Programming the new 3 Player Game on Grass



Adrian Eaton came over this evening and I am very pleased that he's agreed to collaborate on this project.

Time restraints/developing other ideas
Due to time restraints (the beta version of the project needs to be online by the end of September 2003), we are working on the first functional idea that we have for a reworking of the game.
There are already germs of other ideas from other people that look at least as interesting as my '3 Player Chess on Grass' and it will be important to continue to develop these other games in parallel.

Open source collaborative art process
We have agreed to make the development of the programming for the game public, which will mean creating clean properly commented code (more work for Adrian;-). We agreed that in the spirit of the project the whole process should be as open as possible.
It seemed a natural extension of the project to create a searchable dynamic database in which participants can contribute their visions for world peace in the form of new games, images, utopian social models or links. This links in with Tor Norretranders' description of the effectiveness of political emergence.1

Adrian's work in progress
Adrian has already created a model for the three player game. This uses Flash MX.
The main things we talked about were:-

1) creating the game for 3 distinct online players. The complications here are to do with setting up server sockets which allow a change at one person's PC to be displayed immediately on another persons.

2) hooking the game up to a pre-existing chess algorithm which would allow players to play 1 or 2 Player games against 'the computer'.

We wondered if there was an online 'Deep Blue' that we could plug in to. Adrian decided to go off to look into java programmes that he could modify.

Please mail us or post a comment here if you have any suggestions.

notes 1. In 'The User Illusion' Tor Norretranders describes how small (and often seemingly futile) interventions and actions by the multitude can change the course of world events in unexpected ways. He sights the end of the Nuclear crisis in the mid 80s as an example- in which peace demonstrations, discussions over lunch, protest songs, artworks, student activism in conjunction with the activities of polititcians led to a radical change of cultural attitudes and ultimately a change in the world security.