Friday's game lab

One of the main activities in Friday's game lab was having the participants videotape the game reviews they discussed and storyboarded during the November session. They were asked to play the game with their partner(s) to refresh their memories on their opinions. Originally, every group was going to shoot at the same time, but I ended up working with one group at a time. I first reviewed their script and storyboard with them, asking them to elaborate on why they thought certain features were good or bad. We next did a practice run-through and then taped the actual segment. These were not the most polished segments, in part I think because there was such a long gap between when they wrote the script and when we taped. A couple of them commented that they had forgotten some things because they had been away so long. As the camera person, I also had some trouble figuring out how to capture both the speaker and the game play on screen that they demonstrated to back up their reviews. I wonder how these would have differed if we let the kids tape them themselves? However, I think that once they have had a chance to edit them and to see how the whole process works, they will see places where they could do things differently. And lastly, in watching some of the G4 reviews on the iPod, I noticed that most of the segments are views of the screen only with voiceover rather than the hosts just talking about the game in the abstract. I wonder how this approach might differ in the way the participants were willing (or usually not willing) to ad lib on the fly.

On a totally unrelated matter, something kind of interesting happened at the end of the day when I sat down to play Oregon Trail on the PC. Often, the kids don't really pay attention to what I'm doing when I don't first engage them in some way. This time, though, they kept watching and commenting on what I was doing. They wanted to tell me how to play or what to do and were constantly giving me advice. One of the participants even grabbed my mouse at one point to show me how to steer while rafting the river. I don't know if it was their experience with the game or a maybe a sense that as an adult I don't really know how to play games, but several of them wanted to be involved.