Name That Profile! An Easy Collaborative Youth Ministry Game

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Looking for a quick and easy game for your youth ministry that promotes collaboration instead of competition? Jeremy Pettitt shares a quick game idea!

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Video Transcript

As you're seeking to help your students connect, to build community, I really do recommend that you play collaborative games. Collaborative games are different then competitive games. Competitive games, you have a winner and a loser. Collaborative games are helping students get to know one another.

Here's a collaborative game that's a lot of fun. It's basically called Name That Profile. When your students come in for the night, they may check in, you ask them a question, please get their permission and say, "Listen, we're going to play a game called Name That Profile. We want to use social media profiles to see if people know who you are just from the things that you like and the things that you posted. If they say yes, then basically you can make a list of the students who are willing to have their profile used.

Then the leader can stand up on the stage, pull up a profile and never mention the name but just mention a list of things that are on there, things that they liked people they're friends with, schools they go to, towns they live in, just information about them that they have publicly posted to social media profiles. That could be from Facebook or Instagram or Twitter, whatever it may be, but you're basically giving out information about them to see how long does it take or who can first guess who this person really is.

All you would really need is just one connected device on the stage. You don't need to put it up on the screen. If you can, that's fine, but the key is not to show the person's profile publicly unless they say that's okay. However, you're giving the information. The person guesses, they get it right. The person comes up and maybe talks a little bit about themselves if you want them to, if they want them to share a little more. Otherwise, all you have to do is basically let the person who guessed correctly come up on the stage, pick the next person, and share some of that information.

Make sure that you make it fun. Make sure that you have a good time with it, and make sure that you're not saying anything inappropriate. If they posted something that you think , "hey, you know what, this might not be appropriate," then take the time to edit that out. Just don't mention it because you only have it on your device. You can edit out the things that you don't want to talk about, and talk about the things that you do. Hey, you love chocolate chip ice cream and you go to this particular high school, and you also have three dogs, and your Dad works in sales.

You can say all this stuff because their social media profile has it there, but it's really difficult sometimes to guess who a person is simply based on their profile, so this game could take a little while. Give it the time it needs. That's why it requires the person up front to be the kind of person who's helping everyone engage and have a good time with it.

This is a fantastic game, and I'm looking forward to hearing stories. If you can and want to tell us more about it, you can post it to @awanaym and just tag us and let us know how the game went or what it looked like. We'd love to hear the results and hear what your students thought.

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