Friday, September 21, 2007

Playing As Borg in a Star Trek MMORPG +

Originally Posted by Ereiid:
Do you want this ship to turn left, 37 of 50? (check one)
[ ] Yes
[ ] No
[ ] This question is irrelevant. Parodic polls are irrelevant.
I get the point. :) But I don't think it's all that telling a point.

Why assume such a clunky interface? A "democratic" system doesn't imply "here's a question, now pick one of the supplied options" -- it could as easily be implemented as the game system accumulating what every drone is commanding the cube to do on a real-time basis, whatever those commands might be, and then performing the average (for continuous functions) or plurality decision (for discrete functions).

In other words, while "system asks, everybody answers" is one approach, it doesn't have to be the only one. There could also be "everybody says, system reponds."

Giving up individual power to play as a Borg drone does not automatically translate to just sitting around waiting for the game to ask them poll questions. I think if we choose to look at this question in a constructive way, we can come up with approaches that are a bit more creative than that....