Multiplayer Introduction Game

At the 2012 Teaching and Learning with Technology Symposium at Penn State, I had the honor of introducing Jane McGonigal, Creative Director of Social Chocolate, and game designer extraordinaire.

In his book, The Grasshopper, Bernard Suits writes: 

“Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”

Jane McGonigal quotes this in her own book, the name of which I am omitting for reasons that will become clear presently. She then goes on to say: 

“Compared with games, reality is too easy.” 

Now, I feel the same way about giving introductions, it is too easy; so I thought we could make a massively multiplayer game of it.   

The game has 7 quests and 5 minutes to complete them:

1. The title of her New York Times best selling book.
2. Three games she has developed to help people tackle real world problems.
3. The title of her TED talk. Bonus: How many times has it been viewed?
4. What is her current job title?
5. Where did she get her PhD?
6. Tweet the link to her webpage with her twitter handle, the TLT Symposium hash tag and one of my twitter handles.
7. Tell us something we didn’t know, something I would not have come up with in a traditional introduction.

I am very happy to report that we successfully completed this game in 3 minutes and 38 seconds. I brought the introduction as a whole in under 10 minutes, so it all worked out well.  

The introduction itself was designed to perform some of the ideas that Jane went on to present in such a compelling way.  

http://gaming.psu.edu/gamification/buttons/