TRONICv1

The first outlining of the idea and the responses different people had to it.

2020

I prepared this:

format for discussion: idealistic notion my motives are good, to be discussed another time perhaps i am a teacher, and social artist love the game love to have more competition the idea: more like an invitation 1,000,000 players in one tournament in one year's time of 0.2.8 release played in one evening £1 entry fee some goes to developers: 200k most goes to players: 600k a little goes to service providers: 100k and the rest to previous designers, film director, artistic director: 100k or however we organise it... who? the game is super simple so it can be played by young and old it is not kill kill kill, so it is open to everyone there is scalability: skills are evident in individual players teamplay: a good team can beat a collection of skilled individuals... maybe? so kids can test their quick reaction times adults can use their temporal awareness to set traps appeals to new kids on the block and a whole generation of guys who loved TRON how? mainly word of mouth though with some concerted effort in promoting at various gaming venues...? and then the interface with joe-public has to be super simple less emphasis on clans, and more on team-formation, less technical-developmental, more play when? 6 months: 1,000 player tournament 3 months: 100 player tournamnet 1 month: small informal tournament just to test it out where? dedicated servers: official i suppose... secure and locals can host their own of course... what? noobs download the game free play, encourage to set up their own moviepack and register for worldcup then they will be invited to the earlier smaller tournament closer to the time and they know they could make £16k that night from the game oh yeah... if they are good enough why? the game is excellent it is incredibly well designed simple: only two keys minimum beautifully elegant: acceleration due to proximity of trail shares good design with chess and GO difference is multiplayer: it is social, it is the virtual equivalent of football and in the future virtual world of games, this could hold an important minimal place just like chess and GO, rather than what the developers are doing which is to play around with maps etc that is: purify, distil it, faster, lower ping, increase teamplay and why you guys? i have played with you and i like your attitudes you are all different and i wanted to test the idea with a variety of people i didn't want to suggest this to people who are like me or who are just nice i think you are all strong independently minded people with different personalities and ambitions etc with at least one common interest: playing armagetron \ framework of idea: social cohesion not engineering the developers of the game have done the business now as players can we do the same socially necessary add-ons: voice capacity team choice secure trusted servers for official games so what's next? 1 a few people who think yeah this sounds good 2 these people thrash out some kind of provisional plan 3 we start rolling it out, invite others to join and take part 4 as well as an established interface for noobs with clear entry into the worldcup first month will determine whether it works if it does we carry on... important to recognise it is voluntary also the thing about working with things an artist and his stone or wood or paint or canvass and engineer with his metal and stone a scientist with his chemicals etc is that the number of variables may be many but they are ultimately manageable and controllable however we are dealing with people and as such we don't want to control anyone and there will by necessity be different ideas on how to do this and we need to have a reasonable way of resolving differences unlike writing the computer game itself where there is something about efficiency, speed, economy of cpu time etc, elegance even we don't have these external conditions, so it can get very baggy hence the rigour: 1,000,000 in a year to pull this off, we can't just arse about, and we can't just rely on our own tastes we must accomodate as many people as possible

I cut it into sections passed them through skype chat and the others responded as we went along

generally wolverine ghableska and mazuffer listened throughout and then said stuff at the end

i remember maz's response: 1,000,000 is impossible hehhhe which of course it isn't... though there is still a tiny chance my first response to his was: 1000 in 6 months... to which he said: that should be possible and then i went on to explain the meta-reason for such an idealistic objective: to inspire it has to be exciting enough for people to go... wouldn't that be cool 1 miiiiiiiiiiillion players in a year wow it kind of aligns people and gives their contributions a.. parameters

wolverine went into some detail regarding problems with money and time-syncing with different servers and we discussed most of that through voice so i have no recording of this suffice to say it was exactly where i am blind: serious here-and-now practicalities

my response is to leave most of those technical details for later once we have enough players who are interested in the idea and we start to learn the social skills to bring it about: this for me is the most important factor and something demonstrated so well by the developers: the ability to work together without a hierarchical structure their time is not being bought ( albeit the developers have a slightly easier time of it since they are producing a thing and confrontation of perspectives can be resolved through actually producing the most efficient code for example )

ghab was enthusiastic and without him i think i would have just crumpled under the initial criticism ! this is not a criticism of the participants it is merely a recognition that we are trained to be critical ( you know.. the dialectic devil's advocate scientific disproof ) and to my mind we apply this critical faculty too early which is another reason why the idealistic objective is presented first

if you like the idea then whatever objections you come up with you want to come with the solutions rather than presenting them to another as if you have already been defeated by it

anyhoo these ideas and reasons are covered elsewhere on this wiki contributor's guidelines i think

anyway i wanted to voice the idea to a few players and if they didn't like it i wouldn't have taken it further so my deepest gratitude to the people known as wolvering ghableska and mazuffer