Questions, concerns, befuddlements
Ron Edwards:
Yeah, that's right!
I'll provide the four terms on January 1st, which kicks off the submission period.
Best, Ron
David Berg:
Hi Ron,
You said, re: the words, "The two you choose need to be central to the game in some fashion." Could you elaborate on this?
I get a vague sense of a "design to spec" challenge, but am fuzzy on doing that when the spec is so broad.
Let's say a word is "phoenix" and I get inspired by that to do something about rebirth, and wind up making a game about robots who've uploaded the consciousnesses of dead people. Does that count as "phoenix" being "central"?
On the other hand, I could make a game where everyone plays a phoenix. By your judging standards, is that likely to fit better? Worse (for lack of subtlety/originality)?
Thanks,
-David
M. J. Young:
I admit to being interested, even intrigued. It's the 24-hour thing that causes me to hesitate, for what is probably a different reason.
My days are generally rather packed. I've got deadlines on two articles per week (I'm the Time Travel Movies Examiner at The Examiner.com, and a ton of unpredictable real-life and online obligations. If I can get twenty-four free minutes out of twenty-four hours, it's a light day. I rarely write a forum post uninterrupted. So while twenty-four hours sounds like plenty of time to create a game, I find myself saying with Steven Wright, "Not in a row." It sounds like fun, but I might drop in next Thursday, pick up the words, Friday morning write a hundred words on an idea that has coalesced, and not get a chance to get back to it again until Tuesday.
That sounds like it would violate the twenty-four hour rule. I'm not sure, though, how I could avoid doing so--I don't have days off, and if I did my wife would lay claim to them rather quickly.
So how strictly should this twenty-four hour rule be interpreted? I know you said that the time limit was there to prevent us from second-guessing ourselves and forcing us to make quick decisions to get things together. If it were a competition it would be unfair for me to have the weekend to think about it, even intermittently. But since I can never know when I sit down to type whether I am going to have several uninterrupted hours or five minutes after which I won't be able to return to the task for a few days, I can see the twenty-four hour rule killing me pretty easily. Everything I write involves picking up where I left off a day or more ago, done in fragments that hopefully coalesce into a complete coherent work.
So I guess I'm asking whether not having more than five or ten minutes a day to focus on such a project automatically disqualifies me.
Thanks.
--M. J. Young
Ron Edwards:
It does, unfortunately. The 24-hour period is fixed by the clock. It's not that it takes 24 hours to do it, out of 48 or 72 or whatever, but that it was done in that particular span.
See what happens during the submission period. Since there's no sign-up or prior commitment phase, there's no reason to say one way or another at this time. In the past, any number of people who talked smack about what they would do failed to submit, and any number of people who said they probably couldn't discovered that they could.
Best, Ron
David Berg:
Hey Ron, didja see my post?
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