This is part 2 of a series of posts about how to de-stress from work or school while still in GCQ and without breaking the rules on social distancing. You can see part 1 of this series here.
Everyone knows that Filipinos have three favorite past-times to let our hair down: socializing over a meal, going to the mall to chill or watch movies, and a day or weekend trip to a new place. Unfortunately for most of us, none of these options are available as of the first week of June.
If you're like most people, you're probably looking for a way to unwind and de-stress. In this post, we've gathered a few alternative options for de-stressing and relaxing during quarantine. Read on to find out more.
I'm sure many of you are missing the large salo-salo that is so common in Filipino daily life. We at Halcyon will be the first to admit that we're big fans of getting together with parents, siblings, titos, titas and cousins for a big meal at home or at a nearby restaurant. Despite the economy slowly opening up and restrictions easing, getting together with friends and family in big groups would be a highly irresponsible thing to do.
Luckily, we have things like Zoom and a few other online tools that will help you not only stay in touch with your nearest and dearest, but also have fun with them in a remote, socially distanced way.
Note: Switching Off and Recharging Your Batteries Is Important
I'd like to take this opportunity to reiterate that switching off and recharging your batteries is important during these times. Correction: it's more important during these times probably more than any other time in recent years.
While many of us are blessed to be working or studying from home over the past months (read: no traffic jams to deal with going to and from work or school) a consequence of this is that many of us have lost that clear demarcation between work life and home life. There is now hardly a need to shower (be honest!) and get dressed before reporting to work. Neither is there a "ritual" at the end of the workday, whether that's packing up your laptop, exiting the building, having your favorite snack or picking up your kids at school on the way home. If you're like me, the lines between work life and home life have well and truly been blurred.
Host a Trivia Night on Zoom with Your Friends and Family
Now we get to the fun stuff.
This being a long weekend for us all, a great way to de-stress and switch off, remain social and continue social distancing would be to have a virtual game night with your friends and family.
Setup
For this to work well, you would need to have at least 3 participants, though the more participants there are, the more fun it will be, of course. One person will need to be the game master, and the others are players in the game. The players can play individually or in groups and I would recommend playing in groups of two or more (just like a real trivia night at a restaurant or bar where you'd form a team with the people in your table).
Zoom Accounts and Host Setup
The next thing you'll need would be for each participant to sign up to a Zoom account. This is pretty self explanatory, though if you're reading this and you have some elderly members in your family who you'd like to invite too, you might have to setup their account for them.
Once you all have zoom accounts, the host of the meeting will need to enable breakout rooms in Zoom meetings in their profile (don't worry, the free account also supports this). Rather than explaining it at length here, head on over to this blog to read about enabling breakout rooms.
Trivia Questions
Lastly, you will need some trivia questions. If you're playing with immediate or extended family, this would be a great opportunity to create trivia questions about yourselves. Questions like "How did mom and dad meet?" or "Where did Juan lose his front tooth at age 7?" always elicit a few laughs and little bit of nostalgia amongst family members. If this isn't your cup of tea though, this site is great for some random trivia questions, though many of them are on the difficult side of things. If you'd like to do something related to Filipino history (it is Independence Day today after all), you can find some here, here, here and here.
Gameplay
If you get the setup correctly, this is actually the easy part.
The easiest way to start would be to have the meeting host also be the game master. With the prepared questions, the game master asks the questions. Once the questions are asked, the game master opens the breakout rooms on Zoom. Individuals can be automatically assigned, manually assigned or transferred by the game master in the breakout rooms. The game master then gives participants one minute to answer the question.
Within each team, one member needs to write the answer on a large piece of paper or a whiteboard. Ideally this would be the same person each time to avoid confusion.
Of course, it goes without saying that using external sources (Google or books around your house) to find answers questions is cheating, and while Zoom has no way of controlling who is using Google or not, if you or one of your game mates are cheating on a Zoom trivia night, please refer them to us as they might be in need of professional help.
Same as a normal trivia night, the team that scores the most point wins.
Variations
To add more spice to the game, try holding multiple rounds of 10 questions, with the game master changing each round.
Another option would be to assign people randomly to a breakout room for each question with the game being scored per room, rather than per team or individual and the scores at the end of the last question is what determines who wins.
Similar to what we recommended in the previous post, a fun "consequence" for the losing team would be for them to buy everyone in the game dinner once we're all allowed to have big group meals again.
Conclusion
Playing trivia night over zoom is no substitute to sharing an in-person meal with those you hold dearest. Nor does it come close to driving away on a long weekend like this one to chill by the beach or to hike a trail. But we must all make the most of the tools that we have at our disposal in order to stay connected and have fun with our friends and family.
Hope you all have fun with our recommendation and let us know how your Zoom Trivia Night goes!