Zoomvergence: A New Zoom Game
When I took TAPS 103: Beginning Improvising, I learned of a game called “Convergence.” The game begins with two players counting down from three and then saying a random word. These two words then become the “prompts” for the next round, with the two players repeatedly trying to find where these words “converge” at the same word (e.g. cellphone/improv -> space object/prank call -> refrigerator). Another variation of the game has multiple people playing in a circle, with different sets of two players hopping in with their own words until eventually (hopefully!) converging.
Since everything is virtual now, I wanted to find a way to translate this game to cyberspace using Zoom. Thus, Zoomvergence was born.
The game begins in basically the same fashion as the in-person game: each player picks a word at random (in this case, apparently, the words were “skyscraper” and “penguin”). Then, each player turns off their camera while they must search for their word on Google Images for 1 minute. Once satisfied with an image, they download and make it their background. When both players have downloaded their images, they use the “raise hand” function on Zoom to signal that they’re ready. Then on the count of three, they reveal their backgrounds.
These two backgrounds then become the new prompts for the players, who then must hunt for an image they believe represents the average — or convergence — between the two current backgrounds. The game continues like this until the players turn their cameras on with the same virtual background.
The goal of the game is similar to the goal of any improv game — to connect in a playful way with another player, and to collaboratively work towards the same goal. I included the time limit boundary to encourage players to go with one of the first images they could find (and not spend forever looking for the perfect picture).
We ran into a couple unfortunate wrinkles during the play-test. For one, finding an image on Google Images, downloading it, and making it a virtual background is a bit more time-consuming than I originally thought it would be. Instead of seeing the 1 minute time limit as a way to free themselves from the pressure of finding the perfect image, my play-testers (and friends) found it stressful to have to look for an image and download it in the span of 1 minute.
The second bump they ran into was that they simply could not converge on anything within the span of 5 minutes (i.e. how long the game was supposed to take). I had forgotten that most games of Convergence in the real world can take up to 10 minutes, and I didn’t initially take into account that navigating this game virtually might take even longer. Brenna and Austin definitely got within the same genre of background image (they eventually landed on two different movie posters), but weren’t able to successfully converge.
Overall, though, my friends still had fun playing the game! The most fun part of the game (measured informally by the amount of laughter I could hear over Zoom) seemed to be the moment when the players turned on their videos and saw how similar or different their backgrounds were. There was also a fun element of bewilderment that would sometimes crop up when a player chose a background that didn’t seem to really be an average of the two previous images.
Some main takeaways from this game design and play-test:
- Always take into account the limitations of the game’s medium. Virtually, for example, the process of finding an image, downloading it, turning off your video, uploading the image to Zoom, and changing your virtual background is super time-consuming.
- Emphasizing the objectives and rules of the game—even the softer ones, like “don’t worry about finding the perfect image”—is a crucial component of game design, to ensure that the players get out of the game what I want them to get out of it.
- Giving the players agency to determine the difficulty of the game could be fruitful. Clearly, my original definition of “convergence” was too narrow to even be feasible within 5 minutes. Maybe there could be a difficulty setting for players to decide for themselves how they want their backgrounds to converge—instead of the exact same image, maybe convergence could mean the same genre of image, or for the image to contain the same object.
