Gaming My Life Weekly Challenge: Create a New Game Every Week

We’re gamifying a charity walk!  Instead of walking from a start to a finish, 150 people will be walking from a wine bar to other wine bars and food trucks following our app along the way until they end in cupcakes and wine!  The event will be in San Francisco in 2 weeks

Mobile Adventure Walks is our free mobile game that makes walking fun.  The game Aaron & I built on the iPhone is fun, but it’s really just a start. We’ll be adding features that make it feel even more gamey, but working on features that take forever to build isn’t as exciting as creating new ideas and hearing about new people playing. I was thrilled to create an online scavenger hunt game to promote our Kickstarter campaign, with help from Aaron.  The hope was to get people to play everyday for 5 minutes to solve daily puzzles.  The daily puzzles in the Holiday Adventure Hunt

Daily puzzles were meant to feel similar to an actual Adventure Walk where you had to pay attention to details in your surroundings, but instead of being outdoor hunts, these daily hunts were indoor and on-line. By solving a Hunt Question of the Day, a player got an Unlock Clue.  All 18 days of clues ended up revealing 18 letters (with a few twists along the way) and then these letters needed to be unscrambled to discover the final web site.  Once players arrived at the Hidden Final Destination, they could see the Wall of Winners and add their name & photo to the wall along with a message to other players.

I had so much fun with the game. It was incredibly fun working on the bigger concept, the daily hunt questions, and the hidden clues that worked together to get to the finish.

If I planned another game like this one, this is what I’d do differently:

• Simplify the concept so it could be quickly understood
  
• Make sure the concept is appealing to the target audience
• Test the marketing of the concept to make sure that people who will like it will be drawn to the description of it
  
• Design the concept so that it could be automated
  

Even with an imperfect game, it was great fun to read the emails from people who enjoyed the game and to hear the thrill of the people who made it to the finish!

As always, I’m looking forward to the next game!  More to come in FL over the holidays…

I won a beach vacation by eating fruits and veggies!

Well, I won it from myself after a 48-day game that I played.

About 6 weeks ago, I decided that all my issues with managing my weight could be solved by eating a total of 5 fruits & veggies everyday.  The best way to make myself do this, was of course through a game.  Here were the rules:

• Eat a combined total of 5 fruits & veggies everyday for 48 days
• Mark each serving in an iPhone app, because it’s surprisingly hard to keep counting to 5 everyday
• Now, here’s the tough part: no chocolate until all 5 fruits & veggies are eaten for the day.  Motivation #1
• Everyday I complete the challenge, I get a check on the score-sheet we keep on the bedroom door
• If I miss a day, I must roll a die.  I then must add the number of that roll to the number of days I have left to complete the challenge
• After 48 days + however many dice rolls, I win a beach vacation!

The good news:

• I didn’t miss any days.  48 days later, I won!  We will go away for my birthday weekend.
• I lost 8 pounds
• I have a much easier time eating healthier foods and crave chocolates and sweets less often.  For the first time I can remember, I actually go some days without eating chocolate.  It’s eerie.
• I found that an app, which I thought to be thoroughly useless, was helpful when incorporated into a larger game:

I’m going to keep up this challenge and switch to 50-days at a time, keeping the prize as a mini-vacation.  Rick’s still on his challenge that will award us an iPad, although his missed 3 days forced him to extend his game by 10 days.  We’ll see what he plays for next and how many vacations I can win!

My sister, Cheryl, and her friends Anna & Gayle hunted through Delray Beach, FL, as they uncovered my philosophy in the “Julie’s Guide to Dating and Living Game”.  The trio earned Wisdom Points as they followed clues to becoming the wisest of all daters and life livers.

It all started at 4pm EST, when Cheryl received an email instructing her to go to an address on Atlantic Avenue where she was to mingle and see if there was anyone she was interested in talking to.  She arrived quickly and got scared by the older gray-haired, cigarette-smoking gentleman sitting at the bar – she thought it was a bad set-up.  I answered her frantic call and reassured her it was safe to wait at the bar until there was someone she chose to talk to.

