Simulator, Stimulator

Last week was the roll out of another sport experiment on Meta Olympia; an individuals-based competition modelled after racing, extreme games, and track & field.

The whole idea behind Meta Olympia is simulating a prediction of the future through a single genre-specific media site.  In this manner, having multiple sports happening simultaneously has always been the goal, emulating a comprehensive property like ESPN.  Though not easily attainable in this pilot stage, it is a fundamental, if not necessary aspect to 'the games of tomorrow'.

Sketch by Shaun Mullen, capturing the whole mortal vs. Mars vibe.

This is where Pathfinder Marathon came in.  A sport with an isolated scope, fixed duration and easily relatable would limit the impact of existing resource constraints.  A race totally fit the bill.  What I loved about it was just how completely different it was to football/soccer.

Of course, we had to cook up the lore, the process of generating players that mapped to the demographic distribution of the world, and also create a simple simulator geared towards individual, race-style competition, but without the dependencies of a team sport programmed over multiple weeks and with much more substantial rules and gameplay, it was a much simpler exercise than the MAFL was.

The probability-based engine created for Pathfinder Marathon.  Inputting competitors and their individual attributes derives the probability of performance against terrains as well as likelihood of injury/death and even loss of will.  The dots represent racer positions over time and the red lines the probability of a player tapping out for whatever reason.

The trade off of this type of sport was coverage.  Rather than pacing out games against a schedule, we are forced to run each stage of the race daily... and to report it and generate the art and visual assets.  

Damn it!  There's a lot to do!  And for the first few days, there were a few moments of doubt that it was sustainable.

Like all good things, however, you need to get over the hump. 

From a newsroom perspective, after 5 days of reporting Pathfinder Marathon, we now look forward to running the simulator, dissecting the stage, culling the runners that DNF, and seeing how a bunch of meaningless numbers spat out by an arbitrary engine can become the source of meaning and stimulation!