Battlebots an Newsweek

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Posted by Joe Johnson at 05/25/2001 12:05 PM EST


Engineer on team #47, Chief Delphi, from Pontiac Central High School and Delphi Automotive Systems.


In Reply to: Re: I liked the discussion...
Posted by s_alaniz on 05/25/2001 11:06 AM EST:



Steve,

Of course we can get on TV if we are willing to put away our moral compasses and go whereever they want to take us.

But that is not the goal.

Nor is it the goal to blithely stick our head in the sand denying the reality of what makes the Media tick so that the only coverage we can get is a charity piece on the Networks once in a while or a PBS special now and again.

In my view there is a WIDE gap that we can live in here.

We don't have to have naked coeds driving robots into frenzied free-for-alls in order to get coverage. We also can't say that the game SHOULD get TV coverage even though the competition is confusing to watch, complicated to play, difficult to score and next to impossible to understand.

Here is the bitter pill I am struggling to swallow: I believe that this year was a lost opportunity for FIRST.

I have heard that FOX is going to be picking up Battlebots soon and that most of the worst parts of the Comedy Central coverage will be gone. I believe that if FIRST had had ANYTHING CLOSE to a TV friendly game this year we could have had a chance at that kind of National TV exposure. With the game as it was in 2001, it is clear to me at least that FIRST took themselves out of any serious consideration.

Worse, I fear that this year's game made future consideration even less likely. The Newsweek story is a case in point: FIRST is a game where high school students build machines that put hoops on sticks!

This hurts to say, but I think it is true.

Bottom line: We should not let our competition define us (FIRST is not Anti-Battlebots). There is a lot of room to have TV friendly competition that does not have us wallowing in the worst that TV's Vast Wasteland has to offer.

Joe J.