From Conference Fatigue to Cookie-Face Glory: Western Governors University’s 32-Team Game Show
Conferences are long. Faculty brains were fried. Western Governors University needed something big, bold, and bright to shake off the Salt Lake City conference haze . So they called us in.
We rolled out our Game Show for 500 faculty members split into 32 teams — and went straight for the good stuff. Custom trivia written just for them? Check. Buzz In battles that made the quietest professors yell? Check. Price Is Right challenges that had everyone rethinking the cost of a box of cereal? Double check. Then came the pinnacle of the evening. Watching thirty-two grown adults attempt to move Oreos down their faces and into their mouths without using their hands while all 468 of their colleagues screamed them on.
Because, as it turns out, sometimes the road from scholar to slapstick is only one cookie long.
At the start, the vibe was nervous. Lots of questions. Lots of “Wait, how does this work?” But the second the games kicked off, hesitation melted into laughter. The room was electric, and by the end, these thirty-to-seventy-year-old faculty members were all in — laughing, cheering, competing, and plotting their rematch for next year.
Behind the curtain, our crew of four Go Game facilitators ran the whole thing smoothly, dropping in custom trivia questions and scaling the show seamlessly for 500 people. Meanwhile, outdoors, another Go Game team was running a Classic Adventure for a different group at the exact same time. Salt Lake City was basically ground zero for fun that day.
The result? Five hundred very tired faculty members transformed into five hundred people blown out of the water. They came in skeptical and left saying, “We’ll hire you again.” That’s the magic trick: turning post-conference exhaustion into pure play.
