Remosi’s Rants

When designing a game to be the most boring game in the world here are the top 10 things you should take into account:

1. The game should have long periods of nothing happening. Absolutely nothing. This gives the commentators time to talk about their cat, or perhaps some guy that stole their carpark last week. Becareful that periods of violence don’t break out during these times, that might make it interesting.
2. The game should be played over a day, or, better yet, multiple days. Make sure that noone can figure out who’s winning until the very end of the game, they have to be on the edge of the seats as it were for the entire time. If people get bored of your game, they’ll leave and you won’t make any revenue. You need to keep them there, bored out of their minds, but hanging on for “just a bit longer” to see if anything’s going to happen.
3. Make sure that the game almost never results in a clear win by either team. Theres nothing more satisfying as watching people after they’ve spent 5 days watching a game having nothing to celebrate/commiserate. There should be no major event, in particular, people after the game has finished shouldn’t be able to look back and say “Remember that excellent <whatever>?” and have everyone nod and say “Yeah, that was pretty cool/uncool.”
4. Anything that might actually be interesting should be replaced with one side conceeding “yeah, we’ll give you n points for that” without them having to earn them
5. The rules should be long, boring and incomprensible. In particular the rules should have holes so large that you can drive a bus through them. You don’t want anyone, least of all the public, commentators and especially the players having ANY idea what’s going on. Directions should come from some mythical person, who noone has ever seen, using a formula that everyone knows the name of, but noone knows quite what it means. The directions should appear arbitary, and in fact, in practise, they probably should be. Just don’t let on to anyone.
6. Events should be signalled by incomprehensible actions that make the referee look like a drunk doing the funky chicken. These should be called funny names (as shown by the next rule), but noone should ever giggle or laugh, it’s to be taken horribly seriously.
7. Things should have totally incomprehensible names. Call events after animals (Ahh, that’s a magnificent pigeon.)
8. The name of the game should be after some small creature that has absolutely no relevance to the game at all. Once again, names of animals are prefered, although not required.
9. Make sure noone shows any flesh, no matter what their gender is. You don’t want the spectators interested in anything! If possible make sure that everyone wears the same clothing, including both sides. It should be nearly impossible to figure out who is who on the field, and even which side the person is supposed to belong to. Covering up people as much as possible is very important to this goal. Refrain from putting identifying marks on people, such as a large number on their back. That would make it too easy
10. If anything interesting ever occurs, claim that it’s an unfair advantage to one team or the other and immediately work to rectify the situation.

Why do serial busses always have two ends? RS-232 has a “DTE” and “DCE”. USB has a “Host” and a “Device”. Even Ethernet has a “Computer” and a “Switch” end. What happens when you want to plug a computer into a computer? A Computer into a PDA? A PDA into a Modem? A PDA into a digital camera? A digital Camera into a Hard drive? Why can’t we do these things? Why don’t they just make all cables cross over? Computers can plug into computers, modems can plug into modems, camera’s can plug into hard drives. It’s a fairly obvious design requirement (I want to plug everything into everything!) and not that hard to implement (lets just specify that all cables must be cross over!). But noone does. Sigh.