Group Activities w/ a screen projector

May 31, 2018 7:21 AM

During the pizza nights that I sometimes host, we sometimes play around on the screen. Usually while eating or the sipping afterwards, we navigate Google maps and show countries we're from, potential vacation spots or sometimes Mars. What are some other fun multimedia group ideas with a projector?

Things we've done:
-watching movies/videos
-play geolocale games

We don't have enough time for a tabletop game, so I'm not interested in one unless a session can run 15mn or less.

Any other ideas for group screentime?

posted by tedious to Grab Bag (13 answers total)

Best answer: Seven hours of footage from the cab of a train, Bergen to Olso. No one can resist getting sucked in. It's also on Netflix. Search for Slow TV; there are other offerings.

But honestly, this was the first thing I thought of.
posted by hydrophonic at 7:37 AM on May 31, 2018 [3 favorites]

You could do shadow puppets
posted by turkeybrain at 7:58 AM on May 31, 2018

Best answer: It might be fun to play around with The Cultural Borders of Songs and listen to music that is popular in other countries. I've fallen down a few rabbit holes with that website.
posted by sacrifix at 8:39 AM on May 31, 2018 [1 favorite]

Best answer: At the recent FOSS4G-NA conference, there was an evening presentation on The St Lous Map Room.

Project a base layer on to a blank sheet of paper or canvas or whatever. The choice of base layer can be interesting: Roads (do we define our environment by automobile travel?), waterways? schools? lot lines?

Provide a cue legend (Three colors, for past, present and future, was one proposal. Places where we were excited, scared, happy, sad another...). Give people markers. Let them fill in the map.

Then project other layers (demographic or economic information? other transit modes? whatever might cause conversation) and see how that changes your perspective of the map.

That project was projecting on the floor, but there's no reason you couldn't do this with big sheets of paper on the wall. Or even just projected on to a whiteboard.
posted by straw at 8:42 AM on May 31, 2018

Does everyone have some kind of smartphone? You could play You Don't Know Jack or some of their other party games on the big screen. Civic Doodle looks fun.

The phones now are able to be the game controller so there's nothing to manage other than the host PC.
posted by JoeZydeco at 8:45 AM on May 31, 2018 [2 favorites]

If everyone has a phone, you could play kahoot. You can make your own quizzes for it.
posted by betweenthebars at 9:07 AM on May 31, 2018

2nding Kahoot.
posted by gnutron at 9:09 AM on May 31, 2018

there's lots of fun party games if you have enough smartphones/tablets to go around, That's you! is great
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 9:31 AM on May 31, 2018

Best answer: Google Culture has some great art stuff up there: you could do a virtual museum walk-through, either for a place no one has been to, or a place that someone loves and wants to share.

Open up a Dropbox or Google Drive folder ahead of time with an announced theme ("pictures of flowers" or "freedom" or "my Happy Place"), and run through a series of images in an Open Art Show; the poster can be anonymous or talk about their choice.
posted by wenestvedt at 9:50 AM on May 31, 2018

I was once enchanted by an experience of being at a small club and watching short internet videos on a big screen. People were sort of competing to show off curated videos they had found. I think it was sort of a prearranged contest, and there was all sorts of obscure/arty stuff, like the sort of videos you see on Kuriositas. Or here is a post that describes some resources.
posted by bitslayer at 9:54 AM on May 31, 2018

Best answer: The film Microcosmos is amazing to pretty much any soundtrack. extremely high-res largely non-narrative bug footage.

That thing where you play any movie with the volume off and make up new dialog for it (microcosmos actually works great for this too)

That thing where you project spotify album covers onto the wall and match up your own face with the eyes/nose/mouth of whatever face on the album cover is kind of hilarious if your friends are as easily entertained as mine are.

Music video wormhole, everyone adds music videos to the same youtube playlist
posted by wowenthusiast at 10:33 AM on May 31, 2018

Geoguessr, the Google Maps game where you look around a random area and try to guess where you are:

https://geoguessr.com/
posted by Kafkaesque at 11:40 AM on May 31, 2018 [1 favorite]

There are a lot of pretty cool party games that work well on a big screen: I've had friends who liked the Artemis Spaceship Simulator (though this was the Star Trek Club in college so a very specific subset) and Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes is always a hit at parties. I've also heard good things about Monster Prom though again, that's the specific subset of people who like dating sims and think a co-op competitive one would be fun. Nidhogg is great as a pickup indie game that people can learn and play in seconds.

There's also Where's Waldo, or taking horrible quizzes together (either classic Quizilla or Buzzfeed), or going down your old social media accounts (high school Facebook posts are often hilarious)/looking at old photos.
posted by storytam at 1:50 AM on June 1, 2018