I'd certainly be up for a contest, although I don't actually have a
single-stash or treehouse-stash game in the works (yet ;-)
Take care, all!
Subhan
On 2/7/06, Brian Campbell <lambda@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Feb 7, 2006, at 2:27 PM, Christopher Hickman wrote:
>
> > I guess I seriously underestimated the demand here. No one else
> > has any
> > comment on a contest to design quality single-stash games as entry
> > level
> > Icehouse games?
>
> Hmm, I managed to miss this the first time around.
>
> > This is a good idea. As Mark Rosewater (of Magic: the Gathering
> > designer
> > fame) frequently mentions, restrictions breed creativity.
>
> I definitely agree that restrictions can be extremely helpful in
> inspiring elegance, creativity, and lots of other good stuff, though
> removing restrictions can also help see problems from a completely
> different angle ("why does a board game have to have a board, or
> turns?")
>
> I think one of the reasons Icehouse is such a good game system is
> because of it's fairly limited palette. You only have a couple colors
> to work with, 3 sizes, and 5 pieces of each size/color. The
> restrictions here actually end up serving as inspiration, and I think
> the restricted palette of one or a couple of Treehouse sets could
> also provide such inspiration.
>
> > Another added benefit of forced creativity, there's the obvious:
> > Restricting
> > to single-stash games gives us more of what we need--single-stash
> > games. :)
>
> Yep! Single-stash games are so much more convenient than multi-stash
> games, for a variety of reasons: cost, space, ease of setup and
> cleanup, and so on.
>
> > I'd also like to bring up something else I recently read.
> > According to Wil
> > Shipley (http://wilshipley.com/blog/2006/01/os-x-prize.html), Larry
> > Page of
> > X-Prize fame believes that prize-incentive research is the wave of the
> > future. Since the horizontal growth of the Icehouse market is more
> > important than the vertical growth, and elegant and compelling
> > single-stash
> > games allow for an easier introduction to the world of Icehouse,
> > perhaps a
> > prize to spur developers would be good. The bounty discussed in
> > the above
> > linked article began with a $100 prize and has grown to over $6000
> > in mere
> > days. If some such similar bounty were made for compelling single-
> > stash
> > games, with the Icehouse community at large adding their own
> > donations to
> > support the effort, I think we'd generate some good stuff.
>
> :/ I'm not very fond of the idea of having monetary prizes for
> Icehouse game design competitions. The X-Prize is a very different
> beast from game design. There is a very high cost of entry in aero
> and astronautics, which means that there needs to be some fairly high
> potential payoff for people to spend the time and money to design a
> new spacecraft. Game design can be fairly quick or somewhat involved
> (as in, Andy vs. Kory's design styles), but it costs nothing and the
> time taken is doing something you enjoy and would do in your free
> time anyhow, playing games. Also, I think money could make the
> community a lot less friendly; when money's on the line, people are
> going to care a lot more about the vote being fair, you have to worry
> about people stacking the vote, and so on. I prefer being a member of
> a casual community where people design games for the fun of it, or at
> least for just fame and glory, rather than a truly competitive group
> motivated by money.
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=====
Work like you don't need money, Love like you've
never been hurt, and Dance like no one's watching.
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