Air B-N-Me

Let me start by saying Periscope is just a rabbit hole. I had a hard time putting it down, because I like to check out what's happening in places I've been, even thogh the people I see are strangers, and to hear spoken languages that I don't get to hear all the time. I have to remove it from my phone...Ew and after the New York Times article on Monday documenting how officially disgusting it is, let's get out of that app, ok? But I had a good time playing with Debbie and Jess on this live broadcast.


The Air-B-N-Me project was okay. Not jumping up and down about it. It could have been a little cooler if we were all actually playing the same game. The instructions were a little confusing, so folks sort of made up their own rules. Good games don't ususally work well that way, and this one didn't. There was a lot of unnecessary confusion. Some folks were live streaming themselves on Periscope, some others were uploading prerecorded youtube clips, and others were just recording ads. Also, that the ads disappeared for some first time users was frustrating. The search function on the air b-n-me site didn't work well either, so you had to scroll through all pages of "swapportunities" instead of searching for what might interest you as a lurfer. I bet if they ran this again and had the kinks ironed out, it could be fun.

The part about creating a character was fun/creative, but wasn't really necessary to play the game. In fact, it was actually detrimental. Once you created and advertised a character, to do this right, you had to deliver a streaming "live" experience. If the character is fictitious, it's pretty tough to deliver a decent live experience that isn't super contrived. It would have been better to create a character based on your own actual life, or, not create a character at all, but enter the game as yourself. Then, the live stream is easily deliverable. That way, though, you'd lose the creative part about creating a character. I guess it really depends on the goal of the game and what the leaders want the participants to get from their participation. Once that's settled, then the plan of action needs to be clear for participants from the outset for the game to really work. This could be a decent collaborative game, just needs some tweaks and clarity.

My character was Jibaro's Wife, but of course when it asked for a sign in name for the site, I put mkein, and so that became my (unchangeable) character name. Oh, well. I made a couple videos and had fun with it. My videos disappeared, and there is no way to go back to your own swapportunity and edit it. So I had to make new ones....drag. Uploaded one, but the forum posts on our own page only shows 5 posts, and you can't get back to the earlier ones by clicking load more, because it goes to an error page. So I had to scroll (buttons don't allow you to go more than 2 pages at a time) through to page 27 to find my original post to copy and respost it. The technical aspect is poor and annoying.

Looking for lurfer opps is hard, because some people stream, some post videos, and some posted nothing but a text ad for a video. Not sure what to do with that.  Like this one. What are we supposed to do with it? Looked at a few videos, like someone making a breakfast smoothie, someone reading a book with her dog, someone looking at fabrics, and someone checking the markets online. Overall, pretty average stuff.

The idea was good, but execution was meh. Not a huge fan of the game.