Roaming Gnomes & ROYGBIV

We invented our own festival called LAPDAWG, and it was a great excuse to focus on making new experimental games without worrying about a submission process.

Note: I have seen folks on LinkedIn say, “Stop saying WE - own your triumphs,” or similar enthusiastic Peloton-spin-class positivity mottos (no offense, Peloton Interactive - I love the energy of Bradley Rose, never change!). Look - I can admit that I was the catalyst in many ways, but the effort was always made as a team. My triumphs are our triumphs. I make games alone, but the big games are better as collaborations. And working with others brings out the best in me. It’s hard to self-promote, but I need to recognize the dedication of those around me who believe in my crazy ideas enough to see them through.

Further Note: The previous rant is necessary, as this particular game demonstrates a great deal of team trust across a company that likely didn’t always get what I (and Debra Everett-Lane and Shaelyn Amaio ) were up to but put up with us anyway.

LAPDAWG, or Live-Action Physical, Digitally-Augmented Wacky Games, was our way to create a handful of new games every year for a large audience of college kids. The festival was primarily at Bucknell University (thanks, Margot Vigeant ), but it also appeared at 美国卡内基梅隆大学 and the University of Pittsburgh .

There were a couple of game flavors that made it to LAPDAWG. Some were scaled-up versions of game mechanics, like Angry Birds or that ring game.

Note: That ring game was an idea I had forever - there’s this carnival experience where you move a metal ring along a twisting path. If you touch the sides of the path, a buzzer plays, and you lose. It’s fussy and elicits anxiety - a perfect inspiration for experimentation. What if one took that game and made it huge? What if two people held a pole attached to either side instead of one person controlling the ring? What if, instead of seeing the ring or the path, the players were blindfolded and had to rely on others to give instructions? What if we used an airhorn instead of a buzzer going off? It was glorious - I encourage you to find an excuse to run this at your next large gathering!

Further Note: Where are my pictures from this?!

Others were based on games I had made before, like the Lost Treasure of M.O.W. Some ideas even evolved beyond the initial seed. I loved SpaceTeam as a concept. It was a game I played a handful of times with groups, mainly other designers, and had a great time. It was an app-based game where everyone had to carry out different tasks in a spaceship. Each player has a set of labeled interactive elements, such as dials and buttons, and a display screen that relays instructions. Unfortunately for the players, the instructions are almost always for another player. This means that each player is simultaneously shouting out random gibberish (the names of the instruments were hilariously abstract). If the precise instructions are not carried out within the allotted time, the ship crashes, and everyone loses.

I wanted to make a SpaceTeam variant for many players. I didn’t know how I was going to do it, but I knew what prop I wanted: Garden Gnomes. Shaelyn and I searched endlessly for unique garden gnomes. We needed at least twenty for the vague idea to work. It turns out that there is a large community of garden gnome collectors, and getting twenty varied gnomes was harder than we thought. Shaelyn miraculously stumbled upon a cache of twenty or so gnomes going for less than $80 total (I’m making this number up - I know it was ridiculously low compared to other shops). They were identical, but the size was right, and you couldn’t beat the price. A week or so later, we had a complete set of gnomes made from some not glass, not ceramic material, each holding a little metal tray.

The basic idea was that each gnome had a unique name, a location (more than one can occupy the same area), and an object on the tray (or no object). Each round would have a starting setup for everything and a secret ending setup. If the players could achieve the ending setup successfully, they all won as a team. If a single piece were out of place, they would fail.

I feared that giving the players simple instructions would make the game too easy. How do you make it so the players would have to communicate and, better yet, say ridiculous things to one another? This is when the game started to move away from SpaceTeam. Since I couldn’t give instructions to each player based on time, I had to figure out how players could unravel their own instructions.

