Workplace bingo is the example we use in the book for how fun comes to life. This isn’t just theoretical fun—we’ve actually tried it, and yes, it is indeed fun. While finishing up the book, we ran a mega-workplace bingo at the 2018 Digital Games Research Association. Conference attendees played workplace bingo throughout, adding a layer of playful fun to the event.
Below are the tools we used to produce our bingo cards. Feel free to borrow and make your own.
COLLECT YOUR TERMS: First, draw up a list of terms. For DiGRA, we scraped the conference paper titles and descriptions. There are lots of tools to procedurally scrape. Good old human scraping also works (i.e. making lists). If you are doing a game studies workplace bingo, feel free to start with our lists.
GENERATE YOUR CARDS: Next, find a tool that will generate bingo cards for you. We used this one (thanks, Osric!). Tools like Osric’s Bingo Generator make low-fi bingo cards for you. If you want to make something a little fancier, we’ve shared our Adobe Illustrator file and a PDF, both of which include 25 unique bingo cards plus a starter set of rules.
DESIGN YOUR RULES: Every Workplace Bingo game needs rules tailored to its context: the kinds of players, the place and event where it is played, the time constraints, who strict or loose square matches are, etc. Our rules from DiGRA are here—take them and tailor them to your event.