(Sorry in advance for typos, everyone!)
trip - Yes, for sure a dedicated host for the show has been part of the vision. But I couldn't even get enough players this time around so it is what it is in this version. I think it'd be cool to have a room that each player would go into to privately enter their orders into the computer and have a camera set up that they talk to to explain their moves and reasons. Then the host would reveal everything to the players at once. This would all be edited down for the show of course.
jason4747 - thanks!
yavuzovic - Did I buy which map? I own a copy of the game (an old one) so I bought that map. The one I used in the show is available online, and I got permission from Nick Fitzpatrick to use his version. If you're asking a question about IP legal stuff, then no that's a whole can of worms that I haven't handled. I figure this is so small time right now and totally non-commercial that it won't really be an issue. I'd take the videos down if anyone got upset, but at the moment it seems like just free advertisement for the game.
Nikola Maric Eto - thanks! my hopes are with him too (but only after myself, of course)!
rayhicksiv - thanks!
Octavious - It's funny, "It's just people staring at pieces of paper" was something I said to myself every time I sat down to edit this. And honestly, I think you've really hit the nail on the head here with your question about the intended audience.
I would like this to be accessible to non-players as well. I know that this version misses the mark on that, and that's fine by me since it was a test of whether I could film and edit something like this in the first place. But whether the game could ever translate to a wider audience at all has been my central concern with the project since the beginning. And it's still an open question to me.
I want to believe that it could though. I do think that the rules are straight-forward enough that the general principles of what's happening can be conveyed to a reasonably competent audience without the need to spend a lot of time going over specific moves.
I also think that with a longer span of time to film a game, the show could become less about people staring at paper talking about moves and more broad strategy and getting to watch alliances develop and fall apart. In the test run, we only had a day to play and everyone already knew each other so discussions were 90% tactics. Hopefully this wouldn't be the case in the next version.
I could talk about this all day, but I'll stop there for now. I think that we're more or less in agreement except for maybe the thing about limiting to one or two players. We can come back to that. Thanks for watching and thinking about these things and for kinds words as well!
Deeply Dippy - Yes, so this all ties into what I was saying to Octavious. I agree that the discussions should be edited down to the key points and throw out a lot of the discussion about tactics. It's something I probably should have done more of here, especially in the third episode, but for the test run it was almost impossible to avoid since the short timeframe and pre-established relationships between the players meant almost every conversation was pretty boring. My hope is that the next version will avoid this pitfall by changing the circumstance. We'll see though!
About shortening the moves: I think I get where you're coming from. In the test run, I made them longer to give a sense of what I want the actual show to be like even though in this version it got a bit boring. I think that once you introduce a bunch of stranger who are forming relationships while playing this stressful game, then the length of time for each move should be long enough for us to witness all of the human politics happening.
The pundit thing is a really good idea. It could even be like a separate video to watch for those that care more about game moves to watch without bothering the folks that are just there for the moments of drama. Or something like that. The beautiful thing about web shows is how free-form the format could be. I got to do a little bit of that by providing the maps with the episodes, and it would be really fun to have a whole bunch of stuff like punditry for people that want a bigger bite of the apple!
Anyway, I really appreciate you watching and thinking about these issues. I wasn't expecting people to engage in this way, and it's really fun to see that people are thinking about this along the same lines as me.
eturnage - Thanks! I'm not sure about the rest of the videos for this particular game. I have the Fall 1902 move halfway edited, but it's been that way for a few months. My original plan was to edit the entire game into episodes and put them up all at once, but after I realized I was in a standstill, I just went with what I had finished. Now that I know there are at least a few people who would want to watch the rest of Season 0, it might be easier to motivate myself to work on it. But be warned: I am very slow!
I'm check out this Chris Martin character. Hopefully, I'm not just reproducing what someone else has already done. I was too afraid to look into that while I was working on it. Thanks for the link!
fourofswords - Thanks!
Hauta - it's those moments that make it worth it. thanks for watching!
speudebradeos - Yeah, I don't know many diplomacy players in real life so I had to work with some inexperience. I'm honestly not sure how I feel about a show that featured super hardcore diplomacy champs. It'd probably be fun sometimes, but not always...I don't know, I'd like to hear opinions on that. However, I do know that in the future I would require players to have at least played once through online first. I don't mind inexperience leading to weird strategies since that's sort of fun to see, but I'd rather not watch people really screw themselves because they misunderstood a basic rule.
As for the number of players, I guess I disagree with you, but enough people have said the same thing that I'm wanting to talk more about this. Honestly, I've only done the 17 player version a couple of times years ago so I really would like more opinion about that version and how games typically go.
In terms of the show, my reason for wanting a larger set of players at the beginning is because it introduces more opportunity for counter-intuitive strategies like staying weak early on or whatever which would be interesting to watch. Of course, in editing choices would have to be made on what to focus on for the "story" each turn, and not everyone would get equal time, but I like the idea of the few that outlast the noise if that makes sense? But I don't know, maybe the bigger versions don't actually lend themselves to fun strategies in the way I'm thinking. Thoughts?
Thanks! Team Mano!
SpiritoftheRadio - Thanks! The game ended in a draw which will be an unsatisfying ending to the show if I ever get to the end of this one. The footage is all there and ready for me to go through it so I might finish it, I might. I'll almost certainly finish Fall 1902 since it's half done anyway. I just kinda crapped out because it was difficult to gage whether anyone would ever be interested in seeing it. I'm very happy to know that there are people that would watch!
Yes, we're all math grad students except for Nate (England), but he's married to one who I could not convince to play. Do you do math?
Bladerunners - Thank you very much! There's no reason reality tv can't be smart. That's been my thesis statement for this project.