Here’s a quick summary of the game:

Scoop! is a game for 3 teams of 15 players. It takes about 90 minutes to play. Each team is a rival tv news crew. The Red Team are radical lefties. The Blue Team are staunch conservatives. The Yellow Team are tabloid muck-rakers. Each team has a digital camera, a bag of props & costumes, a mobile phone, two walkie-talkies, and a tip-sheet, and an impossible deadline…

The game begins with the presentation of the rules and the tip-sheet – a list of stories that the teams will have to cover. There are two importnat principles to absorb: If you can’t make the news, fake the news – it’s a cut-throat rolling 24-hr news environment. The story must be got at any cost, even if you have to make it up. Shoddy working practices make great news stories – if you can film your opponents doing anything, that’s a bonus for you and a penalty for them.

In addition to the stories on the tipsheet, there are two politicians (one Red, one Blue) out there giving speeches and kissing babies; capture them on camera for bonus points!

Once the teams are ready, they start recording on their cameras simultaneously. There are two rounds of filming. After each round, teams return to base and watch the films they have just shot in a live 3-screen presentation, during which their news reports are scored.

The complete rulesheet for the teams can be downloaded in pdf format here

For us, this is the result of a design process that was longer and more collaborative than that of our usual productions; a process that has led to a game with far greater depth and ambition. For players and participants, Scoop! should be a very different kind of pervasive game experience, with a shift in our approach to the relationship between narrative and spectacle.

Over the past days and weeks, we’ve been working hard – crafting props, working on scoring mechanisms, shooting video, casting performers … and now we’re ready & raring to go!

Over the weekend, we’re scheduled for two runs of Scoop! – The first run is on Saturday, between 2.00pm and 3.30pm. The second, final run will be on Sunday, from 4.00pm to 5.30pm.

For those of us behind the scenes, Playmakers has been an exciting, challenging, and – most importantly – highly entertaining project. So thanks to all of you who’ve participated & contributed, and we hope to see as many of you as possible this weekend!

I thought Scoop! on Wednesday night was brilliant.  Way, way better than one of the earlier incarnations of the game that I played at the ICA.  I have a couple of small suggestions to help make it even better …

* The written instructions could be simplified and more catchily and cleverly presented.
* The teams could be given longer to prepare – ten minutes flew by.
* A stop watch would be incredibly helpful to make sure we reached 20 seconds (this was a problem in our team).
* Some people are too shy to present (one of our team members did so but looked fairly unhappy doing it).
* A helper could give a quick tutorial or written instructions to at least one member of each team on operating the camera (to help avoid problems with the camera).
* The playback session is a bit long and unwieldy.  To avoid this the teams could possibly just film their individual reports, rather than the whole twenty minutes.

My main comment concerns the scoring system and the need to prevent ruthlessly efficient target driven teams (for which I accept all blame) triumphing over amazingly creative magum opus teams.  The aim should be to have fun rather than simply file as many reports as possible. but the current scoring system doesn’t work that way.  Giving people more time to think about the reports might help with this.  Spontaneity could also be induced by requiring all reports to involve a passer-by in some capacity.  I’ll have a think about how the scoring system might be improved and let you know if I think of anything clever.  I also wondered if it might be getting perilously close to copying aspects of the Go game, which is obviously also to be avoided.

These are just my humble thoughts, so feel free to incorporate or ignore as you see fit.

See you next time,

Michelle

Did you get a chance to play on the Southbank last Wednesday? What do you think of Michelle’s comments? Is she right? Send us an email!

Putting together an equipment pack that will challenge the players’ creativities while not stiffling them with obvious “right” answers is a trickly line to tred – as Alex put it, we want to give them enough rope to hang themselves, but not proscribe the type of knot they have to use. So each team will find itself with several large pieces of cardboard, some transparent acetates that will allow them to draw in their own special effects, and a collection of party poppers, balls and other delights that carefully straddle the line between ‘whimsical’ and ‘useless’.

The same challenge emerged in putting together an appropriate set of clues. Between us, Holly and I put together two full sets of clues – one nice and vague, leaving a lot of creativity to the teams (“the south bank has been invaded!”), and the other quite concrete, with specific examples and suggestions of how each story could be manufactured. In the end, we all agreed that a mixture of the two was best, and so we have some quite lose clues mixed with some very specific ones. Finally, we added the possibility of inserting new tip-offs throughout the course of the game, by giving each team a mobile phone and preparing some extra-special surprises for the night…

Against the backdrop of all this, we were also working hard at the ruleset, giving it some extra streamlining for live play. The scoring system has been simplified substantially; the missions are now graded in terms of difficulty and are scored for completion, rather than on a per-second basis. On the other hand, the criteria that the reporters now have to meet in order to earn their points are much more stringent. Jingles have to be sung and dress codes have to be met before points will be handed out. A half-day in Clapham Junction turned up some wonderfully tiny blazers that would make excellent reporters’ jackets; Camden provided them with some suitably massive counterparts. Ties made from ribbon will be de rigueur on the South Bank this evening. Gradually, our choices could be seen to be drawing us ever closer to our obvious muse…

So, let’s see what we’ve got to work with:

- [1984] – the first ever ad for the Macintosh (directed by Ridley Scott)

- [Dave Green's Glom] – footage from a camera game by Dave, one of our video guys

- [Massive Urban Gamers ... ] – Bruce Sterling’s (sardonic) annotations of my promo email

- [Paparazzi] – which, if you squint, has a certain family resemblance to Scoop!

- [Justin.tv] – best known for its founder, Justin Kan, who used it to broadcast live, 24/7, from a webcam attached to his hat

- [Whiteboard from "Yes, And!"] – with notes that would (eventually) become A Day At the Beach

- [Checkpoint] – a game of furniture smuggling, from Hide & Seek

- [Video Screens] – a photo from our BFI playtest

Q: What other relevant links have we missed?  What does it all mean?  Does anything on the list trigger any further questions or comments for you?

Oh, and – if you haven’t done so already – remember to vote for our fifth playtest ruleset!  You’ve got until Monday…