The solution was that each player would have a command they had to carry out. This would be written in Gnomish, a made-up, ridiculous-sounding language. Additionally, they would have a single translation of a word. They were not allowed to show one another cards, so to decode the instruction, they would have to roam around the space and figure out what each word on their card meant while assisting other players. I didn’t make it easy, either. Instead of just having something that said, “Move the Hoops Gnome to Gnarlyville,” where “move” would be used on basically every card, I used every synonym for “move” such that players were limited in how they could shortcut one another’s journey.

We also included ways you were supposed to move the objects, such as “walking in slow motion” or “skipping.” These add-ons were silly and unnecessary, but they made it more fun to watch!

Every round had a different set of translations, each a bit weirder than the last. A card would say, “Sizzle the Gobbly-Gook to Vita-Vo-Pickle-Snak” in round one, “Wipple the Gobo-Glingo-Ringo-Kaboom to Willow-Win-Jar-Jar-Under-Bus” in round two, and “Blimp the Shinto-E-Riggle-Poo-Diggle-Quizzle-Comp to Zipple-Zamble-Squo-Squee-Scramble” in round three. The increasingly strange gnomish words excited the challenge in subsequent play-throughs, but this often wasn’t a concern as many of the events had new players each run.

The big issue was that all of the gnomes were identical. We needed to make them all unique. So, in a follow-up to the bacon-making party, we invited all of NBBJ | ESI Design to adopt a gnome. We put paints in the common area, and for a week, our fellow designers and artists would paint the gnome's hats in different colors and patterns. And, of course, they did not disappoint. The gnome designs were far greater than I had imagined. It brought the game from an idea to a fully formed spectacle.

During my travels, the game ran at IndieCade East, LAPDAWG, City of Play, and various universities. And then, I had to retire the gnomes as they were too much to store and relocate for events.

The game was beautiful, but it could have been better. Saying wacky things in Gnomish was not pleasurable - it was a chore. Some players thrive on made-up words, but others (like me) struggle. Also, judging at the end was hard. I had to ensure everything was set up perfectly at the beginning of a round based on a map. Then, I needed to walk through the final result with the players and evaluate their work. It was a slog, and the satisfaction of the win took too long. One time in Pittsburgh, I messed up the maps and couldn’t correctly grade the output. This meant there was no way to let folks know how they did, the worst possible outcome from doing all crazy banter. I loved the idea, but it needed to keep evolving.

The solution was ROYGBIV. I met a professor at the University of Pittsburgh who introduced me to other academics looking to use games to teach engineering students entrepreneurial skills. One team focus was communications, and a revitalized version of Roaming Gnomes would be perfect. The conditions for all the games are minimal technology and a way to work inside a lecture hall.

ROYGBIV is the same basic idea as Roaming Gnomes, with critical improvements. The players start with an instruction and a translation, but they translate symbols, not words. This eliminated the slog of reading nonsense and made folks concentrate on communicating strange symbols effectively. I even put in similar symbols, which increased the difficulty and fun. Instead of gnomes (sorry!), I had a grid of colors that could either be made using paper on the floor or an app projected on the wall. The players would be given the coordinates of a square on the grid and the appropriate color from the rainbow. This meant evaluation, especially on the app, was a breeze. Also, since there are no gnomes to move around, the entire game is print-and-play - no need for a U-Haul to bring it to events.?

Note: Let’s talk about the use of symbols. The idea was perfect for this game, as it gave the players agency to be creative in their descriptions. Instead of trying to sound out gibberish, they had to find a way to describe an abstract two-dimensional shape. Players did this in all sorts of ways, some being literal (telling the number of corners, turns, or twists), while others likened their symbol to an existing brand logo. The funny part was when two different approaches met and tried to decipher one another.

Thanks to the Ideas at Play initiative we started for college students, I have shared ROYGBIV with thousands of players. The next step from the print-and-play variation is to create a web app that automatically makes different combinations of symbols, translations, and game boards. This would allow for unlimited play without repeat. I have found that groups are unlikely to play more than a couple of times as it’s more of a team challenge than a game - which was the intention, anyway.