You know how you be get chatting with a friend, and suddenly you both just get silly? That’s what happened with Sue Clark and me, the other day. Not face to face, over a cold one after work — because Sue lives in Maine, where she reigns over Lighthouse News — but online, over at Twitter.com. The upshot was that Sue came up with a new way to “get rich quick”… well, she explains it all here. Enjoy! ~Jen

How To Get Rich With Twitter

There are hundreds of blogs that start up every day with the dream of making money online by kicking back on a beach and letting the green roll in. They are inspired by such success stories as Chris Garrett, Darren Rowse and Jeremy Shoemaker, all of whom make a comfortable online living from their blogs. Of course, it’s only a dream for those hundreds of hopefuls, as it really is hard work to get to the level of earning more than a pittance from your blog. And they are laden with Google adsense ads, have no original content, and are really spammy blogs.

And then there’s Jen, our very own Domestik Goddess.

Online Betting Moves To Twitter

One day, Jen (aka @rjleaman on Twitter) tweets about an interesting post she found on Squawkfox entitled Recipe: Strawberry and Banana Green Smoothie. I think I will just switch to our conversation from that point. I’m @lighthousenews in this conversation.

Getting Healthy and Getting Rich

Multiply this by all your followers on Twitter and you can make a healthy living from this very creative online money making scheme. And a side benefit to it is the health benefits for your body. That is, unless you end up looking like Popeye®. On second thought, that might not be a bad idea:

Sue Clark has been interested in lighthouses since she was a little girl living on the Great Lakes of Michigan, and even more so after moving to Maine. She is a charter member of the Maine Lighthouse Museum, a docent and former secretary of the Friends of Pemaquid Point Lighthouse — where she was married in 2000 — and a member of the American Lighthouse Foundation. Sue blogs about her passion at Haunted Lighthouses and Lighthouse News.

If you’re at all into the game of Bunco, here’s a little something:

Proctor & Gamble’s Prilosec OTC has teamed up with the Breast Cancer Research Foundation® to raise money for breast cancer through a Charity Challenge.

Players can register online at Buncocentral.com and the group that raises the most cash will win a trip to Vegas to compete in the 3rd Annual Prilosec OTC and meet Naomi Judd, the country singer.

About Bunco
While it is a new and growing trend in the United States, Bunco is almost 200 years old. It’s gaining in popularity – in fact, more than 17 million women in the United States have played Bunco and more than 7 million play regularly. Per rules, players take turns trying to make three dice turn up as the “key number,” or ones in the first round of play, twos in the second and so on. Rolling three of a kind is a “Bunco.”

(Sounds like good clean fun, actually… and the history of Bunco, as given by the World Bunco Association, is nothing short of fascinating!)

P&G will donate 100% of donations from the Bunco Charity Challenge, and 100% of the proceeds of the Championship t-shirt sales to The Breast Cancer Research Foundation® to support the nonprofit’s goal of preventing breast cancer and finding a cure in our lifetime by funding clinical and genetic research worldwide.

Game Design: Exploring Creativity with Children

Monopoly Rules

I remember playing Monopoly with my dad.

He taught me many things about wheeling and dealing.

Whenever he purchased Boardwalk, he would ceremoniously place the card into his shirt pocket, symbolically telling me that I would NEVER get it. Mostly, I remember that he would nearly always win.

Yet, my fondest memories are of his creation of a game called Card Monopoly.

He made it with a deck of cards and two record album covers slit open and taped together. The rules were simple, requiring only a second deck of cards, two dice and a couple of tokens. We played quite a few games of Card Monopoly.

I remember thinking that my dad was a genius to be able to invent a game.

Zillions of Games

Dad went on to create many more games, including a computer word game! He instilled in me a love for making games. He also tempered my competitive nature.

Now, as a father, it’s my turn.

With five children, the fun is amplified. We have made up games as one group. We have made games for each other as Christmas presents. We have done solo efforts and used each other as play testers…

So, how did all this come about?

Come take a trip back in time, when the children were young and impressionable…

Inspiration

Where did our game ideas originate? It may be cliché to say that inspiration comes from everywhere but, for us, that was pretty close to the truth.

