Event-driven game management

[Richard]

As you may know, I have been thinking about building a web site to permit games to be played online in real time. This is one idea that I had recently to facilitate the process. I believe that the army use a similar technique in their tactical exercises, so it has a good pedigree.

Typcially the umpires in a conventional game will organise orders/reports in slots of 15-minute intervals or thereabouts. Whilst that does work it is rather artificial and there may be many occasions when little of interest is happening in the game but the umpires still have visit the players on a regular basis. All of which requires considerable management effort.

An alternative is to create a diary, with blank entries at intervals; these may be 15 minutes as before but could be 10 or even as low as 5. When an order/report event occurs - i.e. a message is sent between a commanders - then the umpire estimates how long it would take for the message to reach the intended recipient and notes that time in the diary. The same goes for units arriving at their specified destinations, after an order is issued and received.

All the umpires then have to do is wait near the players to get their orders and pass them on to Umpire HQ, or check the Event List to announce the arrival of a courier or whatever. Any clash of units on the field would also constitute an event of course (the report of which should be added to the list), so the umpires would need to be aware of such possibilities. They must also know the current game time of day of course.

Note also that the system can be applied to any timescale - e.g. days or even weeks. It is both efficient and scaleable.

That may all sound rather complex but it works well in my experience as a player (as I remember - a long time ago), though I must confess that I haven't tried it as an umpire. It would be nice if we could try it out some day.


Richard

[MJ1]

Perhaps you can give it a go when you run your Waterloo game?

Give it a try down the Warwick club with a small game / scenario and then see how it goes.

The guys at Warwick are usually keen for multi player sessions and I am sure you could get at least a couple of players to try it out?