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-Extra Stuff-

This section is purely extra items that may or may not have relevance to MGM and are for the readers reference and entertainment.

Links from the Editor

Updated 10/12/2004

Creative Ministries Conference

Updated 2/28/2005

Drama Games learned while attending

Zap
Purpose – To free the minds of the participants, allowing to focus on following task. Reflexes, quick thinking.
Description – All players stand in circle, facing in, half arms length spaced. The first person points and makes eye contact to a random individual, and says Zap. The chosen one then repeats for any other member as quickly as possible – even to the previous player. This continues until the chosen moderator stops the process.

Zap Praise
Purpose – Similar to Zap, though impressing idea of praise upon participants.
Description – Same as Zap, but the player say words that come to the mind about praise. There is no emphasis on time in this game.

Machine
Purpose – To inspire creativity and teamwork. Focus and rhythm are also stressed.
Description – One player is chosen to start, and they may choose any melodic sound combined with a (simple) movement of their body. This person will continue to repeat this motion for the entirety of the round. The second player will choose any other motion and sound that remotely “interacts” with the first player. They must continue this motion with the first player. All players are added one at a time. If desired, the chosen moderator player will fluxuate speed after all players have joined. They then slow to a halt to end the game.

Mirror
Purpose – To develop advanced focusing skills, as well as physical skills of manual dexterity and peripheral vision.
Description – The entire group creates pairs of two. If uneven, the moderator may participate, or choose to have the extra person sit out temporarily. The pairs are ideally physical height chosen, of best match. The pairs will stand one foot apart – facing one another, in a relaxed position maintaining eye contact, with no expressions or movement. When the game is started, one of each pair is chosen to be the leader, without expressions, moment, or speech. The leader of each pair will create slow motions with their upper body, with the mate attempting to mirror the leaders exact movement. The eye contact is continually maintained, still without expression from either. The moderator may choose to change the leader by counting down from three, and the pairs attempting to make a seamless change. This may also be done to switch players between each other and outed players. The game is always resolved by returning to a relaxed position, as lead by the individual leaders. Advanced variations of this game may be used in experienced players, as using more areas of the body, or with facial expressions.

Blob
Purpose – To develop sensorary teamwork, as well as non-visual senses.
Description – The room needs to be inspected for obstacles before hand, by the moderator. The players will space themselves as far as constraintly possible. The players will be instructed to keep their eyes closes during the entire game. The initial goal of each player is to roam the room slowly without touching anyone. The player may not talk, move objects, or peek. If a player encounters another player, the point of contact becomes a connection that must stay until the end of the game, whatsoever the position. The goal of the players that have been joined changes to become predatory, seeking out other players. The game will end when all players are connected, and the moderator tells them to stop. They may then end by observing themselves before disconnecting.

Freeze
Purpose – To develop improvisation, creativity, and teamwork.
Description – The players are set up without a moderator, in a stage setting, with 2 actors and the rest of the players are viewers. The first two choose a scene silently without communication, and continue with any story, setting, and actions. The viewers are instructed to look for opportunities to change the scene into something drastically different, based on the physical position of the actors. They may then yell Freeze and take over the scene by tapping out an actor and replacing them, leading the other actor as necessary. This may change over until desired length of time. In performing this activity, more physicality should be stressed, to overcome hindrances as well as encourage creativity.

Trust Walk
Purpose – To developing listening skills as well as trust.
Description – The moderator chooses a leader and a follower. The follower leaves the room, and the moderator sets up obstacles by positioning the extra players. The leader may retrieve the follower, who is blinded. The leader will direct the follower only by voice, saying only the follower’s name. They may use speed, amplitude, volume, or distance from the ground in voice alterations. All the extra players are completely silent.

Trust Circle
Purpose – To develop extreme trust and teamwork.
Description – A player must volunteer to be in the center as the main focus, while the other players crows around, surrounding the volunteer. The volunteer will then close their eyes, and start to fall over, but not straight down. The other players will then catch the player and push them gently towards to the other side. The goal is to keep an even pace, without alarming the center volunteer. Care must be taken in allowing a volunteer, as well as creating safety. The outer players must continually talk to the cent person, reassuring, but not in conversation.



Assassin
Purpose – To encourage friendship, clear minds.
Description – Each player picks someone to be their bodyguard, and somebody to be their assassin out of the room silently. When the game starts, and everyone tries to protect themselves from their assassin, by trying to keep their bodyguard between themselves and their assassin. After several minutes, everyone reveals who was picked for what.

