Anybdy like the game?

[mrnoble]

I love it.

My main concerns with FIRST over the years have included:

1) An insular culture. This is a nearly universal problem with organizations, but FIRST has always claimed to be about reaching out and bringing in new people and teams, to show them the fun and success they can have in the world of engineering. It has sometimes succeeded at this, and other times failed. Our team actually dropped out for two years because of the difficulty we had understanding and being included in FIRST's culture after our first go at it.

2) The elite teams. No offense intended, folks, but I side with underdogs and those who are dealing with limited resources.

3) Status symbols. For instance, I don't find the trend toward "status" wheels necessarily good, impressive though they may be to look at.

4) "Dialed-in" drive-trains, frames and manipulators.

Anyway, this game addresses a number of my issues. No status wheels here. Tried and true ways of doing things no longer will work. And the comments from Dean and the leadership at the kickoff implicitly refocused us on opening the game and FIRST culture to allow a chance of innovation and success for more types of teams.

I also love the number of constraints. It really adds to the challenge. Without giving away too much, I will say that the direction that our team's students may be taking their strategy and design means I will not be at all surprised to find more innovative approaches from other teams this year than I've ever seen.

[smurfgirl]

I do like this game. As I posted in the thread about disliking the game:

So far, I really like Lunacy- I like games where there's a lot of strategy involved (so last year was a bit more of a disappointment to me). Everytime I re-watch the animation and re-read through the rules, new complexities jump out at me. I know people have mixed reactions to <G14>, but I think it's great, just because of how many layers of complexity surround it. I don't think any of us will truly know what to make of it until we've seen it play out in a few competitions. I also like the change that's been made to the floor from recent years; the whole game has a refreshing feel to it, like it's a new twist on everything. I even like <R06>, because even though it sounds very limiting, it forces you to work within the intent of the game, but you're still going to see so many different and unique robot designs that approach the game very differently.

I think this game has a lot to offer and a lot of people are overlooking it because of things they think "are not fair" like <G14>, or the sizing constraints. I think these are the aspects of the game that are going to make it the most interesting and the most challenging, producing unique robots that approach the tasks very differently, and tons of options with strategy that will make for dynamic and exciting matches. I think this game has the potential to go a lot of ways we're not expecting it to because of rules like <G14>, and a lot of the scoring rules, and we're going to be in for a lot of surprises. This is going to make matches way more fun to watch and participate in, unlike games like overdrive, where you're generally just driving in circles chasing a ball for the duration of the match. I welcome the change from the ordinary that 2009 has brought us. That's more reflective of real-world engineering challenges anyway, right?