The bartender told Cheryl that the drinks were already covered (I’d called ahead) and she was relieved when her friends Gayle & Anna walked in.  They were told to have a drink and compare notes.  Cheryl, Anna, and Gayle, respectively, are pictured below at the bar:

Up until this point, Anna & Gayle had been following a separate set of text message instructions through a program I built. They had been accumulating points for their team and when the 3 were together, they responded as such through SMS.

Their next text message included a link to the map on their phone, directing them to a location that corresponded with Rule #1 of Dating and Living: Always have fun!  For the next four hours, they answered questions relating to my rules of dating and living and interacted with strangers.  Each right answer earned them a Wisdom Point, but they could have moved on by typing SKIP at any point.

Most text messages asked questions which could be answered by the name of a restaurant or store name.  The trio was directed to these locations through links to the phone’s map.  They got their exercise as they walked along Atlantic Ave to the locations that would answer the question.  The team was sometimes able to earn Wisdom Points for interacting with strangers and getting advice.  This all related to Julie’s Rules of Dating and Living.

11 Rules of Dating and Living uncovered through the game:

1. Always have fun!
2. Always get out of a bad date.
3. To meet caliente men, you need a diverse group of wing-women.
   (A previous question had to do with Caliente Kitchen)
4. Join lots of clubs
5. Hang in public places often & talk to strangers.
6. Treat yourself how you want to be treated. Be kind, generous, & flattering to yourself.
7. To meet men, go where they go.
8. Have a deal-breaker question.
9. To get here eventually, you must first learn to date yourself.
10. Enjoy your journey.
    This led to the standard, “Buy Julie chocolate” mission – I can’t wait for them to arrive!
11. Learn to take yourself on a date. I prefer solo movie dates.

All questions were answered correctly – go team!  Most impressive was when they earned a well-deserved bonus point.  They earned their reward after handing Cheryl’s phone number to a good-looking guy who had shared his opinion about deal-breaker questions (it must have been a good one).

They were instructed to have dinner after 3 hours of game-play, which was perfect timing.  They were still hungry after stopping for a lobster roll snack at a clue-location:

After dinner, the game was successfully won by this hard-working team, but their assignments did not end.  They were each instructed to plan a solo-date, ask themselves out formally, and report back how it went.  Hopefully they’ll post the details about their solo dates – I’m excited to hear the details!

Thanks again for playing, Cheryl, Gayle, and Anna!

-Julie

Yesterday was Aaron’s last weekday off before he starts his new job on Monday, so I sent him on a journey that would allow him a glimpse into his future.  Between jobs, he had taken a 10-day trip to Mexico City where he had his fortune predicted by a finch and I thought I could do better.

My goals for his game were:

• Send Aaron on a hunt through town to learn about his future and feel positive and happy about his new beginning
• Experiment with Ruby on Rails & Twilio as the engine behind his experience
• Give Aaron a better psychic prediction than the bird in Mexico City

Before I picked up Aaron, I gave him the web site to visit to explain the game.  At that site, he entered his cell phone number that gave him a small on-screen message as well as his first text message:

From his first message, he clicked the link and found out where to go through a pin on his cell phone map.  I picked up Aaron at his house and we were off to learn about his future!

We arrived at the first location and he replied to the SMS a few times before correctly identifying that the helpful community will come from “The Hub”, a shared entrepreneurial workspace in downtown SF.  His next text message told him to take a tour of The Hub and asked him if he liked it.  Luckily, he did!

Aaron’s next few messages sent him to different places around town to discover what would come to him and what specific personal attributes would come in handy leading him to his happy future.  His SMS conversation with the automated system looked something like this:

There were only a few little hitches in the plan, like when we arrived at what Yelp reported as a magic store to find a bunch of apartment buildings with no signage.  I easily explained this away to Aaron as the prediction for magic is invisible, just as magic itself can’t be seen.  I had a harder time explaining why Yelp’s reported “Charm” boutique was not where it was supposed to be.  Luckily, Aaron was good sport and enjoyed the experience and his brightly predicted future.

