[Inkspot] Having to reproduce that grid each time kills the game instantly. It would be an utter pain in the arse to edit that each time a word was added (and when does it get updated? after every guess? each new word?), and the chance of screwing it up would be very high. (Note how many mistakes have been made just counting backwards in the Celerity CDs game! And note how hard it is to get certain participants to realise they've been getting the rules wrong.)

If you want a cryptic crossword clue guessing game, I'd strongly recommend doing it as was done before, with people submitting and guessing clues as they felt like it, with no grid.

I think, incidentally, activity on all three sites was waning even before the Orange festival, although that has made it more obvious. We're just not getting the same number of participants these days.

Apologies, incidentally, if there's an acerbic note in all that, I'm just generally pissed off about a lot of stuff today.

I agree with your points about the problems of updating and my greatest fear of solutions not fitting previuos moves and having to be redone. But I needed feedback like that so as not to make a complete prat of myself by just setting up the game with all of it's woolley thinking. There are other types of cryptic games already played on this server, but I wanted one that had a finite life span.
There is still an empty game slot.

Ooh. That's interesting. A new game has appeared in the wrong place...

Right, that's sorted; and the end-game trigger for the Python game has been set to the usual.

[Darren] Someone needs to do a good, solid corpus-based statistical study on activity rates in the Morniverse. I'm sure it would make a good PhD topic. My impression is also that activity has declined, but it was less busy than now when I first joined eight years ago (bloody hell, eight years). In those early days, fresh with the joy of discovery, i can remember having posted the last move in every game on York and MCiOS, and being quite at a loss for what to do next once I'd done it. Especially on weekends. In retrospect this was a bit rude, but I was immature and callow even in those days. :) I find that nowadays I tend only to post in a small subset of games and even when bored am unlikely to stray into the others. Maybe other people have gradually settled into a similar pattern.

[Projoy] I certainly have settled into a similar pattern, though I'd like to think that's because I'm less obnoxious now. I'd say the most concerning trend is the seeming lack of interest in the game of Mornington Crescent itself - our one token game here, for instance, is crawling along quite pitifully, and Long Games all over the Morniverse have slowed to the pace of Jeremiah Snail, the 1956 All-Dorking District Champion.

I think that posting only to one's favourite games is quite normal; it's certainly my style, but it depends on how creative I'm feeling at the time, if at all. A good rule of thumb is that if you have nothing interesting, witty etc to add to a game then wait till something more promising turns up. There is increasing verbal incontinence and rule-bending simply for the sake of posting something. The whole thing is beginning to annoy me, and not just me, as I know privately. We could also do without those who post under more than one name, which is deceitful and sad. One has already been outed and I have a very beady pair of eyes on another one.

Meanwhile, I'm rather concerned that a bunch of people who are posting elsewhere seem to have stopped posting here. Was it something I said?

Trouble is, the limerick games are no longer and during the short bursts of time that I actually enter these portals, there's nothing else that takes my fancy. Apart from AVMA. Sometimes.

[CdM] Maybe a long verse game? Although admittedly the last few attempts at "hard poetry" didn't seem to attract very many of the current Mornipersons.

Where did pen go?

[Tuj] Maybe you drop it on floor?

Lack of time is making me ration the games I follow. If the general turnover was higher, I'd be active in a greater number of games. As it is, I tend to monitor chat, limericks, haiku, glow worms and on the whole that's it. Because they are the games where you can just dip in, make a worthwhile contribution to, and then disappear back into the ether. But of course, if I never find time to visit other games, I don't feel I have the right to kill them even if they are getting long in the tooth, and that reduces game turnover . . .

[Proj] You know what I mean ;)
[SM] That's the vicious cycle, isn't it just? We never did quite foster the quick turnover as even after upheavals we're still too cautious of scrapping games... I'm wondering if Clerihews (and possibly Cheddars) have had their day...

[Tuj] Yes, indeed. In fact, I will bring up something I've advocated before and failed to convince people about; I think it's worth having a 'rapid turnover' section, a 'slow burner' section and an 'immortal' section. The immortal section would contain chat and possibly a long game. The rapid turnover would tend to be plain MC games, but with a smattering of other quicker-moving experiments. And the slow burners could have the game slots left over. I have long thought that the biggest problem is that the slow burners hog too many game slots. The shorter-lived games really do need their own section otherwise they keep getting crowded out.

[SM] Good, well-thought points. Would perhaps work better with games marked as to which they are rather than with separate sections though? And I'm sure having AVMA rather than a longer game would encourage some excellent short attacking MC games.

[SM] Hmmm... I'll think about this. I can forsee a difficulty in deciding which category things should fall into; though, of course, this can always be tweaked according to demand.

Anyway, just wanted to remark that it's only just got dark here.

