got lucky - both Mira and I had brought Dobble, so we sat and talked about that (and animals - did you know that the world's smallest gecko is about the size of my thumbnail...only not as fat). Dobble is basically a really complex game of snap; only with nine pictures on each card. I also played a game called Labyrinth with Ruby and Jude. This was interesting; because when I asked them what they played at home, they said 'Settlers of Catan'.

Catan is a really devious game of strategy, and it's also what I'd consider a fairly complex boardgame. It was certainly leagues above the magnets 'n' maze game they'd brought in. I asked them why they'd chosen Labyrinth and not Catan, and asked them if it was because it was easier to teach than Catan. The said yes; and I wondered for whose benefit that was - the adults who they were expecting not to know anything about games, or the rest of the kids. 

Mighty Minis is a kids toy/game, but the first workshop has already taught me that there are real differences between the adult and child versions of 'play'. Kids want complexity and rules, and they love deviant play - making those rules and complexities do something they aren't supposed to. Their sense of emergence is also much stronger - it didn't really matter to Mira that half her Dobble cards were missing - but that woyld drive me crazy! So instead we played a spot the difference game with the two tins the game came in. Mind had a larger ridge, and it made a different noise. The game was still there, it was just one I hadn't realised was worth playing.