In related news, Paul W.S. Anderson (Resident Evil) and George Romero (* of the Dead) plan a new reality television show. Like Survivor, contestants who are voted out will act as an increasing number of judges. "It'll take a lot of brains to survive on this show," says Romero of his new show.
Settlers could best be described as a "gateway game". When introducing people to board games, I find that Settlers is one of the easiest games to teach and that people quickly pick up on it. Stores I game at stock Settlers for that very reason - it's easy to get people hooked. However, after an initial addiction phase, gamers tend to move onto harder, more serious games.
My chief criticism of Settlers is that it's heavily dependent on an element of luck. Resource production is unpredictable, and poor luck (when rolling the dice) can really stymie players for part of the game. This is where the trading portion of the game comes in. More experienced players quickly start assessing their opponents when thinking through trades. Settlers then can evolve into a "screw your neighbor"-style game.
I can't say that I'm impressed with the notion of putting a mediocre board game online. While there are a few good adaptations (Dark Tower comes to mind if only because it's so rare), I'd rather sit down around a table and an actual board than play it online. Putting it on MSN certainly won't help adoption, either.
Saw that at Bumbershoot in 2002. Very, very funny, though not a bit political. I've never considered Stone & Parker to be political - they seem willing to just produce comedy that pushes the limits of taste.
We need more effective use of technology in politics. Currently, most campaigns don't get it and are using cobbled together systems that break under load.
Some background: I was Governor Dean's Legislative District Co-Ordinator in a suburban/rural part of Washington State, and responsible for contacting over 86,000 voters in under 10 months. At no point was Gov. Dean planning on visiting my area - Seattle gets all the politicians, but we're on our own out on the Eastside.
My technology challenges were two-fold: organizing a team of thirty volunteers, and then doorbelling likely voters. The software provided by Gov. Dean's campaign was initially very late and very buggy, which is what most campaigns have. Instead, I settled on using a combination of OSS packages and integration with a proprietary mapping software package which was donated to me by the campaign. I wasn't real happy about the mapping software, but it worked.
The reason we used this combination was that a politician doesn't need to (and realistically cannot) visit every door in a precinct, in a legislative or congressional district, or in a state. There are voters out there who are highly partisan and will still vote based on the letter D or R to the right of each candidates name on the ballot. The challenge on Gov. Dean's campaign was to get my volunteers in touch with undecided voters who voted regularly, but lived in areas where there could be as few as five voters per square mile. We did this by using some basic data analysis (on MySQL) of voter data and then geocoding the results for the mapping software. It worked, and even though Gov. Dean didn't win the caucuses, we turned out a record number of voters.
Most campaigns don't grasp the potential uses of technology. I recently offered a free blog to the candidates in my area. I'd host it, publicize it, and pay for it - all they had to do was type on it. In small campaigns, it's very hard to get voters to so much as recognize the names on the ballot. However, the professional consultants - who get paid to be smarter than your average person - recommended against this. My rationale was that Google likes blogs, voters like Google, and thus the voters can easily find the candidates and see how things are going and what they're about.
I support the development of open source political packages and may start working on one of these projects. Most campaigns don't have a technology budget and just cobble together some Access databases, some spreadsheets, and a quick website. A free software package which offers all those features and is under continuing development will easily surpass a Rube Goldberg collection of software.
Slashdot Mirror
In related news, Paul W.S. Anderson (Resident Evil) and George Romero (* of the Dead) plan a new reality television show. Like Survivor, contestants who are voted out will act as an increasing number of judges. "It'll take a lot of brains to survive on this show," says Romero of his new show.
Settlers could best be described as a "gateway game". When introducing people to board games, I find that Settlers is one of the easiest games to teach and that people quickly pick up on it. Stores I game at stock Settlers for that very reason - it's easy to get people hooked. However, after an initial addiction phase, gamers tend to move onto harder, more serious games.
My chief criticism of Settlers is that it's heavily dependent on an element of luck. Resource production is unpredictable, and poor luck (when rolling the dice) can really stymie players for part of the game. This is where the trading portion of the game comes in. More experienced players quickly start assessing their opponents when thinking through trades. Settlers then can evolve into a "screw your neighbor"-style game.
I can't say that I'm impressed with the notion of putting a mediocre board game online. While there are a few good adaptations (Dark Tower comes to mind if only because it's so rare), I'd rather sit down around a table and an actual board than play it online. Putting it on MSN certainly won't help adoption, either.
Saw that at Bumbershoot in 2002. Very, very funny, though not a bit political. I've never considered Stone & Parker to be political - they seem willing to just produce comedy that pushes the limits of taste.
We need more effective use of technology in politics. Currently, most campaigns don't get it and are using cobbled together systems that break under load. Some background: I was Governor Dean's Legislative District Co-Ordinator in a suburban/rural part of Washington State, and responsible for contacting over 86,000 voters in under 10 months. At no point was Gov. Dean planning on visiting my area - Seattle gets all the politicians, but we're on our own out on the Eastside. My technology challenges were two-fold: organizing a team of thirty volunteers, and then doorbelling likely voters. The software provided by Gov. Dean's campaign was initially very late and very buggy, which is what most campaigns have. Instead, I settled on using a combination of OSS packages and integration with a proprietary mapping software package which was donated to me by the campaign. I wasn't real happy about the mapping software, but it worked. The reason we used this combination was that a politician doesn't need to (and realistically cannot) visit every door in a precinct, in a legislative or congressional district, or in a state. There are voters out there who are highly partisan and will still vote based on the letter D or R to the right of each candidates name on the ballot. The challenge on Gov. Dean's campaign was to get my volunteers in touch with undecided voters who voted regularly, but lived in areas where there could be as few as five voters per square mile. We did this by using some basic data analysis (on MySQL) of voter data and then geocoding the results for the mapping software. It worked, and even though Gov. Dean didn't win the caucuses, we turned out a record number of voters. Most campaigns don't grasp the potential uses of technology. I recently offered a free blog to the candidates in my area. I'd host it, publicize it, and pay for it - all they had to do was type on it. In small campaigns, it's very hard to get voters to so much as recognize the names on the ballot. However, the professional consultants - who get paid to be smarter than your average person - recommended against this. My rationale was that Google likes blogs, voters like Google, and thus the voters can easily find the candidates and see how things are going and what they're about. I support the development of open source political packages and may start working on one of these projects. Most campaigns don't have a technology budget and just cobble together some Access databases, some spreadsheets, and a quick website. A free software package which offers all those features and is under continuing development will easily surpass a Rube Goldberg collection of software.