Was working late last night when an inspiration hit me - Calvinball should be in this competition. Question of course... is how.
See, for example, the rules:
http://calvinandhobbes.wikia.com/wiki/Calvinballhttp://www.bartel.org/calvinball/It's basically a game of coordinated anarchy with no end condition. You stop when you stop, and you can literally say whether you've won or lost as you do it. Unless you're in a zone where quitting and winning isn't allowed. Or if you haven't hit the right picket or forgot to say the special line of poetry. Or, or, or...
The challenges I'm thinking are manifold: I don't have near enough time to even think about what a graphical interface for such a game would be. It would essentially be developed as a multiuser text game where users have the ability to invent words using a variety of pre-defined nouns and their respective verbs. I'll run into the issue of spatial awareness, though, so perhaps a hybrid interface can be used showing a simple "game board" map (randomized between matches?) with the various zones, wickets, pickets, and trees delineated.
However, even harder is how to make such a game compelling. There has to be some reason for people to play it, because we aren't all disillusioned organized sports competitors like Calvin. In fact, for most of us, I think it would be more entertaining to play a player of Calvinball than to play Calvinball itself. So how do you rate how well a person plays someone playing Calvinball?
Since Calvinball itself employs nonsensical scoring and an indeterminate win condition, I think a game about Calvinball should score you based on how well you play Calvinball. Scoring and winning don't matter in the game, so the human player shouldn't earn points when his game character scores. The game seems to be more of a tightly knit social engineering experiment. You make up rules, and if other people play along, you've essentially "scored" a social win. The best players keep the game most entertaining for other players, because solo Calvinball is called a personality disorder. This means you can't create too many silent rules (remember, rules can be vocalized or not; depends on the zone) and frustrate your opponents into declaring themselves the victors and running off.
So there we have it - my brain dump about Calvinball. A multiplayer text game with a crude map in which players position themselves, create rules in an attempt to get others to play along, and earn a meta score based on how entertaining they are to play with. What say ye?
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