GPS ARTIST
The 21st Century equivalent of Neil Buchanan’s ‘big’ Art Attacks
This game requires a heap of space and gives young people the chance to express some digital creativity. Find a large outdoor area and tell everyone to get their phone and download an app that will track their movements (something like Strava will do the trick). If you don’t have enough phones or apps, the young people can work in groups. Tell the young people that they have 30 minutes to create a beautiful picture… on the mapping app. As they move around the space, the app will track their journey, creating some kind of ‘wonderful’ image. After the time is up, judge the pictures and announce a winner.
HUMAN EMOJI
Emojis are everywhere. You can barely move for emojis; just the other day I was walking down the street and an oversized pair of praying hands almost pushed me into the giant, bulging bicep beside me. Anyway, for this game you need two phones: one to send emojis and one to receive them. Split the group into two teams. Each team takes it in turns to send one person forward; this person is then sent an emoji, which they have to act out or encapsulate in some way. The first team to correctly guess the emoji wins a point.
THE LOCK-IN
Exactly like a traditional lock-in, but with less alcohol and more desperate requests.
Step one: lock the doors. Yes, it’s the most ominous start to a game imaginable and a possible health and safety risk, but it’s all about effect… (You don’t really need to lock the doors.) Split the group into teams of four and five, with as many phones between them as possible. Tell them they have one hour and cannot leave the room. In one hour, the team with the best, most creative and hilarious ‘thing’ will win. The teams’ mission is to get that ‘thing’ to the venue without spending any money. Using their phones, contacts, emails and social media accounts they have to beg, borrow and blag the best item they can. Reinforce the point that they can’t spend any money – this is all about blagging and contacts.
I REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY LIKE YOU
The non-Miss America version of ‘World peace.’
This is a quick, easy, individual game for the start of the evening. Tell the group they have five minutes to post something, anything on their Facebook page. At the end of the night, the person’s whose post or photo has the most ‘likes’ is the winner. It could be anything: a hilarious photo, a status deliberately engineered for likes (‘OH MY DAYS, I’M ENGAGED!’ works pretty well) or something genuinely heartfelt and lovely. You might want to calculate the winner as the number of likes as a percentage of their total friends.
SLOOOOOOOO-MOOOOOOOOO
Good things come to those who……………… ………………wait
For this game, you’ll need a phone with slow motion capability. Split the group into as many teams as you have phones, and give them 20 minutes to create their best slo-mo video, using anything they can find in the meeting space. They might need a while to figure out how it works, and what kind of thing looks particularly good on the technology, but once they’ve got the hang of it, expect some glorious creations.
