Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr B
This is disappointing. It isn’t so much about the game as it is the inspiration. We are here to show students just how awesome it is to be a scientist or an engineer, and encourage them to pursue it as a career. A critical part of the process is clearly identifying the problem (pink spends the entire kick-off day analyzing the game), and then finding the best solution for that specific problem. Yes it is fun to win, but it doesn’t compare to the rush that you feel when you see the problem conquered – and know that it was your brain that helped conquer it. That feedback is wonderfully motivating, and makes it easy to wake up for work in the morning. This changes the problem and it kind of takes away some of the payoff.
Still, I understand that we have to be reasonably safe, and I’ll bet the GDC dislikes the change as much as we do. And in the grand scheme of things, this is probably one of those “FIRST world problem” memes  . We will just man-up and do the best we can. Who knows, maybe we will rise to the occasion and play even better. |
I know exactly what you mean about how great it feels to solve a tough problem, that's why I'm addicted to this junk. However, when you teach about engineering it's good to also teach about what engineers have to deal with on a regular basis, including how fickle most customers can be. If you're working on a project and your project manager hasn't given you a major design change in the past couple weeks, something is up and you should be on your toes. This counts double towards the end of a project, if you give a customer time to think it over, they'll change their mind or something will "come up" and you have to work it out. Fast.
In this case, one could consider FIRST to be your customer, and they tell you what they want, and you give them exactly that and not something else. You meet the requirements or you lose the "contract" (and probably your job).
Maybe, for an example, a hypothetical deepwater drilling rig in the gulf explodes and causes a massive, highly publicized oil spill. New safety standards incoming, do all of your products hold up to this new scrutiny? Maybe you can't drill where you wanted to anymore, now what? This is the same thing, simply on a less... explosive... scale.