Paparazzi
| Paparazzi | |
|---|---|
| |
| Designer: | Kevan Davis |
| Year: | unknown |
| Players: | 2-30 |
| Stuff required: | Costumes for the celebrities. Each player needs their own digital (or Polaroid?) camera. |
| Crew required: | One moderator, five or more volunteers to play celebrities. |
| Preparation: | Requires pre-printed sheets with photos of your celebrities in costume. |
| Time required: | Half an hour to an hour. |
| Place required: | A large public space, ideally a defined area of city streets. |
| Activities: | Photography, sneaking. |
 | |
 | |
Stalk celebrities through the city streets, and try to catch them indulging their terrible secrets. It's all in the public interest.
Setup instructions
To run this game, you'll need a handful of assistants to act as celebrities. Each of them should have an identifiable "look", from whatever costume props you or your friends can provide - dark glasses, hats, scarves, wigs, etc. They can be parodies of existing celebrities, or just have a random, distinct style.
Prepare a single-sheet dossier handout of the celebrities. Each celebrity should have:-
- A name.
- A photo. Get a clear photo of each of your assistants in costume, before the event. (If they're bringing their own costume, they can email this in.)
- A brief bio. If you feel like writing one. If an item of costume hasn't really come out in the photo (or wasn't available at the time it was taken), mention it here.
- A terrible secret. The paparazzi will get bonus points if they can catch the celebrity revealing their terrible secret. (Examples: smoking a cigarette, stopping off in a pub, kissing a lover, reading a script with a large-printed title, getting into a fight, eating a pie.)
Tell your assistants to wander around the playing area for the duration of the game, making sure to perform their terrible secret four or five times, as the mood takes them. If they see someone trying to take a photo of them, they should avoid being caught (holding a hand out to block the shot, ducking away, walking down a different street) and should drop their terrible secret if caught in the middle of it. If they're feeling heavily stalked, they can choose to leave the playing area (perhaps hailing a cab or jumping on a bus) and re-enter it somewhere else.
Player instructions
You are a group of paparazzi photographers. In your hands you have a dossier of celebrities who are expected to be passing through this area of the city today - it's your job to spot them and take some good pictures of them.
A good photo is one that's clear and unblurred, where we feel that the celebrity is clearly identifiable, and where there aren't any other paparazzi visible in the shot. This will be entirely a judgment call on our part, so get the best photos you can.
We'll be paying $1,000 for a good, middle-distance photo of the celebrity, where their whole body is in shot. For a close-up of their head and shoulders, we'll pay $2,000. And if you manage to catch any of the celebrities indulging their terrible secrets (which are listed on your dossier), we'll pay you $5,000. We'll only pay you once for each type of photo for each celebrity - so you can make at most $8,000 from a single target, if you get each type of photo of them.
Meet back here in half an hour to review your photos. Whoever makes the most money is the winner.
Scoring
When the players return at the end of the game, have them approach you individually to have their photos scored. It'd save time to have a score sheet ready, with rows for each player and columns for each possible photo of each celebrity. As the player flips through the photos on their digital cameras, you judge each photo and tick the relevant box. Your judgment is final as to whether a picture is a "good" one - a shot with the celebrity's hand in front of the camera might be unusable, or it might be a great candid shot, it's your call.
Total up the scores and announce them. Invite the players to upload the pictures to a Flickr or Facebook group or something when they're done.
Optional rules
Rather than fixed payments, you could make some celebrities more valuable than others. This could be arbitrary, or it could reflect how difficult they are to spot, or how careful they're being about their terrible secret.
If everyone's got high-tech cameraphones, you can have them dial their work in on the fly, and have the scores ready when they return at the end.