At the final stop, Cafe Gratitude, we played the Abounding River board game which gets players in touch with their gratitude in several categories, and actually assigns specific homework based on what you learn.  The food and game at the cafe added to the positivity of the day and we both were able to relax into the positivity of the day.

Overall, I think we’d both call this a successful game and now we have a platform to expand on with future games.  I’ll be using this for the next few games I create, adding on a few features at a time.  Also, I’m going to change my rules for this Daily Challenge once again.  I’ll change the blog again, this time to a Weekly Challenge to make it more realistic.  One game a week minimum will be easier, so that’s the new plan – and my prediction is that this will work!

-Julie

I thought I’d made up my first card game called Happily Ever After, until my friend Barton pointed out that the way each player competed, it was more like Happily Ever After and Screw You.  So the game needs some work to be nicer all around, but for now, I think the name’s kinda catchy.

Bruce had requested a game called Happily Ever After that would be similar to Chick Flick, the Game.  Knowing Bruce, I thought a card game could be fun for the 4 of us when we went to Bruce’s for dinner tonight.

There were 4 categories of happiness in the game:

• Rejuvination
• Love & friendship
• Fulfilling work
• Excitement & adventure

I filled a bag with cards in each of the 4 categories (colored yellow, orange, blue, and green, respectively) and each card had a description and a number of points.  To start, each player picked 5 cards without looking into the bag.  (The bag started out as a beat up brown shopping bag, which Bruce quickly replaced with a cute Ralph Lauren bag – thanks, Bruce!)

We held our cards secretly and Bruce started by picking a new card from the pile and placing one of his cards on the table.  The idea was to collect a total of 5 points in each category to win.  Points were based on the number of points in that color you had placed in front of you on the table.

Here’s how the game worked:

• Some cards contained a short positive story, for example in the love and friendship category, “You make a new friend +1″.  If you chose to place this card in front of you, you’d have +1 in orange until you accumulated more orange cards to increase your points.
• Some cards contained a short negative story, for example still in the love and friendship category, “You forgot your new friend’s name -1″.  Negative cards are for placing on someone else’s pile to take away their points.  Hence the “Screw You” in the game title.  Whoops – I hadn’t thought of that when creating what I thought was nice game.
• Each color had several cards labeled “Negativity Armor (reverse negativity)”.  These were special cards that allowed the player to block the negative attack and instead, inflict the negative points onto the sender.  The blocker had to use the same color Negativity Armor as the color under attack.  When this happened, it was a social where all players had to have a sip of their wine.
• There were 2 white Negativity Armor cards that could be used to combat an attack of any color.  In the end it didn’t matter, because somehow Bruce had all of the Negativity Armor cards.  That guy was protected.

So, Bruce started by picking a new card from the bag and choosing which one of his 6 cards he wanted to place in front of him.  Then Rick went, then me, then Barton, then back to Bruce.  We had to either place a card to aggregate points or block another player by taking away their happiness.  How exactly did I miss how aggressive this game was?

A little bit of bad math on my part made it incredibly difficult to win this game.  The good news is that all of my ridiculous cards were read and played (including many cards awarding players for the idea of buying me chocolate or playing my games – not to mention following all of my advice about finding a fulfilling career and adding adventure to their lives).

Since Bruce was only 1 point away from winning, he was awarded the Happily Ever After and Screw You Champion.  The rest of us were just screwed.

I got great advice for version 2 of the game.  Fixing the bad math obviously ranks high on the list of important fixes, followed closely by adding new types of cards.  Cards that skip a players turn, reverse the order of play, award you a new turn in place of the next player, etc could add more luck to the game.  We brainstormed ways to take the “and Screw You” out of the title by making it more collaborative, like inflicting negativity on yourself while allowing others to step up and block your self-destruction.  These are all ideas for me to play with for version 2.  Also, I learned of another game to check out at a cafe to give me new ideas for this style of game.

