Posted by Ken Patton at 04/19/2001 7:14 PM EST
Engineer on team #65, The Huskie Brigade, from Pontiac Northern High School and GM Powertrain.
In Reply to: PUSH to Simplify the Game for 2002 ***Attention FIRST ***
Posted by Andy Baker on 04/19/2001 11:31 AM EST:
I totally agree! This year's game was a disaster from the casual spectator's viewpoint. It was not even worthwhile trying to explain it to anyone - after the first few minutes of explanation, they lost interest. You cannot watch the game by yourself and figure it out.
As an engineering challenge, it was great. The complex strategies and tasks and communication challenges were world class.
I think there are a number of things that should change. But I agree, the Prive Directive (I love it when Andy speaks French!
) is on target, only I would clarify the objective of simplifying the game:
MAKE THE GAME SIMPLE FOR A CASUAL SPECTATOR TO UNDERSTAND - this does NOT mean make the game easy for a robot to play.
In football or basketball, you know the primary objective is to get the ball into the endzone or basket after watching for only a short time. There are many many subtleties, but the casual spectator quickly knows who is on offense, who is on defense, when someone scores, etc. FIRST has not had a game with clear objectives since 1998 (hmm what was the last year ESPN bothered to put on a show...).
Keep the tasks difficult - it part of the magic of engineering to get the team from "this is impossible" to "I know twelve ways to do that" and I think FIRST has done this well every year. But KEEP IT SIMPLE FOR OUR VIEWERS!
How about this for a mantra: "Dean, design the game as if your grandmother is going to watch it"
Ken