Create a Public Diplmacy Game, win cash, meet Cory Linden during E3!

Sponsored by USC in Los Angeles. Details here. Like I mention there, I'm exchanging e-mail with the coordinator, so if you have any questions about it (after reading the rules) post here, and I'll try to relay them to Joshua, and relay his answers back here.

Question becomes - must it be diplomacy based on the "real world?"

I'd love to see a translation of SEIV into Second Life. It would be beyond fun to watch a game built for the third dimension (and diplomacy) to finally acheive it.

Even if I'm a lousy diplomat. Last time I played, "six front war" comes immediately to mind.

I am so into this!!!!!

Public Diplomacy? Muhahaa... I'm just waiting for the space aliens to storm in and kill the entire assembly. That is, of course, after negotiations have failed.

I'm glad you bumped this puppy TT: now that the Barnett madness is over, I can announce that a member of the USC team running this has an SL account, and I'm helping her arrange a meeting with her and any game developers interested in entering this contest. Watch this space for details!

Anyone currently working on anything? Anyone intrested in collaborating?

this sounds kinda cool, but i dont really get it, i'd be interested in teaming up

This is their idea of Public Diplomacy: http://uscpublicdiplomacy.com/index.php/about/whatis_pd

Just reading through that gave me a couple of ideas.

Ill E-mail you, we'll talk skillsets

EDIT: Or not. Feel free to email me.

IM me inworld

Show of hands: who's interested in meeting in-world with the USC rep next week about this contest, to get a better idea what they're looking for?

public diplomacy... they say it like it's a good thing. What are they exactly looking for?

Come to the meeting and find out! Main thing now is I wanna head count of how many folks are innersted.

I would have been intrested if I hadnt been away on business. too late?

Nope, not too late at all. I'm meeting with the USC coordinator tomorrow and we should be announcing an in-world meeting for sometime early next week.

Thanks Hamlet.

I am very interested in attending the meeting. I recently gave a small presentation about the USC competition to my Intercultural Communications class. It spurred a vibrant, though short discussion about the potential of MMOG's as tools to further communication, understanding, and cooperation between cultures.

Champie

SAVE THE DATE!

Harmony Harbinger, who works at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, will be appearing in SL to talk about this contest next Monday at 7pm SLT. More details in the next couple days.

now im new to this game and am a very poor coder, and such, but I have a good idea. My Idea would need a decent size plot of land to work on. may look like a large full scale version of a Civ sim.

1. create a large playing field with prims shaped like countries.

2. economics, for this to work every country needs a starting amount of goods, generic goods, goods can only be sold, cash from selling runs production, production scores points and replenishes goods to be sold. all goods are generic, for a coop sysem to work total goods in the world remain constant, they just change hands.

3. Anyone can play, a person would come and choose a country to play on, and it would be for them during a set period of time. each country would need to vote in a leader who would deal with distabution of the good and services. everyone else would have mini games or puzzles that would convert the goods bought into goods that can be sold.

4. a United nations like building that leaders can sit in areas where they can see a board that lists the country, there current level of good to sell, and level of goods bought. Goods sold + goods bought should always = amount of goods each contry started off with.

so things to need are:
A. Land.
B. Coder to create scoring, transfer and tracking of goods, mini games for conversion of production of goods. team assignmet, game time tracking.
C. builder, to make the game field.

I believe this would make a fun game promoting this idea, while not make a game with violence involved. promoting team spirit, and diplomacy between compeating players.

Production: non leaders compleate EASY games or puzzles win a puzzle creats more goods to sell then a lost puzzle/game, but production needs to hapien regardless of puzzle/game outcome. produced goods go into the pool of goods leader can then sell.

example of game play goes like this:

Game starts.
country A and B vote in there leaders, contries without leaders would be shut down and not be considered in the calulations for goods trading.

Each country recieves 1000 goods.

Leader A sells 500 goods to Leader B now country A and b has 500 goods_to_sell and 500 goods_for_production. goods_to_sell + goods_for_production will always = 1000. trades are always 1:1 ratio.

Production begins. country A converts 400 goods_for_production into 400 goods_to_sell, but country B was slower and only converted 200 goods. Now country B at this time can only trade for 200+what is still in reserve, leaving country A with 500+reserve, if there are other countries then country A could sell them to others.

Now this can be turn based where each phase has a time limit, or it can be live going on for days where people can come and go working production when there online, but can cause bottlenecks if leaders are offline when goods need to be traded.

Might need a computer controlled player if there are a odd amount of countries, but the computer will allways convert all the goods that were traded with it to keep it even for trade each turn.

Good idea! Why not come bounce it off Harmony next Monday? Details here.

Public Diplomacy Game Contest Meeting
Date: Monday, November 21, 2005
Time: 7:00PM - 8:00PM (60 minutes)
Location: Waterhead (0,0)
Host: Hamlet Linden
Category: Discussion
Cover Charge? No

Event description: SL Game Developers: Meet Harmony Harbinger of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy to discuss the center's Public Diplomacy Through Games Competition, and how you can create Second Life games for this contest.

