Date Posted:Tue 2003-06-03 12:04:03 Author: arendt Subject: May I suggest another implementation/metaphor In reply to:
Redeye
's message, "I see..." on Tue 2003-06-03 11:09:17
You don't want to write a book; you want to develop
an online, interactive political game. Talk about
Neuromancer, you want to do the governmental structures
that would have saved Gibson's vision from being a
DYStopia.
Look at how popular SimCity is. It is a game with no
violence that requires a whole lot of analytical ability.
Imagine what a cool game you could make when the "random"
news events aren't just ideas some game developer dumped
into a file at game creation time, but are actual real
world events.
I had a working title for this of Fantasy Politics (like
the Rotisserie Baseball or Fantasy Football stuff that
is so popular with sports junkies), a game for political
junkies.
sweetheart, you are good at database management, right?
And, goobergunch knows how to use ESRI to get map data
and display it on a website. I know how to write image
processing algorithms for generating districts from
population density maps.
The idea is to put whatever Constitution we have into
computer code, and get the thing up and running on a
website as an alpha-test version. Attract people who
want to play. Begin with one legislature, just to get
the mechanics right. Then, add about ten legislatures
and recruit enough "voters" to get the real-world
input modules up-and-running so we can get a sense of
how fast we have to manage dataflow. Also, multiple
legislatures allow us to tune up the algorithms for
"binding" groups of legislatures together momentarily
to address cross-specialty issues (this is the multi-
way equivalent of a House/Senate conference committee.
