Despite my utter fatigue (staying up till 2:30 Friday and Saturday night, eating terrible hotel food) it was important to me to make it to the Sunday 8AM Lean Coffee Game Design that Tomes organized. I wanted to to see how the discussion format worked and I wanted to hear folks game design thoughts.
The format is pretty simple. Everyone writes down topics on cards (in this case post-it notes). Once the ideas are all written, they cards are laid out and you put a dot in the lower left corner of each topic that interests you. The topics are sorted by their interest and then put into a four stage Kanban: to discuss, discussing, discussed, and take aways. The first three categories are self explanatory. The last one (take aways) was a place to put all the specific suggestions that were made during the discussion so folks could look them up later.
Each topic was discussed for three minutes and then moderate did a check in and folks wanted to keep going, we added a minute to the clock. I don’t think any topic got past four or five minutes. We were eager to get to as many as we could (we didn’t get them all).
We were encouraged to keep our contributions concise, avoid examples or length exhortations, and just share ideas as raw as we could. When we agreed with someone we made snaps or nodded but didn’t enter the conversation just to voice agreement.
Some of these were opinions pieces (i.e. should you X or Y?) and some were fact finding (i.e. what are good resources to do ABC?). I think the discussion format handled both of them well, but opinion pieces probably need more time to fully bake. And that’s okay. This didn’t feel like a full conversation, but the start of many possible conversations.
I had a good time and even drank some coffee (which thankfully didn’t ruin me like it normally does). Thanks for hosting it Tomes!