BEDTIME STORIES

The first games we ever made up were bedtime story adventures. I invented dungeons and forests through which the kids traveled as a team. Each child had opportunities to change the course of the story:

The bedtime stories were so much fun that we began playing them during the day. We would sit in the living room and spin wild, fanciful tales of treasure hunts, quests and spelunking (caves are great settings for game stories!)

EXISTING GAMES

My wife and I spent a lot of time choosing fun, family-oriented games that would appeal to most of us. While my older sons and I enjoyed competitive games, my wife, daughter and youngest son were more laid back. Sure, they would get into the spirit of the moment, but for them, it was not an all-consuming affair. It was rare to find the perfect game.

Our short-list included:

• Liar’s Dice
• Stacker
• Boom-o
• Boggle (no scoring)

When we created new games from existing games, we either changed the rules or we combined two or more games into one mega-game!

MASS MEDIA

PC games, fiction, sitcoms, cartoons and movies have all played a role in inspiring us. All five kids have collaborated on creating a town populated with television characters lovingly drawn on the backs of my old business cards. The town is on a poster board, complete with a mall. I have no clue about the game, but I hear constant laughter coming from their bedroom as they play-act their way through this adult-free world.

SCHOOL SUBJECTS

As Homeschoolers, whenever my wife an I introduced topics to our kids, we either supplemented them with computer games (Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, Zoombini’s Logical Adventure, etc.) or we created our own. One such creation was Chemistrivia. As you can imagine, it was designed to test knowledge of basic chemistry.

Guiding Theme

I think it is critical to recognize the elements that make a game fun for children.

Kids don’t always tell you how they feel, but it’s pretty easy to detect boredom and frustration. Getting trounced by big people is no fun for junior — although apparently, it’s okay for him to dance all over our vanquished ruins.

Having one daughter and four sons sitting around the table, I’m keenly aware of gender stereotypes.

Finally, I realize that sometimes, sibling rivalry intrudes on the game, making Sheldon, the oldest, disproportionately targeted for all the evil cards and whammies.

On a positive note, I have learned that Dominique displays the best lateral-thinking skills; Evan is the most analytical and enjoys numbers; Kayla — like her grandpop — drives a hard bargain and can be quite sneaky; Sheldon exploits all the loopholes in the rules; Ryan loves to play, as long as he can sit on mom’s lap and help her.

By minimizing or eliminating the potentially unattractive parts of games, we have a handle on the “fun bits.”

Going back to our sources of inspiration, I looked for ideas that either minimized competition to the most trivial level, or fostered team play. Here are just two examples of each theme ideal.

Trivial Pursuit of Happyness

Scrap Paper Game exemplifies trivial competition. By making the acquisition less important than the surrounding activity, we created a game that was fun for a six year-old as well as a fourteen year-old.

With nothing more than pencils and six pieces of scrap paper per player, we each drew one animal per scrap, assigned it a value from one to six, and wrote that value down. We also wrote down their natural habitat. We arbitrarily ranked the habitats (Ocean-dwellers were stronger than Desert animals).

Then, we simply played out each animal, one round at a time, with the “strongest” animal collecting the rest of the critters.

At the end of the game, whoever had the most points got to draw a new animal with even more points. The rest of us got to draw weaker animals to add to our collection.

Then, we’d start all over again!

The Civil Board Game

Gem City was all about cooperative play.

We had to mine precious gems for a despotic king and his high-maintenance queen, while keeping the city running as efficiently as possible.

Each player was elected to a government position and made proposals that only got enacted if the majority voted in favor of them. With civil positions having conflicting agendas, a lesson in petty politics awaited my unsuspecting children!

I went all out on the construction of the game board, using spray paint for the river, forest and desert, sandpaper strips for dirt roads, and duct tape wrapped around cardboard strips to represent paved roads.

We bought some beads from the dollar store and these became gold, rubies, sapphires and emeralds. We borrowed the figures from RISK®. These became various citizens in the King’s realm. Other, one-of-kind remnants were used as props. Railroad tracks, mines and warehouses all came from whatever was lying around the house.

Although I built the city, the kids helped define the rules of play.

