Design Journal #2 - The Folk Game heard round the world

This last week in 3377 we began work on game design starting with "Folk Games".  A Folk game, as defined by Dr. S, is a easily accessible and quick to play game that requires little explanation; typically spread by word of mouth some examples include: Tag, hide-n-go seek and capture the flag. Dr. S challenged us this week to come up with our own spin on a already existing folk game, using our knowledge gained from the readings. From our reading by Macklin & Sharp, we learned that all games have 6 factors: Actions, Rules, Goals, Objects, Playscape and Players and for whatever folk game we chose we would be making a tweak off of one of those factors. In Gordon Calleja's Unboxed, we also learned about what makes games and moreover "play" distinctive and interesting as a mode of entertainment, coming away with the idea that the interactivity and willingness to become absorbed into the moment of play being the most distinct elements, meaning whatever games we make should also entrance the players to "come down to the games level" so to speak. In our group we made a spin off of "group juggling", a game in which objects are thrown in a group in a specific order, with the goal to go on as long as possible. The tweak we made to this game is changing the goal from a challenge of endurance, to a last man standing style of game, where as soon as a player messed up, they were out of the game and the game would go on like this until a final 1 on 1 showdown. Some issues that came up with this change, were that with more and more players and objects it became harder and harder to tell who was knocked in any given round. More over I don't think our game really encapsulated a feeling of immersion and as such players would often get distracted. Overall it was really fun using the tools given by Macklin and Sharp and dipping a toe into user-centric-design.