Contest themes

[Ron Hale-Evans <rwhe@...>]

I have enjoyed the games in the Solitary Confinement competition
overall more than the games from any of the other piecepack contests,
and I think there are a few reasons for this.

First, I have come to appreciate solitaire games much more lately --
perhaps because Marty and I essentially wrote six of them for the
contest, but also because of certain recent hypercompetitive trends in
my game group, and some other personal reasons.

Second, this was the biggest piecepack competition ever, so there 
was a wide variety of games to choose from.  Some of them were 
bound to be good!  And many were.

Finally, I think that as a community we are developing a common
language and a bag of tricks for creating piecepack games (an
unspoken "pattern language").  We're just getting good at writing
piecepack games!  Yay for us.

Marty and I took our own advice and started thinking about possible
themes for the next contest, should we have won it, while we were
waiting for the results.  I suggested a competition for BYOP (Bring
Your Own Piecepack) games like Easy Slider, which could take any
number of players.  Coincidentally, around this time people started
talking about multi-piecepack games, and the poll was posted.  

The preliminary figures for the poll seemed to show that not many
people had more than one piecepack, and Marty also thought my theme
suggestion was somewhat limiting (although it would certainly sell a
lot of piecepacks), so I started thinking about a cooperative-game
competition, and it's interesting that people have been talking about
co-op games on the list lately too.

We'll just have to see what Clark surprises us with.

Ron

-- 
    Ron Hale-Evans ... rwhe@... ... http://ron.ludism.org/
	 Center for Ludic Synergy, Seattle Cosmic Game Night,
Kennexions Glass Bead Game & Positive Revolution FAQ: http://www.ludism.org/