A regular deck of cards controlled the actions during the game. If one of the four Queens was drawn, we got a holiday, but she got all of the sapphires! If one of the four Kings was drawn, we had to pay taxes. Other cards controlled the growth of the population, work production, and the number of guards at the mines. The game was over when all four Kings were drawn.

The heart of the game was managing the city.

Each child had his or her own idea of the best way to accomplish various objectives.

Teaching the kids the art of wheeling and dealing brought me full circle.

Now it’s their turn.

Mitchell Allen and his family own Morpho Designs, a website design company. Sheldon Allen owns GameDev Guru, an active recruiting site for game software developers.

Technorati Tags: games, children, creativity

Here’s something different — and quite intriguing — that caught my attention recently, as a caring dog-owner and a loving guardian of impulsive and animal-loving children.

Doggone Crazy is a unique dog bite prevention child safety board game — and dog bite prevention is the whole goal of the game. It promises to be good fun to play, as well as educational.

Here’s what the makers of the game have to say about it:

Doggone Crazy! is the first ever board game to empower kids with the knowledge they need to make safe choices around dogs. Kids can be doggy detectives, trying to figure out what the dogs are saying with their body language in the more than 100 photo cards. Children and families will learn about dog communication, dog behavior, dog safety for children and how to prevent a dog bite.

Through fun activities, photographs of real dogs and puppies and question cards, Doggone Crazy! promotes education and child safety. Doggone Crazy! is a highly competitive race around the board collecting dog bones. There are over 100 cards showing photographs of real dogs doing real doggie things. There are more than 60 different dogs and more than 40 different breeds represented…

Download the game’s free Parent Guide (PDF file), a great resource that explains all the concepts covered in the game and their basis.

Or, to start learning about dog communication right away, see the quick reference guide (PDF file) to see a sample of the kind of dog body language that is illustrated by the game cards.

Even dog savvy parents have said “I didn’t know that!” after learning about subtle and little-known dog communication signals from the photo cards in the game. Kids just say “We all have fun!!”

For 2-6 Players, ages 4-12 — adults too! Requires at least 1 player with 3rd grade reading skills, and a gaame with 4 players will take about 40 minutes.

The “storm days” of my own childhood came to mind, reading what the Frugal Duchess says about Low-Tech/No-Tech Fun for Kids. Oh, those longed-for storm days! When we woke on a winter morning to find a white-out of snow, when school was cancelled and a whole day of liberty stretched ahead — albeit a day, often, without benefit of electricity.

As I recall, it usually took about an hour for the novelty to wear off… and then poor Mother was pressed to find ways to entertain three children of different ages, and with very different interests.

Board games were a great stand-by, of course, and dominoes. We drew pictures and made crafts. We played with the dog. And books were a perennial delight — providing that there was enough light, on a storm day, by which to read.

Brother and I also played “Make Believe”: a complex self-invented game that somehow managed to integrate Barbie dolls and Hot Wheels cars with a box of old costumes and a cavalier disregard for logic and scale.

When we ran out of inspiration, however, Mother had two more weapons in her entertainment arsenal.

One of those essential tools was an old British book called Something to Do: 300 games, hobbies and pastimes for all the year round, long out of print now. I remember it being kept on a very high shelf, a book we never opened for ourselves, a wonderful book from which Mother would pluck the most enchanting ideas — for emergencies only, when “Mom, I’m boooored” whining threatened to turn into sibling warfare.

Her second storm-day life-saver was just a small stone.

Mother presented it to me with great ceremony, I remember, the summer before I started school when every other child in our neighbourhood seemed to be away at camp. It was a lovely dark brown stone with tiny rusty-red flecks, about an inch long and slightly less wide, polished as smooth as silk by the long action of Atlantic waves.

“This is a magic Something-to-Do stone,” she told me. “You have to sit down very quietly in a room all by yourself, hold the stone in your hand, and rub this smooth hollowed part with your thumb, just so. This magic stone will give you the perfect idea for something to do, any time you start to feel bored.”

You know what? It worked!

Decades later, I still have Mother’s tattered old copy of the Something to Do book, and that very same smooth dark comforting Something-to-Do stone. I may not have my mother’s deep understanding of a child’s mind, nor her practical wisdom — but when storm days come around, I am not entirely unprepared.