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As one of those involved with the design of the game for this year, I would like offer the following observations:
- The process of designing the 2003 game started on the last day of the 2002 Championship Competition, and didn't really finish until the day before the kick-off this year. It involves a very significant number of people, from all across the country, most of them volunteering a tremendous amount of time and effort. Their efforts were supported and augmented by the Engineering staff at FIRST.
- There is a very considerable effort to make sure that as many loopholes, "gotchas" and "oopps!" elements of the game are identified and eliminated as possible, long before teams ever see the game. That process starts earlier and earlier each year, but always seems to take longer and longer as the games become more intriguing.
- Despite our best efforts, we missed a few things. WE KNOW we missed a few things! Some of these were items that we never saw coming, some were ones that we knew about but simply ran out of time to resolve.
- Every year, the game design team puts together a list of lessons learned and things to correct for the following year, and starts to work on them earlier (the process of designing the 2004 game has already started, even before this year's competition has completed!). Trust me, the list of things that need to be fixed compiled by the game design team is a LOT longer than the one you have listed so far!
- Throughout the entire process, the game design team WANTS to get feedback from the teams, schools, and sponsors. They need to know how you react to the game, the rules, and the intent, of the challenges they create, and they want to use that information to do a better job the next year. So let them know what you think. But to keep the information flow manageable, please consider the following two points:
--- FIRST provides specific opportunities, such as the Team Forum, as channels for providing feedback. Use them! Ideas and comments gathered during these events are specifically captured and used by the game design team. Random e-mails, phone calls, and notes written on napkins and passed to judges at the competitions can "fall between the cracks" and not get through to the right folks that can use and act on the information.
--- CONSTRUCTIVE criticism is always welcome. Stone-throwing will be ignored.
Having been through the process this year, I have a new appreciation for just how difficult it is to design a good game each year. It is a big job, and an enormous effort is required to pull it off. From the outside, it is almost impossible to understand how much goes in to the process each year (I know that before I went through it, I never 'got it'). The simple reality is that the direct FIRST staff is too small to do this on their own - they have to rely on the support of volunteers and donated efforts to get the job done. Toward that end, when you make a suggestion that "FIRST needs to do XXXX," you should realize that the very best way to ensure that "XXXX" will happen is to find a way to get your idea developed and implemented by a corporate sponsor, and provided as a complete solution to FIRST (e.g. the creation of the injection molds, and the plastic molding, for the gear box elements including in this year's kit were all donated by a certain corporate sponsor). Ideas like having a fully supported HyperRules system are great - but are much more likely to be implemented if a team could convince their corporate sponsor to pick up responsibility for the implementation and support of the HyperRules system, than if we just toss the idea to FIRST and say "go do this."
-dave
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Y = AX^2 + B.... ehhh, whatever
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