Lonely Mechanic #1
April 8th, 2005 10:52 am

I never thought when I wrote NewsBruiser’s story submission feature that I would one day use it myself…

For a long time I’ve wanted to make a game around the North American Industry Classification System. My attempts to date to create such a game have foundered. Here’s the best one I’ve come up with, which I call “Bidding War”.

Each player picks an industry from the NAICS, deliberately or at random. Enter the name of your industry into the search box at eBay (no quotes, be sure to check “search title and description”). You’re trying to get the top search result for the industry name to be something very expensive.

If there is a match, note the top bid (or starting bid, if there are no bids) for the first search result. The player whose bid is higher wins the round.

If there are no matches, remove one word from the right-hand side of the description and search again. In the unlikely event that none of the words match, choose a different industry and start over.

Sample game: I choose “Seamless rolled ring forgings, ferrous, made in steel mills”. You choose “Motor vehicle wheels, new”. Your search turns up a Toyota pickup with a top bid of $16,995.00. Not bad. But for some reason, “Seamless rolled ring” turns up a “SiteWatch Systems Wireless Network Video Solar Trailer” (”Long-Range Voice Data and Video Surveillance over Wi-Fi”) with an asking price of $23,750.00. I win.

You could also play only comparing the top bids of items that have bids, to eliminate way-overpriced junk from consideration. In that case you would have won that round, because the first item in my search results that has a bid is an RV (top bid: $13,999.00).

See, ’cause it’s like War, except with eBay… never mind.

Anyway, does anyone have ideas for games that use this dataset but are real games?

Posted in Lonely Mechanics by Leonard
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Brendan
May 11th, 2007 10:54 am

You could make a horribly comprehensive sourcebook for some “modern-day” RPG. “Roll d12,000 for the industry in which your character works.”

The numbering system is interesting, but it’s a bit like the Library of Congress indexing system in that you can generate random results easily–but what do you do with them?

Hmm. Maybe you start out with a set of 7d10–the first six you roll, and the seventh is automatically set to the check result. At intervals, you can reroll certain of the dice, trying to move from an industry of low unit value (”311611 4: Lard, made from animals slaughtered in this plant”) toward one of high value (”3369913 3: Motorcycles”). If you got lucky, you’d get to reroll the check die and then manipulate any other die of your choice to make the check correct.

The problem is that “high unit value” is pretty subjective unless you do the eBay thing. Maybe this needs to be tied to a more interesting model, like an industrial-sim game where you hop between industries.

Josh
May 11th, 2007 10:55 am

I just like the idea of long-term players eventually knowing what their dice rolls mean without having to look them up. Or even check eBay.

“33999186? Oh, crap, I’ve lost, that’s axial mechanical face seals. Don’t bother looking it up, Jim. That one’s even worse than 33994302 (Hand stamps, stencils, and other marking devices [include rubber stamps, mechanical hand stamps and embossing seals]).”

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