The rule of Joe
I met with my friend and colleague Mike Stead last night who as usual gave me a lot to think about, including some thorny issues with Wikiup. By far the easier to get my head around (I’ll deal with the more difficult one in a later post…want to mull it first) was the issue of mitigating ‘content fragmentation’. All this means is that we get more value out of a centralised data hub with fewer differences rather than more, so any steps taken to reduce differences between games probably helps.
This brings me to “The Rule of Joe”.
This is something I’ve thought about before, but my chat with Mike suggests it has more validity than I had thought at first. Very simply, the Joe rule is a sub-contract that sets down a benchmark representing a theoretical “average Joe” with a value of ‘1′ for all properties. If there’s a ’strength’ property in the game, Joe has a strength of 1. If there’s a ‘weight’ property, Joe has a weight of 1. All properties for other characters get set relative to Average Joe’s (so a horse might have a strength of “2″ and a badger “.2″…er, assuming a badger has about 20% the strength of Joe?). The advantage of setting this peg in the sand is that all games of a particular sort (obviously this doesn’t work so well with starship battles or chess) can define themselves relative to a common benchmark, thus (in principle) less fragmentation.
The rule is voluntary, not enforced. Like any other contract it exists to help establish a framework for development. But as with other contracts, it can be discarded if not useful.
So two basic questions:
1. Good idea, bad idea?
2. Is one peg in the sand sufficient? Do we need a second peg to establish range?
All thoughts greedily accepted!