Hosting a drinking game at Russia's DevGAMM
Last month I hosted possibly the most glorious trainwreck of a panel at a game convention - Game Lynch.
I'm standing on stage in front of 500 people, I had just setup Rami into losing his Game Lynch part. The rules state that if a person doesn't drink alcohol, me as the host has to take the "hit".
A few minutes before, Wolf Lang mixed some... cough medicine with alcohol? I have no idea what that was. It smelled great, but then I started drinking it. It got worse.
This glorious train wreck was Game Lynch, the pre-award show I host at DevGAMM. You can watch the full video here:
I previously wrote on Gamasutra how we invented this drinking game/tv show a few years ago in Ukraine, but this one went off-rails funny. The idea is simple - developers submit their games to get Lynched, on-stage.
Experts have 5 minutes to lynch the game
Devs have 1 minute to defend themselves
The audience decides who wins
The loser drinks a cocktail mixed by other experts
At the most recent DevGAMM in Moscow in May we had over 1,400 participants, and these people joined s Experts:
Rami Ismail
Adriel Wallick
Sergey Galyonkin (known for SteamSpy)
Wolf Lang (Threaks - devs of Beat Buddy)
Mike Rose
and me hosting
The panel was initially invented to be not as much as funny, but to point out technical errors in the games. However being the guy who makes himself an idiot on stage, I've been putting more of a comedy spin on it lately. We added the drinking game component. We added voting with the audience involved live.
Here are more pics
People voting with black/white cards
Mike is mixing a drink. WHY WAS THERE STREPSILS IN THE ALCOHOL BAG???
Wolf presenting the losing devs with their drink
View from the side when Mike was lynching Spooky Rooms. I was helping. There's a timer in the bakground.
Sergey can't hold it in, strepsils still standing there.
Next step I'll be adding a Trial By Combat mode, where the developer can defend himself in combat. During my Lynch, you can hear the dev proposing trial by combat, but I really didn't know how to pull it off right there. In September we'll find out during DevGAMM Hamburg (Sept 10-11 2015).
Do you know of any other non-standard panel formats? I feel like standards are boring, and I try to give recommendations to conference organizers on how to make these things more lively, interesting, fun. We are in the business of fun after all.
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