In today’s workshop, we talked about the concept of actors and counter-actors. We even were forced against our wills to partake in outdoor physical activity! Oh the humanity! Actually, I rather liked the idea of out-of-the-classroom learning and hope that future offerings of this unit continue this teaching method. We had to come up with two games using some of the provided props. Our idea for one of the games follows.

Our first game involved taking turns to throw a football at one another (can you guess that the group was entirely composed of males?) in order to force eliminations. We created an order in which players took turns to throw the ball. Player A would toss the ball high in the air, at which time the other players ran away from Player A, without leaving the designated playing area. When the ball hit the ground, Player A was to rush to pick up the ball, declaring stop when he had retrieved the ball. The other players would stop in place and Player A would attempt to kill a player by throwing the ball at him in attempt to hit him. If the player was hit, he would lose a life – three lives lost resulted in elimination. If the player moved from his position (that is, moved his feet – dodging with planted feet was permitted) he would be immediately eliminated.

After the throw, once the ball had touched the ground, the player designated Player B would then run to pick up the ball as fast as he could, also declaring ‘stop’ when he acquired the ball. In the meantime, the other players moved as fast as they could to get away from the ball (and thus the player whose turn it was to throw next). This play continued until the last player had his throw and then Player A had his second turn. If a player threw the ball out of bounds on the full, he would lose a life.

There were several instances of the actor-counteractor relationship observed. The player throwing the ball was attempting to attack a player, while the targeted player counteracted by leaning away from the ball. If a player knew that he was going to be targeted in the next turn, he could also counteract by ensuring he ran with greater effort during that turn. There is also the action of the next active player to grab the ball quickly at the start of his turn while the counteractors attempt to flee out of range in the same interval. Lastly, there is the role of defenders as actors that attempt to lure the attacker into losing a life by standing close to the field boundary and hoping that the attacker throws the ball out of bounds.

Some of the rules were made up directly out of a need to satisfy the requirement that there were distinct actor-counteractor roles in our game. As a result, I felt that our game was more exciting that if we had just been told to make a game without applying any of the theory. I feel that we have already applied this particular aspect of the unit theory to out board game effectively, but it has been interesting to see its direct effect on something as simple as a game we made up in a few minutes.