Devlog #2

      My group and I got to know each other a bit and learned that we all have played a folk game in our childhood that the others haven’t. We first started with spitting out games we used to play as kids like tag and freeze tag which are folk games, we also discussed in class, so we continued with other ones. This got us thinking of the games we would play at camp like the game ‘Bang’ or games we still play now like ‘Fakin it’ from one of the JackBox’s games. I know that ‘Fakin it’ is not really a folk game, but if you peel off some layers of it, the premise of the game is just have one faker amongst a group of players, and the players have to find out who the faker is. It’s kind of like ‘Mafia’ in a way where you can use cards instead of needing phones and a computer or ps4. 

      Another game we talked about was ‘Red Light, Green Light’ which we had all played before. Richard had suggested that maybe we could add more colors to the game that would make the players do different stuff. For example, maybe we could add purple and when the ‘light’ turned purple, the players would have to crawl. A lot of the process was trial and error mainly because I would find that some of the changes we wanted to make had already been done. I realized that because of how old folk games are, it’s a bit harder to find renditions that haven’t been created already. A lot of researching games online had to be done and not only folk games from American culture but from others, too. In our culture, as the book discussed, we value play as something positive and good that we should and have to do. This definition of play is something we’ve adopted from years ago in our history and our culture. The game rock, paper, scissors is considered to be one of the oldest games in the book going as far back as the Chinese Han era in 206 BC but somehow it winded up all the way in America and we adopted it to make sense and be something fun to us. The moral of all this is that a lot of research had to be done to figure out how we could make a game that hadn’t already been done. 

     We are still working on how to do exactly that, but now understanding how some games came to be and their variations, I’m sure my group and I can come up with a variation of a folk game that appeals to everyone and is actually something fun to play.