So, you’ve learned how we can help your team grow and develop a culture of cooperation and success, but you’d like to learn a little bit about some of the primary tools we use to do that? Then it sounds like you’re ready to Meet Our Games!
A New World from the Ground Up
Microscope (by Ben Robbins) is a game unlike any other we offer here at TourGuide Games. Where other options in our collaborative storytelling experiences have the participants stepping into a specific character, Microscope is much larger in, well, scope!
Instead of pulling off an action-packed heist, or laying out the perfectly wacky world domination scheme, your team members will be stepping back from such a personal story and into a wider world. And the trick to it all: they will be building that world around them. Microscope is what we call a world-building game because the participants are actively building a brand new world in every session.
The Seeds of a World
The worlds that your team members will construct can arise from a variety of possible ideas. In fact, in Microscope, they can come from practically anything! Our highly skilled TourGuides will come to your session with world seeds ready for your team to explore, such as:
- The fall of a far future empire
- Humanity’s first steps towards spreading into space
- The rise of a fantasy kingdom
Each one of the various seeds can spin wildly into different shapes and forms depending on how your team wants it to grow! Microscope isn’t just a wild freeform melee of ideas though, there is some core structure to keep the experience moving, and our TourGuides will be there helping the participants to move through each step.
How to Build a World
There are three main parts of a shared storytelling experience in Microscope and our TourGuides will be on hand to help your team move through them in an exciting and enjoyable way! The first step is to figure out what this new world is going to look like. This starts with the idea seed that our TourGuide brings to the session, along with each one of your team members bringing in items or ideas that they definitely want to see included, and items or ideas that they definitely do NOT want included. These two lists serve as both creative building blocks or constraints, and as a guide for what participants are comfortable with.
With those pieces in place, the next step is to establish where the story of this world starts, and where the story of this world ends. These two time periods, and the overall tone of each, will become the two guideposts for the rest of the experience. When the participants begin adding more time periods and events, they will always fall between these two boundary lines. So your team members will always know where the world came from, and where its story is going.
Finally, there is the meat of Microscope: adding in events and time periods. This is where your team will flex and explore their creativity, their conflict resolution, and their overall group cohesion. In this stage, the participants will take turns establishing a theme, and adding time periods and events that in some way explore that theme. Events can occur in any previously established time period, and everyone’s ideas are valid so long as they both match the theme in some way, and don’t contradict something previously established. In other words, respect what your fellow team members have created, build upon, and watch a world flourish.
If this sounds like an exciting, shared experience for your team, that you’d like to learn more about, drop us a line! And if you’re ready to explore one of our collaborative experiences with your team, let us know!
