the Great game was Re: A new power to deal with, The New Confederate States

> On Tue, 19 Jan 1999, Los wrote:

> Interesting side note: Imagine a future GZZ ECC that decides the fate

i have occasionally wondered about something like this - *really* get
the player base involved. maybe not for the Big One, which is just too
critical, but if the fourth solar war comes around some time (am i
counting right?), with everyone vs everyone else (none of this two-bloc
rubbish!), then it might work.

ok, here's the plan. i will say theez only wance.

i call it the Great Game.

first, find your operations centre. we have one right here, on gzg-l -
certainly the biggest and most far-reaching permanent assembly of gzg
players. we would establish a group of referees - gzg officials (jon t
can sit there with a cup of tea and a fluffy white cat), plus some of the
senior members of the list who don't mind being neutral - to keep track
of things and generally administer (they'd be the UN). everyone else who
wanted in would become national officers - admirals or grand admirals.

we'd use a big map / astrographic database, using Nyrath the Entirely
Indispensable's data. the grand admirals would move fleets about in space and
use some sort of campaign system (must be quite simple), and battles would be
resolved by two players meeting up somewhere in realspace and playing a game.

obviously, we couldn't use a fixed mapping of admirals to players - if
Grand Admiral Schoonmacher deploys Admiral Martin's 7th Deep Space Fleet to
the Xen sector to engage Admiral Barclay's 22nd Colonial task Force, we can't
expect Andrew to up sticks and move to Canada. not unless GZG is
willing to pay the air fares :-).

basically, there would always be a list of actions which have to be fought,
and players would either volunteer to fight them, or be assigned them on a
rota basis, or something. alternatively, all the big fights could take place
at cons; this whole thing wouldn't have to run quickly
-
if we can keep it going until 2005, that'd be fine. play the war in realtime!

the whole shebang would depend entirely on electronic communications, but
i don't see that as a problem. we could always set up post-to-mail
gateways (eg, if someone in the uk plays a battle, they could send me a
postcard with the result and i'd upload it).

the business case is pretty robust - if players know that their actions
affect the course of history - even if they are only commanders of a
sector fleet - then they will be hooked.

it would certainly take some work to set up - agreeing some campaign
rules, setting up the scenario, picking UN and national officers, making the
list of gamers, sorting out the strategic play procedure, etc. it would also
take a pretty scary commitment, but i think we could minimise
the impact by making it a very low-intensity war; maybe if 20 - 33 % of
all battles played by listers were Great Game ones, that would provide enough
speed. in fact, that might make for a ridiculously fast war, now i come to
think of it.

we could always rotate people - if a grand admiral can't commit the time
to command a nation, he can resign (or take some leave) and have one of his
subordinates take over. regular players could join or leave the Great Game
register at any time. if the regsiter ever got below some critical
level, the Game could be suspended - the war has ground to a stalemate
for a while.

an alternative to having a strategic-level game going on (and so placing
a huge burden on some peoples' shoulders) would be to have some sort of
random/automatic system which duplicated the politicians.

> You have a campiagn of somesort in

i think that's a bit excessive - too much would be dependent on the turn
of one or two battles. my model has no one player in a position to change
history (provided the campaign game made decisive strategic strikes hard).

> I know it would never happen but imagine the tension and seriousness

why would it never happen? my way, which would inevitably end up with a
generic big fight with no winners, is safe to plug into the future
history. the only people we need to kick into motion to do this are us -
the future is in our hands, and we have the technology (dammit, i've always
wanted to say that!)!

of course, this could just be the caffeine talking. it says "strength rating
4", but out of what? i didn't see any rating 5 in the shop...

anyway, there's an idea. comments, anyone (and, yes, that is a rhetorical
question)?

Tom