Collaboration – The GAME

I’ve been trying to come up with game concepts for hitRECord and this is one that came to mind. I’m not sure how well it would translate to “play in one sitting” style play, but I think it would work relatively well for playing over the site itself.

The quick and dirty on the game is this –

“Collaboration” is not a competitive game. Instead it is a cooperative game in which players act as a team. The goal is to get every player from the start to the finish by doing remixes until, at the end, the remixes are combined to form one large work.

Here’s the basic setup:

A group of people agree to play the game. All games have a time limit. The suggested limit is a number of days equal to the number of players. Players can choose to omit this rule or adjust the time limit at the beginning of the game as they wish though.

If you’re keeping track of progress on some type of board then you can each pick a hitRECord button as your token.

Each player chooses a RECord of their own as their starting RECord. This is the RECord from which other players will begin remixing to get that player closer to the finish line.

In order to make it to the finish line, a player must pass through a number of spaces equal to the number of players in the game. So, if you have three players, there are three spaces that must be passed through.

For a player to advance a space, another player has to do a remix inspired by the advancing player’s starting RECord. This can incorporate other remixes already in play, but it only counts for one player (so if necessary designate who you are attempting to advance with your remix). You cannot remix your own RECord to move yourself forward, though you can use elements from your RECord or its remixes when working to advance other players. It is suggested that players restrict themselves to the material actually in the game, so using RECords from outside the game as sources shouldn’t be your first step – do what you can with the materials already at hand. Now if a starting RECord includes images, text, music what-have-you from another source, those make sense to utilize since they were part of the original RECord already.

For each remix that is done, a player is brought one tile closer to the finish line. There are a number of tiles equal to the number of players, so if there are three players it takes three remixes of a players work to get them to the finish line.

Once everyone has made it to the finish line, to win the game a last remix is done which incorporates parts of each player’s RECords. You do not have to use every remix that was done (though that could be cool), but all the remixes should somehow be reflected in the end product. This final remix can be done by a single player on the team, by all the players on the team or all the players on the team can do their own version. The team can decide as a group which method they want to use.

Any medium restrictions can be hashed out at the beginning of the game by the players.

I’ve created a Collaboration which may be used to house remixes in to track progress. Or you could create a Collaboration of your own, or an album, whatever works best to help your team organize its efforts to complete the game.

So, yeah, that’s it. This text is part of a short tutorial film I’ve put together (this is sort of the quick reference sheet). If you would like to see the main part of the tutorial where it gives a demonstration on how the game might progress, then feel free to skip to 6:20 on the film. All the information before that pretty much covers the above.

Hope you enjoy!

NOTE: I apologize to RECorderBelle for having called her RECord "After the Rain" when it is really "After Rain". I'm sorry I had taken it down incorrectly and replicated the mistake over the course of the whole thing!

Also, here is the link to the collaboration "COLLABORATION game Collab" for housing RECords at if you would like -

http://hitrecord.org/records/604853