Unit 19 · Something playable, with our rules

February milestone · 45 minutes · 10th and 11th grade · every project, alone or in a group.

What you’ll do

Your project’s February milestone: a version someone else can try, play or hear, with rules written by you or your team. This is that session. You give your project its last pass —a game, an interactive story, a demo, a tool, a sound piece the listener joins in— and you add one page of rules or instructions, signed with your team name or a pseudonym, and its credits. Then the other group tries it.

Why it’s worth it

Finishing is a different skill. Having a good idea on paper is one thing; someone who isn’t you being able to try it without asking you anything is another. And today you see the whole distance: from the rules you wrote by hand in Unit 13 to what you have now.

How the session goes

• Anticipate. You write what your project is missing and “What I think will come out” of the last pass. The day’s budget: a single generation per project, written on the board. If you don’t need it, you don’t use it.
• Act. It’s checked aloud that your card carries no one’s data, and your last instruction runs: one single thing to change. While you wait, you write your final rules and your credits card. Then, ten minutes without screens to write the rules out clean and rehearse a one-minute presentation.
• Reflect. Each project is tried in two-minute turns, with its page of rules in hand. You name which trade would have done your work. Did the instruction get better, or did the question get better? What did the AI decide here that a person should have decided? The vote, knocking on the table, goes to the one that changed most since the paper of Unit 13, not the best.

No screens. Two parts of the session happen with no phone, no computer and no AI. At the start you decide with your team whether the day’s single generation is needed and, if it is, exactly what it changes. After the last pass, ten minutes to write the rules out clean and rehearse. That page of rules is what the other person will have in hand.

The criteria

• C1. Someone who isn’t on your team tries it from start to finish reading only your page of rules or instructions.
• C2. There’s a rule of yours that changes how it’s tried, and you can say why.
• C3. It has a challenge or a decision for whoever tries it: hard, but not impossible.

If your project is without AI

You reach the same milestone, with the same time, the same criteria, the same trying and the same vote. Instead of a generation, you set your materials and time budget for the last pass, and you do it with your technique while the queue runs. Your credits say what’s yours, which technique or tool you used and which work you started from. In your presentation you tell which rule the technique or the material made you change, and how you solved it. In the listening, the question for you is: what did you decide, and why?

If your project didn’t make it

The milestone is a purpose, not a date. You present the version that exists —even if it’s on paper or a fragment— with your page of rules, and you write what’s missing and when you’ll do it. It joins the listening and the vote just the same: naming what’s missing is part of finishing too. And if your project turned out better on paper, in sound or drawn by hand, that counts as a result too.

To look at first

• The dungeon with a sarcastic narrator: a narrator with a voice of its own, written into the game.
• Your heroine in three universes: if your project is a story.
• Want to build your own instruction? Try the library assistant.

What this is, and what it isn’t

This Unit’s design is original: a design position, not a research finding. It promises no effect. Nothing is graded. If your project has a narrator, it can be text you wrote or a character connected to a model through the program’s gateway; either way it follows the Unit 12 rules: it can remember settings, but it’s never a companion. Your project stays in its folder and its private repository; nothing is published without written consent for that piece (publishing on the web comes in Unit 27), and you can choose not to present it to the other group.