Wellington Journal

Play a game and help a fellow out?

During our seven-month stay in New Zealand, Sara's on sabbatical while I'm (let's say) "between commitments". I decided early on to use this time to brush up on new technologies; specifically, Microsoft's Silverlight platform, which is basically Microsoft's answer to Adobe Flash. Just to give myself a project and hard deadline, I decided to write a Silverlight-based game (called “Spin Poker”) and submit it to a Microsoft Silverlight game contest.  It’s a two-stage contest, and it turns out that I’ve cleared the first stage.  Which is where you come in.

Would you be willing to take ten minutes to help me win?

There are sixteen finalists remaining in the contest, all of whom have submitted a Silverlight-based game to the website.  Part of the final round of judging (20%) will be based on the number of times that the public at large (that’s you) play each game, and how well it is rated (one to five stars).  Every little bit helps, so it makes sense for me to ask all my friends and colleagues and family, and friends of friends & family, and family of colleagues’ friends, and people I’ve not talked to in dozens of years, and basically everyone for whom I have an email address to help me out.  It’s pretty easy, and you might even enjoy it.

How to help:

[UPDATE: You’re supposed to be able to automatically install Silverlight if it’s not yet been installed on your system, but that doesn’t seem to be working for some people.  You may want to install Silverlight first, by going to: http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/resources/install.aspx. 

Also, after reading the System Requirements page, it would seem that it works in Internet Explorer 7 or FireFox on Vista and XP, but for some reason only in Firefox or Safari (not Internet Explorer) on the Mac.]

#1. Register at the Microsoft ServerQuest Contest website: http://www.serverquestcontest.com/register.aspx.  As of this writing, this page looks like it applies only to those who want to submit a game, but you need to register in order to rate the games as well.  So it’s easiest to register first.*

#2. Go to the Spin Poker page: http://www.serverquestcontest.com/game.aspx?GID=43 and play, then rate my game (highly, if you please! =).

[UPDATE 2: In order to rate the games, you just have to click on the appropriate star just under the game title on the game page.  This is, unfortunately, not exactly obvious unless you’re used to such rating systems.  So, just to take a completely arbitrary example, if you wanted to rate Spin Poker as 5 stars, you would click on the fifth star (see picture).  If you would like to rate Spin Poker as 1 star, then please click on the little red box with the X in it in the upper right corner of your web browser.]

#3. If you’re willing, please pass this message along to others you know so they can register, play and rate the game as well.

That’s really it.  Feel free to check out the other games in the gallery, write me with comments/ideas for Spin Poker, and so on.  If you enjoy it, please bookmark it and return to play often over the next month.  Then we’ll find out (on or around May 25th) whether my mass-email entreaty had any effect.  In the meantime, I hope you get some fun out of it.  (And enjoy the surprise family videos – you’ll see what I mean when you play.)

Thanks much!

Dug

*NOTE: Some of you may be understandably uncomfortable with registering.  However, the point of this contest is to find good games they can use to promote Silverlight, not to spam a lot of unsuspecting game players, so I don’t think you have much to worry about.  And Microsoft is good about removing you from lists if they do start sending you messages.  Besides, it’s Microsoft: if they’ve not got your email address by now, what kind of lame evil empire would they be?

Labels: Games

posted by Dug @ 3:11 PM 4 Comments

Wellington Bridge Club

Despite my interest in games, I’ve never been to a bridge club, or even played duplicate.  But last night I decided to give it a whirl here in Wellington.  I mean, I’ve played bridge since my parents taught Mark & I during the New York Blackout of 1977.  (My mom complains that I don’t remember anything from my childhood, but what she doesn’t realize is that I just don’t remember anything not game-related from my childhood.  Duh!)  And I played in college, and for a year or so in my first job right after college.  And that was only (good lord) almost 20 years ago.  But I’d been reading the newspaper bridge column in Boulder for the last year or so, and I needed to get out & meet some people around here, so why not?

There are actually three bridge clubs in Wellington, a city of around 350,000 people.  One is over in Miramar (about 20 min from our house) and the other two are within 500 meters of each other on the same road here in Thorndon.  I chose the Wellington Bridge Club because I’d been invited to their open Tuesday tournament by the former renter of our house.  I’d called the day before and arranged to get a partner; the woman I talked to (and the former renter) told me that it started at 7:30pm, but I needed to make sure I was there by 7:15 or so; which I was.

Good thing too.  Partners had to be seated by 7:20p and my partner, a lovely lady with a goodly amount of bridge and bridge club experience, needed to check on my experience with Acol, the preferred bidding system here in NZ.  Since it’d been so long since I’d used any bidding system, I figured I might as well try a new one.  As it turned out, it also gave me an out for some pretty poor mistakes, only one of which I could really pin on my switch from Standard American.

(For you bridge players: the differences between Acol and the American system are pretty interesting; mostly they come down to Acol being more oriented towards limit bids.  For example, 2C after 1C means “that’s it, we’re done” rather than “I’ve got weak support, carry on”.)

In the end, I didn’t fair too horribly; which is to say nobody had to call the director because I’d done something completely stupid, and that’s basically the bar I’d set for myself.  My partner deserved better, and I hope that coming in 14th out of 17 doesn’t screw up her standing too much.  But I had fun, and I suppose that’s what counts.  I’m not sure if I’ll return, but only because I don’t know if I really enjoy bridge all that much.  And when you’re playing at a bridge club, it’s all about the bridge.  I’m glad I had the experience, though, because it made me think some more about what would need to happen to get a regular games group going again in Boulder, and that’s something I really do want to make work.

But that’s a subject for another post.

UPDATE: I meant to mention that we had 18 tables playing (ie around 70 people), and there were probably another 10 tables taking lessons in the next room.  Well over 100 people playing bridge, and they told me that the really heavy night was Thursday, when the intermediates play.  Combine that with the fact that I walked by a very busy Victoria Bridge Club on my way to my club, as well as who-knows-how-many over in Miramar, and I’d estimate there are well over 500 people playing bridge at least once a week in this city.  Considering I have a hard time scraping together six people for game nights in Boulder, I’m very, very impressed.

Labels: Games, Wellington

posted by Dug @ 10:54 AM 0 Comments