August 14 2002 RussCon Report

News

Gaaaah! First Edsger Dijkstra dies, then Kristen Nygaard! I never had direct contact with Nygaard or the Simula language (from which C++ borrowed a lot of object-oriented concepts), but the OO paradigm certainly has affected my life as a software engineer.

Finally: ArmadilloCon, Austin's annual SF con, is THIS WEEKEND! Several RussCon folks will be attending, including Jay visiting from Oregon. I expect to be there at least on Saturday if not more. Artist guests are Scott Kurtz who does the popular webcomic Player vs Player and Frank Cho.

Meta Game

Tim and Sarah recently suffered the bummer yuckiness of losing their home and most of their stuff in a fire, so this week's meta game is a little different and will raise some money to help them out as they settle into their new place.

Meta game players should bring some cash. I will have a deck of playing cards to use as a set of raffle tickets and a pot to put payment into -- buy your first card for any positive integer number of dollars you like ($1, $2, $10, whatever), and additional cards for $10 each. Later in the evening, probably around 10pm or so, we'll pick a winning card from another deck which, and whoever holds the matching card from the raffle deck is next week's Meta Devil. (If the card drawn isn't claimed by anyone present, then we'll keep drawing. Thus the Meta Devil must be present to win.)

Folks who don't want to be Meta Devil are of course allowed to put money in and not take any cards, or to not identify themselves if their card is called (if they're wishy washy and decide at the last minute they don't want to be Meta Devil!) Folks who want to make semi-anonymous donations are of course allowed to put money in privately and take the appropriate number of cards, i.e. no one but you needs to know how many cards you bought.

Designer's notes: The game rules were chosen so that the "first card for whatever you price you want" rule lets anyone participate (e.g. anyone can spare a buck and have a chance to be Meta Devil), while the "additional cards cost $10" rule helps keep the number of physical raffle tickets manageable and seemed a reasonable level of granularity for anyone feeling particularly generous.

I hesitated to do this meta game because this sort of real life situation feels awkward: on the one hand we feel an impulse to help out friends who've suffered a big loss like this, but on the other hand we feel hesitant to simply directly offer money and unsure what an appropriate amount might be, so providing a playful mechanism to facilitate this seemed like an interesting meta game idea: using an existing RussCon mechanism for a new and nobler purpose. However I couldn't decide if it was a clever and fun idea permitting folks to help Tim & Sarah in whatever capacity they were comfortable doing, or a stupid and tasteless idea trivializing their bad luck. My intent is of course the former. I asked a few people's opinions; no one else was sure either. So I finally mentioned the idea to Tim himself, who was not offended by it and said I should do it if I thought it was good, so there it is. I hope everyone groks the spirit in which it is intended: sort of a gaming geek's version of a community barn-raising or something. :)

The first card drawn to resolve the raffle didn't match anyone's, and the second matched one of mine, so I am again the Meta Devil and will design the Meta Game for August 21.

We raised a good amount of relief money for Tim and Sarah... well, I could make guessing the amount be the meta game for next week, but too many of us already know how much it was ($193). It did occur to me later that a more interesting meta game might have been to guess how much money would be raised that evening (closest guess wins), and each ticket bought permitted you one guess... Anyway, thanks everyone for indulging my unusually meta meta game and helping out our pals Tim & Sarah.

New Multiplicative Rank Ratings:      
 3.0603 21.3333 JP (4)
 2.0794 8.0000 Steve (4)
 2.0149 7.5000 Daniel (2)
 1.9741 7.2000 RussD (3)
 1.6094 5.0000 William (2)
 0.5108 1.6667 JonathanC (2)
 0.4700 1.6000 Fina (2)
-0.6931 0.5000 JeffF (4)
-0.6931 0.5000 Dan (2)
-0.6931 0.5000 Clayton (1)
-0.9163 0.4000 JamesK (2)
-1.3863 0.2500 MarkH (2)
-1.6094 0.2000 Whendy (1)
-1.6094 0.2000 JimG (2)
-2.7081 0.0667 RussW (5)

New Multiplicative Win Ratings:
 2.5257 12.5000 Steve won 2 of 4
 2.1440 8.5333 JP won 2 of 4
 1.3218 3.7500 Daniel won 1 of 2
 1.2809 3.6000 RussD won 1 of 3
 0.9163 2.5000 William won 1 of 2
 0.4700 1.6000 Fina won 1 of 2
 0.1178 1.1250 RussW won 1 of 5
-0.2231 0.8000 Whendy won 0 of 1
-0.2877 0.7500 JeffF won 1 of 4
-0.5108 0.6000 Dan won 0 of 2
-0.5108 0.6000 MarkH won 0 of 2
-0.5878 0.5556 JonathanC won 0 of 2
-0.5878 0.5556 JimG won 0 of 2
-0.6931 0.5000 Clayton won 0 of 1
-0.9163 0.4000 JamesK won 0 of 2