It's been dark for about an hour here - I'm home now but have been in the pub with friends - watching the England Game. *sigh*

[Chalky] Dratted England. I spent the evening vociferously cheering Sweden, but sadly now England will be playing on my birthday :( roll on disappointment...

It's getting light here. Time for bed. The solstice will occur at 1226 GMT today after which it's all downhill.

The most wonderful day of the year *happy sigh*

Yeah, the flip-side is that it was fully light again at 4.30am, which woke me up...

I stayed up all night on Saturday night, chatting online... went to bed at 5am, by which time the sun was up and the birds were at full volume. The nights are soooo short in midsummer, it's quite eerie. I remeber camping in Perth (Scotland) reporting on a rally around this time of year, and it still being light at 11-ish, and then of course, there was the great trek north to the North Cape of Norway in midsummer 1995... magical. I always want to head north and be mostly outside every summer now. Instead, I sit behind this bloody desk staring at the screen - although I do have a nice pair of trendy geek-nerd specs now. They make me look like Nana Moouskouri. :o/

[Rab] I'd would suggest that should be set up when the game is defined. If a game proves popular as an ephemeral it would have to be explictly killed off and reinstated in the slow burners section when next a slot appears. The important point is that the short-lived games section is explicitly flagged as such, and everyone knows that not only do we have have a licence to kill them off, but that we are expected to do so. Possibly even flag the game's creation date and give it a defined expiry date - three months or so tops, I'd say, pulling a figure out of my hat.

I still quite like the idea of doing it implicitly. If active games were sorted in order of sluggishness or otherwise (a bit like at Orange where you can sort them by most recent post, but based instead on the frequency of the last, say, five posts). Unloved games drop to the bottom, active games fizz to the top. Every week the least active game is automatically culled (unless, say, it started less than a week ago or it has been given some special protection like the Furcation game).

I make this suggestion in the secure knowledge that, as I can't code, I won't implement it, which is probably the worst kind of backseat driving. :)

What SM said about time (though this is still my first port of call in the Morniverse, and for mostly the same reasons he gave). I don't agree about typing games in advance, though - how would you know in advance whether something is a quick turnover or a slow burner?

I quite like Projoy's idea about automatic culling. Or, and this is completely off the top of my head, how about turning the process on its head? The opportunity to start a new game is always open, but every time someone starts a new game, the least active one gets killed off?

Hmmm... I can see benefits to both the explicit and implicit approaches; the former is easier to code, but might be a bit onerous on (particularly) game creators. Furthermore, I've noted an increasing tendancy to be over-prescriptive in the game brief, and I think further prescription about how quickly moves are to be made might actually be counterproductive and cause all movement to cease completely. For this reason I think I prefer the implicit approach. As I mentioned before, I want to mine the data of all games played so far to see if I can devise some kind of estimate of a games "flagging" point, in which case it can be put on an endangered list and expire if no further moves are made. One problem with always having a slot open is that, as experience at the Lockisseum showed, you get passers-by just starting things for the hell of it.

[rab] Passers-by just starting things for the hell of it... is that necessarily a bad thing? Some of the most memorable games have started like that ("wigwam" on Orange springs to mind, but there are others). I'm starting to think we'd be better off it all games were treated as fast burners and we encouraged a much faster turnaround for games, to keep people interested and stop us all (me included) getting too caught up in only one or two games and ignoring all the rest. I've heard people say that years ago, the MC servers did have games which were much shorter, only lasting a day or so.

Killing a game is easy creating a game that people want to play is more difficult, something different does not go down well, so players do not feel confident in filling a vacant slot. My worry over a timed game is once it has been timed out it will reappear as ...the Return Again of... which happened only recently. I would like to see more people prepared to start games and not stand on the side lines saying "what shall we do now, what shall we do now". With a regular turnover there will be flops and hits. The reason games hang around is the reluctance to replace them. I would not want to see time limits just more bravery with the sythe. Afterall what is the turnover of games on MCOiS where there are 18 active games.

[Darren] It's not a bad thing if it occurs only once in a while, but on the Lockisseum nuisance games were started on an almost daily basis until Dunx brought in the login system. I neither want the maintenance burden of cleaning up, nor to enforce logins for the starting of new games.

[Inkspot] Well, that would be all well and good if people actually killed games, but they don't so it seems that some form of encouragement is needed.

There's a lot of it about!

Please don't kill the Shakespeare game. Yet, I mean, I'm sure it will need to go to its sweet, sweet rest eventually.

[Irouleguy] You don't try to make people predict the future; you have x quickfire slots and y slow burner slots. If a quickfire game ends you can only replace it with another quickfire game; if a slow burner ends, it can only be replaced with another slow burner. If one slot of each type chances to be available at the same time, then you get a choice. After all, an /unsuccessful/ slow burner will still face the chop relatively quickly; it's only the successful slow burners that will hang around.

Next up: the Dream Game...?