WEEKS 3 through 5: Now that  the ideas were flowing out of the teens, Gibson and I decided to throw a curve ball.  Sure, you have your own ideas, but games are not created by one person.  You have to work as a team!  With that in mind, we split the participants up into two groups.  Using their best individual ideas, we encouraged them to create a concept that unified all of them together into one solid game.  The groups were chosen by Gibson and myself in the hopes of each individual contributing their own unique talent to the overall group.

We each took one group and acted as the mentor.  For my own group, I was armed with a MacBook Pro and Google Docs, copying down every idea and trying to make sense of it all for the teens.  The hardest part was trying to encourage the teens to hone in on the solid ideas they created without adding too much more.  Our teens were idea machines, so nailing down a solid idea to focus on for three weeks proved to be rather hard, but in the end we made some sense of it all (see below for the final project documents)

THE FINAL SESSION:
Our basic idea in the beginning was to have the teens pitch the idea to us and try to sell us on why we should make this game a reality.  For our final session, the other teens, Gibson and myself, and University of Southern Maine Journalist and Game Reviewer Dylan Martin joined us to hear what the final games would be all about.

THE FINAL PROJECTS:
DAY/NIGHT developed by Dr. Professor Games
THE INSIDE MAN by Virus Productions

It was a great joy working with both The Telling Room and the teens on this really cool program.  Gamers of the future, don’t fret.  There are some amazing ideas floating around in heads of today’s teens.