I just submitted my essays for the NSF GRFP, staying up all night and just beating the 5pm deadline, as usual.

In the process of writing my "proposed research plan" essay, I had a revelation about Every Front: make the game partially about game development.

So we distribute example clients, publish the complete protocol for speaking with the server, and the various teams can build their own. So in fact, your clients become the thing which distinguishes your team the most from other people. A good client is easy to use and helps you win.

All of a sudden, Every Front is a tool for teaching programming. Or something. And of course, security becomes much more scrutinized, but that's good. Everything was going to happen on the server anyway.

Beyond just writing better clients for game styles we choose, we could establish a framework for any game to contribute. To do so we'd have to have some kind of challenge response that is:

1. Very general, so that people can write their own games and
2. Can't be done computationally without a human

If we have (2), then teams can compete by creating small addictive games. If you can get a million internet users playing your little flash game, your Every Front team all of a sudden has huge industrial production or something.

I would say borrow Amazon's Mechanical Turk HITs, but most I've seen wouldn't make a good game. It might be worth trying to build one anyway... then take a 10% cut of the winnings or something.

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