Details on the competition are here:

http://www.uscpublicdiplomacy.com/index.php/projects/contest/

Grand Prize is $5,000 + airfare and hotel to the May 8, 2006 awards ceremony in Los Angeles, California, during E3; Private dinner and screening with world class judges including John Seely Brown, Bing Gordon, T.L. Taylor, and Cory Linden, among other industry leaders.

This is a great opportunity for beginning game developers, and hey, you might just help make the world a better place. So come meet Harmony and bounce your grand ideas for an SL-based diplomacy game off her!

Hosted by Hamlet Linden of New World Notes. IM Hamlet for more information or details, or check the Forum topic:

/165/18/66111/1.html

well I read more on the other sites and I still think my idea fits in well.

basic underlining lessons to learn are:

lessons on trade, can creating trade aggrements hurt other countries? I think yes, buy limiting resources to only "friends" you "freeze" the countries left out from developing as a nation, or in this game keeping up competitivly with other players. The goal in this is to point out the desparity other nations feel when left out.

teamwork, teamwork here has both national and internation settings. you have teams on conuntries, and the leaders each work in there respected area to help out the whole.

There will be shared goals, and times where conflict negotions can take place. my main goal is for people come to discuss and view a larger picture of the world and the consquences caused by a elite few.

Ill try and be at the meeting, just recently have been suffring from random client crashes. But I think its fixed, its on my end, some incompatible ram I recently installed.

Due to some unfortunate RL events I may not be able to attend the meeting. but will continue to come up with some other ideas for later implimitation.

Allready have a new idea on same theme as before, this one creating stations that produce a type of good a persone can walk up to this station and complete mini games to "mine" this good and it will place a object in there invintory that they can trade to other people or place in a production station that may require a set amount of diffrent goods to produce a product that would score them some points.

stations can be placed all over the SL world, representing things like oil, ore, natural products like wood and food.

This second idea I have come up with could take SL into a new era where in the future there could be minerial rights, and advantages to owning land other then for building porpuses.

looks like ill be able to attend, allthough its going to be 10pm my time, I hope SLT is the same as Pacific time?

Yes, SLT is Pacific time. And for those who can't make it, I'll be asking permission from everyone who does show up to copy and post the chat transcript here.

Hi everyone! Really excited about the meeting tonight and I hope it will be a good opportunity to hash out ideas and answer any questions you might have in regards to the Reinventing Public Diplomacy through Games Contest.

And Champie Jack - thank you for announcing the contest to your class and it's awesome that it spurred discussion! That's the great thing about this project - people talking about two seemingly separate topics like public diplomacy and mmog's and then realizing how interrelated they actually are and the potential behind them.

And Mallaien - I'm liking the idea and let's discuss it further tonight or we can set up a follow up meeting as well!

See you tonight!
Harmony
Contest Coordinator

well I have been going thru a few things, and using a similar theme based on what I wrote up on other posts, I have come up with a Idea that would work on a larger scale, get more people involved.

another reason I have changed things is that I dont want to post too much and have someone beat me to it and try to get credit.

my new idea still involves the same basic game goals, but will allow a very large amount of participation. Allso there will be a few levels of participation, passive and active. The passive player would just be your basic player contributing to the game. Active players will be able to purchase for a low fee, a game peice with very low prim count, that can be used to draw in the passive players to visit there property. there will be a central hub for the game to process scores, and income from the sale of game peices will go for L$ prizes. game play will remain very simple, team based, with prizes going to indivuduals based on there personl score. Scoreing is based on the level of participation of the player.

The game is going to be a system where teammates contribute overall to there team score, but will allso need each of the other teams to help them advance. team score will be based on there coperation with other teams.

A Individual score will be dependant on the work of that one person.
Team score is based on cooperation there team had with other teams.
Prize is ditermined by: top 3 individuals scores in the winning team group, so if your team doesnt win but you had the highest overall score you would not win. you want to win you need to rally your team members on.

For a indivudal to score, he/she would go out and find game peices in SL and "harvest" points from them, then return to the main team terminal and deposit thoes points.

For a team to score they would need to trade the deposited points to other teams. scoreing a point for each trade. trades are going to be a 1:1 ratio. There will only be 3 teams so trading with the same team every time would result in a tie score. Tie scores will results in prizes going to top 3 people of both groups combined. The game allows you to form alliences, or use trading stragities to keep yourself at the top.

At the beginning of each round there will be a time period where people will join, purchace game peices and each teem will elect a team leader. Team leader will be responsible for the trade of points to other teams, and they can still contribute to the resource pool.

Just posted the highly edited transcript of the first meeting with Harmony on my blog:

GAME OF DIPLOMACY: FIRST MOVES

So we sat there by the side of the river, the ape, the chimp, the horus and the rest of us, and talked about the games we'd create to make the world a better place...