How Peaky Midwest Was Run

I don't want to get into how people were gathered. That is not relevant for the topic as I wish to cover it. The people who attended gathered at the home of our sponsor. Monies were collected to provide food and drink for the participants. There were 14 attendees and the 2 Brits who help run Peaky in Britain. The Brits were there to explain how Peaky runs in Britain and also told of some experiences. This was kept brief as it could eat into our creative time.

The way Peaky (and now Peaky Midwest) works is that there is a number of flip chart boards on which to write ideas down. Everyone also chooses a marker of a different color that is to be identified with them. This will have a purpose to be described later. With 10 people throwing ideas around (the Brits exempted themselves and two others were late), we soon filled several flip pages with ideas. Here is where the colored pen comes into play. Everyone had to go around and mark which ideas they would like to write a game around. Everyone can (and was encouraged) to mark down multiple ideas. The list of ideas was thinned from several dozen to about half a dozen. Since we had 12 writers plus the 2 Brits, it was decided to divide into 3 teams. The teams formed organically based on what ideas people wanted to write about. The ideas that were developed were 1920's seance on a train (don't ask me about that idea), the end of the world and no way to stop it (this was in 2012, go figure), and a self help group.

The groups were separated from the other groups far enough apart so that our discussions wouldn't bleed into the other groups' discussions (generally). Everyone had some sort of computing device that was connected to the internet. My group decided to use Google Docs because it allows real time creating and sharing of documents. We also had a flip board and markers to write down ideas among ourselves. Food and drink were more self serve as this was a residence, but we did have scheduled meals. There were also multiple printers around for when the game needed to be printed to be played on Sunday.

Two lessons learned from this: 1) concurrent editing within the same document is possible but makes the flow of creativity cumbersome; 2) the iPad can REALLY mess up a document created with another OS. The really good thing about Google Docs is that it tracks changes to each document so I was able to recover stuff that was messed up.

We spent Friday night refining what the game was going to be about and started writing late Friday night. Saturday was spent continuing the writing until it was completed and then printed the game out for play on Sunday. Sunday was the initial play test to see how well the games run. (I wasn't there for the initial play tests so I had to find out later how the games went.)

One other thing about Peaky: as part of this writing experience, the writers essentially turn over publishing rights to Peaky organization though they get authors' credit. At this point, I believe the details are still being worked out. And as part of that, the game is licensed under the Creative Commons license or something similar to that. That is, others can take a copy, make changes and run it. I don't think they can make permanent changes to the game, but I'm not 100% sure. I know that I have made changes based on my experience with running it. I still share my changes with my co-writers but I don't know if those changes make it to Peaky proper.