Show Me Your Goos

Scott Hardie | July 14, 2012
This year at GooCon: Villa Ridge 2, Funeratic members who can't attend in person have a fun way to participate, like the video tributes that were recorded two years ago.

One round of the live goo game will be played entirely with member-created goos. This means that I need your help (yes, YOU) to make them, please.

There's an ideal way that I'd like each person to contribute, but I am more than flexible about the specifics. Ideally, you would come up with your own theme of five celebrities just like the online game, write five clues, find five photos online, distort all five photos, and record five quick videos of yourself reading the clues aloud to the players.

That whole process could be too much for some contributors, so I'm happy to assist with any of the steps: If you're stumped on a theme idea, I can provide one, or I can just accept a "grab bag" of five unrelated celebrities. If you have five celebrities but can't come up with clues or photos, I can help with that. If you don't have the software to distort photos, allow me to take over. If you're camera shy about appearing on video or just plain don't have a camera, skip that part and I'll read off the clues for you at GooCon. I'd much rather get your partial help than none at all, if any of these steps are deal-breakers for you.

Some fun theme ideas to get you started: Five celebrities from your home city. Five celebrities named after a kind of food or animal or other topic. Five celebrities inspired by the works of your favorite author or band or filmmaker. Five celebrities who have guest-starred on your favorite TV show. Five celebrities who look like something odd. Five celebrities who made headlines in the same year. All themes are welcome; get weird if you like. I will accept themes with as few as three celebrities or as many as ten, but five is strongly preferred.

I'd love to re-use your creations in the online game after GooCon is over, but this would affect your season standing, so it's no problem if you want to skip that. I can also keep your video from being seen outside of GooCon if you prefer.

Multiple submissions are welcome! I don't expect everybody to participate of course, so we're going to need all of the goos that we can get. We cannot wind up with too many, I promise.

If you're going to attend GooCon in person, I still want your help, but you don't need to appear on video: You can present your goos live in person. Send them to me in advance so that I can organize them into a presentation with the others, but bring your clues on paper and you can read them aloud. You'll receive in-game credit for your own goos as if you had solved them, so it's to your strategic advantage to come up with some goos.

A few things to keep in mind:
- Players at GooCon will have no Internet access while playing, so they cannot research. The difficulty should be much lower than online, and the celebrities should be household names.
- Because clues will be heard and not read, clever spelling and punctuation go unnoticed, so don't write clues that rely on them.
- Images should be 360px wide by 360px high. If you have the software to make your own goos, it can handle this scaling and cropping too, but I can cut images if you like.
- Videos can be in any common format. I will host them on YouTube, marked private until the event.

Please send me your contributions by email. Let me know that you're interested and I'll give you my email address in a private message. Please alert me on Funeratic when you send your contributions, so that I can keep an eye out (overzealous spam filter).

The latest that I can accept submissions is October 7. The earlier, the better.

Thanks very much for the help! Making goos is fun, as anyone who's done it over the years can attest, so I think this project will be a pleasure for everybody who participates. It will also bring smiles to everybody playing at GooCon. Get creative and have fun! :-)

(Normally I tag goo-related discussions as such, but I think even people blocking those discussions might be interested in this creative project, so I'm leaving this open to all.)

Ryan Dunn | July 17, 2012
I'm on this.

Steve West | July 17, 2012
Got 5 done. Looking to make a second set. And since these are videos, audio clues included.

Scott Hardie | July 18, 2012
Thanks for the help! Several people have reached out already. The first set of goos just arrived in my inbox. This is great! I will definitely have to use these in the online game when GooCon is over. :-D

I don't know how that sharing is going to happen, by the way. Chris, Joanna, Justin, Kelly, and maybe other people will play these goos live at GooCon, without the benefit of Internet and days to think about each. Do I preserve their correct and incorrect guesses for the record when I let other online players play normally? Or do I erase their guesses from the record and let them guess over again, knowing the answers (if they can remember)? The fairest way would be not to use these goos in the regular game, but to create some kind of extra round as a special feature on the site, where online players can guess too but it doesn't count for the permanent record. I don't know what form these will take post-GooCon, but I'm almost certain they'll appear on the site somehow, for everybody to appreciate. I'm very impressed with them so far and they deserve to be seen. :-)

For anybody recording videos: It would be helpful either to have a brief prologue video where you introduce yourself and the theme, or to provide that information in the same video as the first goo. Ultimately, I can just say it myself if you leave it out. Thanks!

Scott Hardie | August 28, 2012
If you lack the software to make goos yourself, picresize.com will let you scale and crop them down to 360x360, and dumpr.net will let you distort them.

There are other free, similar tools out there on the web, too. You are one group of people that does not need any help Googling. :-)

Scott Hardie | September 17, 2012
GooCon is canceled and the "Player Revolution" game will not take place, but I would like very much to make use of the goos that have already been created and were about to be created by players.

Please continue to send me your goos. The deadline is now December 1. What goos I receive, I will incorporate into the Winter 2013 season that starts on December 3. You will receive regular-season credit for the goos that you create: Send me a theme of 5 goos, and that's 5 free points for you towards bracket seeding. I will be happy to accept multiple themes, the more the better; if I get more than ten themes total, I'll just hold some for the next season. However, it is now more important that we stick to five goos per theme; please talk to me if you have a really good theme idea that doesn't exactly match five celebrities.

If you've already sent me goos and don't want them to be used next season, or maybe you want them used but not the videos that you recorded, please let me know. Thank you so much for making what you have; it will still be put to fun use. :-)

Scott Hardie | November 22, 2012
Just a reminder, December 1 is the deadline to send goos for next season. Each theme of five goos that you submit means five free points added to your regular-season score. I've heard from several players who made goos, but I've received only a single set, so I hope there are still some on the way. Thanks!

Scott Hardie | November 24, 2012
To answer some questions that I've received...

Video is still welcome if you want to shoot it, but it wasn't necessary for GooCon and is even less important now. Feel free to skip the video if you like.

GooCon guests needed easier goos because they lacked Internet access. Now that we're playing online, feel free to raise the difficulty as you like. It's also fine to leave them all easy; whichever you prefer is fine. Personally, after last week's tournament massacre, I favor easy goos again. :-)

More than one theme per contributor is definitely welcome. If we wind up with more than ten, I'll save some for the Spring 2013 season.

Scott Hardie | December 30, 2012
We have a last-minute addition: Erik Bates has created a theme of ten goos. As Steve West often does, Erik graciously allowed me to solve them by email without seeing the answers, so that I can have the fun of playing too. (I had a blast -- you will enjoy this theme!) Erik did not intend nor ask for this to be a part of the Winter 2013 season; it was my choice to publish it now rather than save it for the spring. When I publish Erik's goos in mid-January, I'll leave all ten active until the end, so that you can keep playing the first week while the second is underway. Thanks Erik!

Erik Bates | December 31, 2012
[hidden by request]

Scott Hardie | January 7, 2013
Did anybody come up with ideas that they liked but didn't submit for one reason or another? Kelly wanted to make a theme of five corporate logos as goos, calling it "Corporations are People," as a riff on Mitt Romney and the Citizens United v. FCC decision.