One-Up Game

In ancient greek, the word Ludus had several meanings. It meant both game and school, both play and learning. It also meant a poetic play. It also meant a place where gladiators murdered each other for sport. It's the same with the word "game." There's a bounty of meanings secreted away in the manifolds of that one word. 

Of all of my favorite projects at General Assembly, my favorite was creating the One-Up Game, a project which had nothing to do with the curriculum. Good games have few rules. This is almost always true. It is a bad sign that American Football has a rulebook that looks like a Bible. It's probably a better prognosis that European Football has a rule book that looks like a pamphlet. Cleanliness and simplicity lead to durability. Tic-tac-toe and Rock-Paper-Scissors will last longer than the works of Shakespeare because of its simplicity. One-Up had (I think) only one rule. Here's how it worked. 

One person played their favorite video on YouTube (or Vimeo or whatever). The next person would play a video that they believed to be cooler. Each successive player had to one-up the person that came before them. That's it! That's all the rules! 

So many things. The first is that the quality of content generated was kind of astonishing. It proves to me that algorithmic aggregators still can't hold a candle to room full of smart, funny, inspired people. Second, we often don't personally confront the enormity of the internet. It's presented to us in bite sized, searchable amounts of information. But if you want to win this game, you have to go to the end of the block, keep walking until you get out of the city, and go find the coolest video out there in the wilderness. It's kind of thrilling.

Third! We didn't really enforce any rules. We only implied that there might be rules. Not only did players follow them, they actually started inventing and enforcing their own. Like that a video had to be thematically associated with the video that preceded it. Or a video couldn't run past four minutes. People would come to me asking what the rules where and I told them to ask someone else because I didn't know!

In fact, this game was spectacularly difficult. It was mostly pointless, mostly just for laughs but it was astonishing the extent to which players wracked their memories for the very coolest videos ever created. It made karaoke look quaint. Actually, karaoke has always looked quaint and I love it still.  I will say this in honesty: If this game was played once a week, I would probably go to see the playing of it for the rest of my life. That's a fairly decent complement to pay a game we made up while drinking beer after design class. 

You can see some of the One-Up Videos by clicking on the image below.