Things are starting to come together so much that I thought it justified my first blog post in almost two months.
(it will get a bit livelier around here in a week or so.)
RPI: We're coming. It will obviously be a work in progress, but it's coming and it is happening on Monday.
The number of people who are excited about the upcoming GXC launch is just incredible. On the insistence of our fans who don't go to an ivy league school, RPI, Rice, BC, WPI, WashU, MIT or Drexel, we're going to be creating an "open game" that anyone can join at some point in the coming month or so.
Thus, the purpose of this post is to ask a simple question: What should the open game be? Anyone will be allowed to join any team, although you can only join a team once (obviously... no switching back and forth).
The game should fit the following characteristics:
1) Almost all people (Americans, at least) have a strong affiliation for one team.
2) Teams will have roughly the same number of people*.
3) Two to ten teams.
*When played by a very tech-friendly audience. "IE vs Firefox vs Other" might actually be a viable game. Plus, we can autodetect the browser.
Examples that might work: Democrats vs Republicans, East Coast vs West Coast, Browser Wars.
Make a suggestion (in the comments, por favor), and if we like it we might just make it a game.
9 comments:
Brad - Just noticed your RPI game says it started on 10/9, but your blog says the game started today. Which is it?
Hey anonymous, the rpi game didn't start until today, October 15. October 9 is the date it was created in our database and that's our bad. We'll fix that today :)
How's about teams based on religion? Wouldn't that be historically accurate (except for the blood) and fun at the same time?
If that's a little hot, well at least I'd like an opportunity to kick some pansy democrat ass.
Baghdad! Insurgent forces vs. Allied troops. Except it won't really be a Go Cross Campus game. The insurgent numbers will actually be intel on real insurgents on the ground, and the commands to the Allied forces will direct the live forces on the ground.
Or you could do pimps and hos...
How about the four Harry Potter houses? But you'd be running into copyright laws, there... Same if you do cola wars, actually. Browser wars might have copyright issues as well....
Cool ideas thus far. My initial thoughts:
Harry Potter houses - you're probably right with the copyright issues. Also, we're trying to avoid topics that could be seen as "nerdy" if it got into mainstream media. We're self-hating dorks.
Cola wars - I think this is good because it's a random, irrelevant preference that people are extremely passionate about. Not sure about the copyrights here... obviously we couldn't use logos, but names alone might be okay.
Iraq - It'd be an interesting experiment in crowdsourcing, at least. War 2.0. I'm just sure it would be hacked by some Ukrainian kid and we'd have US troops walking the streets of Ramadi hawking v14gr4.
Religious wars - Hah. Can't say we haven't tossed it around in the office at 3 am. If religions in the developed world were more balanced, we might just do it.
What about gender? It looks like you have a multiplier in place to correct for imbalances between teams already.
Maybe by states? I notice a lot of Facebook groups about "Races Between the States", and it might be fun to have an actual game of it.
I like the map--it really does a good job of visually illustrating regional variations/
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