Discussion Game Instructions

Playing the Game

Players in this game are told to consider a statement, and decide what they think about that statement. You then discuss your thoughts with other people and track your opinion and rationale over time. Start the game by entering your name in the start screen (see the general instructions page). When the game begins you will find a statement on the screen. Consider how you feel about that statement. Do you agree or disagree? Choose a value for your opinion by adjusting the slider appropriately. Then type a brief rationale at the bottom (remember you can bring up a keyboard to type by clicking on the ABC towards the lower left of your Palm).

Next you go around and discuss your opinion with other people. In the default version of the game, when you meet someone you must beam them your initial opinion (ONE player hit the Meet button - one person is the sender and the other is the receiver). You then discuss your opinions, change your score and rationale if necessary and meet a second time to close the transaction. At any point in time if you don't want other people to meet you, you can press the READY button, which will toggle to say LOCKED. In this mode you can neither send or receive meetings. You can also always hit the Data button to review how your opinion has changed over time with respect to opinions of other people that you have met.

Game Parameters

There are just a few parameters that you can set in this game. The most important one is the Question. You should carefully consider what the appropriate question is. The checkboxes can determine the following:

• Force Pair Meetings - Requires players to meet once at the beginning of the interaction and once at the end. If this is unchecked players only need to meet once.
• Allow Neutral Opinions - When checked this puts a zero on the slider so that people can have a zero opinion. When unchecked it jumps from -1 to +1. This is a hotly debated topic as to whether zero should be allowed.
• Allow Pause Upon Exit - Unlike the other games, if this is checked it will pause the game when you exit, allowing you to go to other applications, and come back in where you left off.

NOTE: There is a known bug in the preferences section. In order to beam preferences to another machine you must beam the preferences, cancel out of the beaming machine and go back into the preferences before beaming again. We are working on correcting this problem.

Information for Instructors

The key to this game is coming up with good questions that make the players think. But you can experiment with questions that lean in one direction or the other. The interesting part comes from looking at how the opinions of individuals and the whole group change over time. Compiling all of the data in one place can point out some interesting results as to who was the most influential in the group, and other related ideas. Depending on the question asked, this can be used in any number of contexts.