For now, I’ll focus on a rejuvenating sleep where I’ll hopefully dream of ideas for my next game that I’ll create Wednesday and play Thursday…

-Julie

My friend Susan and I were planning to meet for lunch in Hayes Valley, but we had a difficult time identifying our favorite places to eat.  So, this became the theme for today’s game.

I listed a few categories of locations for Susan to consider as her Favorites:
- places to eat good food
- places to eat good dessert/chocolate
- outside places to sit
- indoor places with wifi to sit and work (since we’re both working on our own ventures mainly from home)

She had 30 minutes to explore the neighborhood and create her own Favorites list following some rules:
- Every Favorite earns a point
- When choosing a Favorite, pretend that money is no object and that calories don’t count
- In order to declare a place a Favorite for desserts, we must eat one
- Every Favorite on the list that matches my own short list earns a bonus point
- Susan can declare a “Favorite” a “Sure Favorite of Julie’s”, which is like a bet.  This means if she is correct, she gets 2 bonus points, but if she’s wrong, she loses 1 point.
- She could have more than one Favorite per category and some categories can be left empty.
- She gets 2 bonus points if she sees any Ecstasy (it was a nice day, so who knew what she’d see).

Here’s what happened:
- Susan picked 15 places.
- We sampled artisan chocolates and Canneles de Bordeaux (just as good as what we ate in Bordeaux).
- Susan guessed that 9 of them were on my list of Favorites, but she was correct only 4 of those times.  This gave her 3 bonus points (4 x 2 – 5).
- Susan wrote down one of my Favorites without betting on it, giving her 1 more bonus point.

This means that Susan scored Hayes Valley at 19.  She missed the bonus for “Ecstasy”  because she didn’t find the statue by that name.  This was not a huge loss, although I was truly horrified when she walked by a macaroon shop not once, but twice, without a glance!

Loss of macaroons aside, we were able to explore the Hayes Valley area in a new way, making future lunch meeting locations easier.  The main idea would be to repeat this game at a different San Francisco neighborhood to compare points.  This way, in the future, we will be able to choose both a neighborhood and a specific location based on points and Favorites.

The game went well, but as a player, Susan wished there was more interaction with people at the locations.  She suggested clues to be divulged by staff to lead her to specific locations.

This is definitely something to consider for next time.  But for now, I am happy to know more about Susan’s Hayes Valley picks (especially a deep dish pizza place Rick missed on his 2010 pizza tour of SF).

Thanks again, Susan!

-Julie

I learned a lot from the last 30 days.  This exercise taught me the following:

• Making these silly games makes me happy.  It’s such a boost to come up with a new idea, watch someone play, and dissect the game afterward.
• Sometimes I want to work on an idea for more than one day.
• Sometimes I want to play a new game for more than one day.
• Creating and playing a new game in one day is hard.
• Rick is a great sport, but it’s not fair to ask him to play my new game everyday.
• Most strangers who helped with these games got a real kick out of participating.  Most of the clerks at stores, staff at restaurants, and musicians on the street that I asked for help were thrilled to be a part of these hunts.  They really hammed it up and played their parts, and some even said that it made their day.

Because this has been so fun and valuable, I’m changing the rules for my new challenge:

• Everyday I have to play a game or work on a game.
• I can count one game twice in the same week whether I’m playing it or creating it.
• I’ll only blog about new games played or finished.
• I will try to create games for as many people who are not Rick as possible (to give him a break).

Today, I chose to play one more round of Biggest Loser Psychic, because I wanted to win after 2 consecutive losses.  I changed the rules and finally won!

This time I took my list of 23 possible events and asked a group of people how many they thought I’d get right.  I guessed correctly at 5, while Cheryl, Adam, Aaron, and Rick guessed too high at 6, 7, 15, and 16, respectively.

