I still can’t get over what happened in the course of the game “I Love Bees” and what was achieved. Especially that relay challenge.
I was sitting in my office when I started thinking about my university orientation games. A few years ago, there was a lot of noise made about a bunch of university students rushing onto a pedestrian crossing and doing some juvenile cheer. That incident is actually quite representative of the games we play during orientation.
The standard orientation programme when it comes to games is to divide the people participating into groups and get them to run from station to station where each station would have some random challenge they would have to accomplish or some game where they would have to compete with another group. There would also be the occasional mass game for everyone in the programme.
I was part of a few committees for such programmes and the aim for us when planning the games was to facilitate bonding between people in their respective groups and allow them to have fun. That was it. We tried our best but whether people built lasting friendships from the few days of camp depended a lot more on what happened after those few days then whatever we planned for them to do during it.
The allocation of the members to a group was also rather arbitrary and sometimes it was a matter of the organisers wanting to put the eye candy into their own group.
The thing is what if we adopted the model of an Alternate Reality Game like “I Love Bees” and adapt it to plan an orientation programme for our freshies. It is probably going to be a bit more work but I think there are a lot of advantages.
Firstly, I think it would be fun.
Second, I think if executed properly, the whole game can definitely be more challenging than the station games we play. In fact, one of the chief complains we hear is that such station games are usually childish.
Thirdly, I think such a game would build a greater sense of community between the participants. Instead of just focusing on a group of participants, the community will be of all the participants.
Fourthly, it allows people to form their own groups which seems to be a natural process that happens in the course of the game “I Love Bees”. I’m not really sure the science behind the formation of such groups, but I think it has to do with basically people with similar interests coming together yet each of them has a different skill set that can enhance the group. I think the natural formation of such groups within the ARG will be more beneficial than the arbitrary allocation of people into groups.
Finally, I think such an ARG-modelled orientation programme will actually teach our university students skill sets that can help them thrive in university and introduce to them the tools they can use to communicate and collaborate effectively. Imagine an ARG like “I Love Bees” played as an orientation game.
After the game, the participants know the strengths and skill sets of a group of people in university when it comes to seaching for information, putting them together and analyzing them. Next time when an individual is hit with a piece of data that he/she cannot understand, that individual already knows a larger pool of people they can turn to and actually know who might be better suited to the task. Also, it might help encourage a culture when something is not known, that it is put out for the whole university to help search for info, collate and interpret them.
Finally, about the title of the post. I think most university students will recognise it as a cheer done at such orientation programmes. In fact, it was the cheer done by the bunch of students at the pedestrian crossing.
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