Hey Dark, \The biggest reason James North designed the currency the way he did is because he originally used the game as a promotion. At the end of the month, the score board leader would be credited the amount of his score toward the purchase of an ESP title. You can see how well that worked out. Second, since the game is purely based on matching, what would be the problem with coins like zing zang and zod? You find a match, you throw the proper coin. Third, there used to be, at least, a more abstract system in the two previous incarnations of the game. In the original version, you could type "whoopass" into the main menu, and the coins would be replaced with flatulence. In the second incarnation, the coins could be replaced with tones. When I started playing the Discworld mud, one of the first things I had to get used to was the concept of British spelling. I knew, going in, that I would be playing a British mud, and as such, I had to learn to spell certain words differently in order to play the game. It's completely against my nature to spell color with a u or center with "r e" at the end, but I was able to learn it, and I still occasionally log into that mud today. A penny is a pence. In fact some people, I'm told, call 1 pence a penny. Fifty is self-explanatory. A dollar shouldn't be too much of a problem. The confusion seems to exist with the dime and the nickel--confusion which could be solved by putting definitions in the manual. But in the end, it's just matching. Find a match, throw your coin, score points. By that logic, we could play produce exchange reaction. Then we could have carrot, potato, beet, mushroom, and turnip. If you wanted an aubergine instead of an eggplant, that would be just fine. But seriously no broccoli. That stuff's awful. All the best, Ryan
-----Original Message----- From: Gamers [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of dark Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2012 8:15 AM To: Gamers Discussion list Subject: Re: [Audyssey] British coinage Hi Ryan. for me it is a question of identification and logic. i know! what british coins are like, I have no idea what american ones are, indeed until Tom's explanation I didn't even know that a dime was a tenth of a dollar. At the moment, the game feels like playing with completely random names that have no meaning or logic to me at all, I might as well be playing with made up words such as zing zang and zod. The reason I think this is such a big deal is that clearly in creating the game, james north wanted a way of constructing tetris using everyday objects, however to most people outside the us, they are nothing of the sort, just pure abstractions, which actually gets in the way of playing the game sinse it means your effectively working with something rather meaningless just as if they were totally nonsensical names unrelated to anything in a person's real environment. One way of fixing this might be to add options for various currencies such as British pounds and euroes, however you still then run into the problem of people in countries who's currency wasn't represented, (I know for a fact there are several indian audio gamers who naturally use rupees), and also the more serious problem that each coinage has different size and denomination coins, for example we've already said that in British coins there is no such thing as a quarter of a pound coin. thus, the suggestion is to create a system based upon objects that everyone has readily to hand, or could easily imagine for themselves, that is why I personally suggested simply changing the names of the coins to metals such as copper, iron, bronze, silver and gold, sinse then anyone is free to imagine the physical coins themselves. tom suggested plastic tocans of the arcade type with some sort of internal logic. the point however about either of those systems is that they have more logic and relevancy to players outside the us. As I said, imagine playing the game with nonsense words substituted for the coin names and you might gather why it is such a problem, particularly for a game so heavily based on the idea of moving physical objectts. Beware the grue! Dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected]. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to [email protected].