These were the 5 that I got right:

• People cry
  This is a given every week
• Someone goes to Subway
  Finally! Actually, Subway went to the whole school, so we’ll count it
• The group talks about what type of number they’ll “pull” at the weigh-in
  Another given every week
• A surprise at the weigh-in
  Another given every week
• Someone wins a stupid prize that people pretend to be excited about (something sponsored)
  Tickets to a premier of a new movie.  They don’t care about movie premiers!  They want immunity.

As incredible as it was for me to finally win the Biggest Loser Psychic game, the actual episode was pretty amazing, as well.  I enjoy the show better with my new game and Rick was actually able to watch it without feeling sick.

I look forward to my easier daily challenge and hope to find new people who want to play!  Please tell me if you’re interested in volunteering, and if so, what your favorite games are so I can plan

-Julie

I met Rick at 5:30 and told him the terrible news.  I had overheard a creepy guy plotting a heinous crime.  At first I thought he was crazy, talking to himself on the street, but then I picked up on a few key words and got scared.

I learned that he was trying to destroy San Francisco and that he thought the easiest way to do this was to first devastate the citizens and then attack them while they are vulnerable.  He thought the best way to upset them would be to take away all the city’s best chocolate.

I wanted to report him, but I knew no one would believe me unless we followed his trail to get more information!  I thought he was heading to Recchiuti, so Rick & I rushed to the Ferry Building to investigate.

We got to Recchiuti and I told Rick I was afraid of the creepy guy and that he should be the one to ask the sales girl if she noticed anyone strange lurking around.  He wasn’t a big fan of the idea, but he reluctantly told her that he was trying to stop a crazy man from destroying the city, starting by ridding it of its best chocolate.  He asked if she noticed anything strange or had any information for us.

She listened to Rick’s story.  And then she told him she did notice a creepy guy a few hours before.  She said he was talking about camping and that he said something about heading over to Fog City News.  Rick quickly realized that if was thinking of camping, he probably bought S’mores & that we should do the same, since it would help us think like him.  Or maybe that last part was my idea

We rushed towards Fog City News snacking on S’mores on the way (which were incredible), relieved that the store clerk from Recchiuti was paying such good attention to the creepy guy’s actions.  We hoped our luck would continue.

When we got to Fog City News, I had a hunch that the creepy guy would have cared about the most popular new chocolate.  So, Rick told our story to the clerk who remembered the villain.  She said she remembered the guy because he was so creepy, and told us what he bought.  She thought she heard him mention Swiss chocolate and then saw him heading toward Sutter St.  New chocolate in hand, we walked toward Sutter to find some Swiss chocolate.

Rick remembered that Teuscher was on Sutter, so we continued, hoping the villain was as memorable there as he had been on his prior stops.  When we arrived, we learned that the creepy guy had been there, and that he had bought the champagne truffles.  We were so happy he had such good taste in chocolate.  We learned he kept repeating the word, “pedsedserp” and that he said something about going to cocoa pretty.  He was getting more vague on his journey, apparently.  The clerk at Teuscher thought it was so strange, that he had written the whole thing down and handed us his notes.

Luckily Rick figured out that cocoa pretty could mean Cocoa Bella (a chocolatier in the Westfield) and that pedsedserp was an anagram for depressed (actually, it seems the creepy guy can’t spell, because there was an extra p, but we’ll let that one go for now).

On our way to Cocoa Bella, Rick got a strange text telling him Number 6.  And when we got to Westfield, this was the first place where no one knew anything.  But, Number 6 is a really good chocolate, so we thought we should buy it.  Just when feared that the trail had gone cold, Rick got a text from the creepy guy telling us that March 7 he was reading SF Weekly Blogs and that we should go where it is no longer.

While Rick worked on figuring out what this meant, I bought us dinner to take home (I knew he’d stop this madman in time for dinner).

