Summon Bees
As the social tag on this blog can attest, despite considering myself an introvert, knowing full well that I am the most at peace when I am left alone, I spend a surprising amount of my time organising and running social events in a professional context.
I've ruminated on this a few times, but for brevity, I think there are two reasons:
- An understanding that connecting with people makes work easier
- A burning desire for social validation, likely driven by childhood trauma
In my head, the first is glaringly obvious.
If you're going to be spending forty hours a week interacting with a group of people, it's going to go a lot more smoothly if you get to know them a bit on a personal level and have some shared experiences to draw on that aren't work related.
You don't need to be best friends with everyone or anything like that, but being able to connect over that time that everyone had a good laugh about trying to guess who submitted which piece of music in a guessing game just makes everything feel better.
The second was partly written as a joke, but also not all that far from the truth.
As humans, we are the sum of all of our experiences up to now, and I definitely had plenty of experiences, especially when I was younger, where I was unable to connect with those around me, whether because of my own weirdness or some other unfathomable reason.
Best to not dwell on that too much though, because that way lies madness. Just acknowledge and move on, because there really isn't any negative behaviour here that needs to be corrected.
Anyway, with that monstrous introduction out of the way, what this blog post is really about is another social game that you can play with a group of people, though this one requires a bit more preparation and effort to pull off.
It's also quite obviously a stream of consciousness, because I'm tired and these sorts of posts require less effort to produce.
I enjoy quite a lot of TV shows, but I have a particular soft spot for game shows that involve comedians, like QI, 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown and Taskmaster.
A while back I discovered Guy Montgomery's Guy Mont-Spelling Bee, which, if you've enjoyed any of the more well known shows above, I can highly recommend.
As I was watching it, it occurred to me this format could be a nice change of pace from the social games that I normally run with my leadership peers, which are pretty much just slightly fancy guessing games with content created by the people participating (i.e. the fridge game and its variants).
At a really high level, what you need is:
- contestants
- words to spell
- a presenter
Contestants aren't that difficult to find. In my case it was a combination of volun-telling the last winner of a social game, asking for volunteers so that people could opt-in and then volun-telling more people when I didn't get four actual volunteers.
This is where it helps to have previously run social things so that people know it's going to be a safe space to relax in, even when there are competitive aspects, so I definitely wouldn't consider running something like this on your very first attempt.
The words to spell took a surprising amount of effort to put together, mostly because I wanted to follow the pattern of the TV show, but relate the questions to our environment and domain, because that sort of personal touch always makes things more interesting.
If you haven't seen the show, it's broken down into segments, with each one featuring words that must be spelled by the contestants, usually with a humorous twist.
For my social event, I chose the following segments:
- The Spelling Round
- Contestants must choose a word from one of three difficulty-level buckets and then spell it
- The Colours Round
- Contestants pick a colour from a board, behind which is an image representing the word that they must spell
- The Buzz Round
- The contestant with the lowest score picks a word list and then each contestant gets the chance to spell a word by buzzing in when the word is presented
Each one of those segments requires a set of words that the contestants can encounter and because the show is intended more for entertainment than it is for actual spelling, each one comes with a series of associated jokes.
I imagine that Guy has a whole crew of writers putting these things together, but I didn't, so I just used a spreadsheet, made up as much as I could by myself and stole some things directly from the show to pad out the rest.
The last thing you need is a presenter, someone with a little bit of charisma who can tie all the things together.
Obviously, for my social event, that was me, and thanks to years of running D&D sessions and a variety of other social things, that was sufficient.
Your mileage may vary.
The most important thing is probably a reflection of how it went.
To that, I'd say: so-so?
I mean, despite my previous statement, I don't exactly have the same skill as an actual presenter, so it definitely wasn't as entertaining as the actual show, for either the contestants or the audience, but I think it did okay all the same.
I mean, people seemed to enjoy it.
The so-so rating is more about the return on investment.
I did as little as I could, but it still required a significant amount of time to prepare, especially when it came to writing the jokes that went with the words.
It was also probably a little bit worse from a connection point of view, because whether or not someone can spell a word, even a joke word, doesn't really tell you as much about them as getting to see the inside of their fridge, or what their garden looks like.
Still, I don't have any regrets, because it's always worthwhile trying something new, something that pushes you a little bit outside your comfort zone.
Plus, I got to make someone spell onomatopoeia, which was pretty funny.