Association Jump
Purpose – Practice listening, improvisation
Description - All players mill about the room. At any time, the moderator yells a player's name, that player 'jumps' into a frozen position. Moderator may sidecoach by shouting themes like 'horizontal', 'up', 'down', 'sideways', 'big', 'small', 'light', 'heavy'. The other players must join in next to the frozen player, creating a still frame.

Credit - Rebecca McCoy-Reese, humanpingpongball.com

History of MiddleGroundMGM.net

Updated 2/3/2004

As you might have guessed, MGM's web page had a rough start. Beginning around the end of October 2003, the idea was first put into motion with the purchase of a 5 page space at Register.com (MiddleGroundMGM.com). The space provided was 5 template based pages that were restricted to choosing a template and then adding text and your own pictures. After much grief, it was discovered that 500KB was available to the creator. After about a week, a second vendor was contacted, NetworkSolutions.com (MiddleGroundMGM.org). As an affiliate of Verisign, it was assumed that this was a a good choice for us. Sadly, history repeats itself, and this site offered the same services as the last one. The only difference was the quality of the templates, and the availability of unlimited picture space. The templates simply could not be dealt with, so it was perused to cancel both accounts. This succeeded with NetwokSolutions and they allowed us to cancel the 5 pages but keep the domain .org The register.com only re-registered MiddleGroundMGM.com in the company's name with the cancel, so we currently do not have this domain. Eventually, .org will be redirected to the same page as .net After the cancellation process, an account was opened with Interland.com which we are currently using. We have adequate email boxes, and most members can be reached at FirstLastname@MiddleGroundMGM.net

The process of creating the actual existing template was a slow and excruciating process. The design was laid out in Adobe Photoshop and sliced for the table cells. The images were transferred to backgrounds and then stretch attributes were put in place. The fixed background was the goal, with the blue bars stretching to the borders. The animated title was created in Adobe ImageReady with some simple gradients, and was included to keep the page from being too plain, though it is the largest file of the page. When first created, it was done in standards compliance, so therefor it displayed accurately in Mozilla. After final tweaking, it was viewed in Microsoft Internet Explorer. Of course, the boxes did not stretch correctly. When IE encounters constricted space in a table, it does not alleviate this space in the directed "*%" cell, it distributes it among the other cells in the table. This squeezed the content in the sidebar and the title to unreadable and unaligned dimensions. All attempts at tweaking failed. Finally, the table was forced with spacer images, and filling the "expanded" cell of the title with another table to create the stretching blue on the right. At first this also failed, because browsers for some reason do not display tables with no content (just background colors) or border turned on. The only way to fix this was to place a character or image in at least one cell, where you can see the "-" in it. All of the spacers are visible by pressing "CTRL + A", which is very tacky. The cascading style sheet was then made to create a softer feel to the fonts and the rollover effect for the side links. This method is very practical in the sense of not loading new rollover images. Once again, the box background is not supported by IE and it will only do the text background. Feel free to view the style sheet used for all pages. It was created with good resources such as HTMLGoodies.com and the World Wide Web Consortium.

Later on... It wasn't previously noticed, but the same issue with the title bar appeared with the sidebar. IE was stretching the first cell to the bottom of the page and did not follow the "*%" specification for the second cell, that should have repeated. Since this was obviously a major problem and appeared twice, it was assumed that it must be a code(creator) error. Many people were asked, including an un-named web site how to fix the problem. After much labor and time spent arguing with various IT professionals, if was decided that this indeed was a flaw in Internet Explorer. Though undocumented, it very obvious if one attempts to recreate the layout of this page. Of course, if a solution is actually found, please email the webmaster. Also report any spelling errors or other annoyances.

The calendar was the next large addition to the web site, with January through September added. The layout was created in pure HTML with tables and the background color method to create lines. The template is reusable, with only minor changes necessary. Feel free to use it on anything you like. One obsticle to overcome with the calendar was the weeks in May. The height of the weeks was greater than the format designed for, and an image was necessary to put the two days in one box. The table seems to resize fairly well, and will fit any screen, given the Print view is used apart from the main website template. The method used to create the straight lines is one that is not printed, so the border attribute has to be set to 1. This may be forgotten in future updates, so please notify the webmaster if any problems are found.

In other updates, it has been noticed in some user cases, the website "runs" slow on some computers. After some investigation, if was found that IE in the AOL software uses 66% to 70% of the processor power. This is no huge problem, but certainly cannot be ignored. The "fading" banner at the top of the website may need to be replaced. If anyone has any of their own designs, feel free to submit them. The only other way would be to get the entire world to use a different product to surf the web.