And then Rick unraveled the mystery.  Our villain was “depressed” because Charles Chocolates unexpectedly closed.  This was revealed in an SF Weekly Blog on March 7.  Following the instructions through the text messages to go where it was no longer, we raced upstairs to find an empty Charles chocolates storefront as they stripped away the name on the glass in front of us

Well, we understood why the creepy guy was depressed, we were, too.  We loved Charles Chocolates and we’ll miss those peanut butter butterflies, terribly.  But, there was still a city to save!  Rick texted the villain (we still have no idea how he got Rick’s cell phone number – he must have known we were hot on his trail).

Rick was able to talk him down with promises of other fine chocolates.  He admitted he too was sad to hear the news, and this probably helped calm the madman.

All told, we’re happy to have helped the city of San Francisco keep its wonderful chocolate, while protecting the people from further harm after lowered defenses.  We will miss Charles Chocolates, but we know he will be back at some point.  We will wait for his return, but in the meantime, we will enjoy our full chocolate drawer.

A celebration of chocolate is a wonderful way to finish off any 30-day challenge!  Tomorrow, I’ll write about the next challenge.  Until then, I’ll be busy eating good chocolate…

-Julie

Since I missed one of my best friend’s 36th birthday, I made him a game he could play without me while feeling like I was part of the experience.  Kind of like a simulated birthday night out while we were on opposite coasts.

I sent him an email with instructions to read one clue at a time and then solve it before scrolling to the next clue in the email.  I was happy to hear that Jason solved the clues correctly and went to the movie theater, enjoyed the Fighter, found the restaurant, was surprised by the gift card waiting for him, and enjoyed the meal complete with port & dessert!

So I could feel more a part of the experience, I asked Jason to photograph each location and answer a birthday quiz (both to simulate what we might have talked about and to give me all I wanted to hear about his evening).  His final instruction was to remember where he lived and go home.  Happy to hear that also went well!

First the pictures (the first is of Jason at the lobby of the movie theater, and the rest were from the restaurant):

Here were his answers to the birthday quiz:

A. What is your favorite sports movie starring Mark Wahlberg?

Probably the Fighter, though he also was in Basketball Diaries which was really good but much more depressing

B. What is Julie’s (or is it a tie)?

I would say the Fighter  He was wrong, it’s a tie between the Fighter & Invincible

C. What is your favorite underdog sports movie?

If you consider chess a sport (and remember I was on the chess team in college when answering this) Searching for Bobby Fisher, if not gotta go with Hoosiers since it was filmed on Butler’s campus. GO BULLDOGS!  Good answer – Searching for Bobby Fisher was good, so we’ll give you that.

1) Family is what you make not what you are born with,
2) Christian Bale has a bald sport
3) Head… Body…. Head… body
4) My Boston Accent really is not THAT bad.

E. How do you think this movie differs from the other movie that was longer playing at the same theater?  Do you think there were many commonalities?  This relates to an earlier clue – the other movie was Battle of LA

Less aliens, more plot, more dialog, similar amounts of blood, and a city worth saving (I say let the Aliens have LA)

F. What did you order for dinner?

I did the Restraunt Week thing so
Ensalada de Manzana y Endibia
Chorizo a la Plancha
Ameijoas Bulhão Pato
Poblano Rejeno <SP?>
Platanos con Helado
And the century of port flight.

G. Any ideas what movie we should see together in May?

Not a lot of movies listed for that date yet, but POTC: Stranger tides comes out that week. Perhaps others will be listed by then. Perhaps midnight in paris

H. What is your favorite birthday game?

This of course

I. Did you have any birthday game surprises?

The gift certificate and the pretty blond matre d’ that thought it was a very fun/funny idea

J. What was your favorite birthday game surprise?

That I was able to drink 100 years of port (a 10,  20, 30, and 40 year) and still walk home.

Thanks again for playing, Jason, and happy belated birthday!!

-Julie