Game Site Surge

There's been a surge in game sites adding their first Mark Steere games so far in 2008. Most recently Vying.org added Cephalopod; GoogleGameCenter.com added Cephalopod, Rush and a number of others; and Igfip.com added Tanbo and Rush. Two more game sites will be adding their first Mark Steere games in the near future. Also, sites which already have my games will be adding more of them.

My games are now on most of the game sites that have non-standard abstract games. There are still a couple of holdouts which I hope to bring on board eventually.

A physics professor recently contacted me asking my permission to program Atoll and other Mark Steere games as part of a grant proposal to the National Science Foundation. He wanted to use my games anonymously in a nation wide program where students would not be told the names of my games or the rules, but would try to figure out the rules by playing the games against a computer. They couldn't be told the names of my games since that would make it easy to cheat by just looking up the rules online.

My requirements of programmers, as explained on all of my rule sheets are: Don't change the names of my games, Don't change the rules, and Attribute the games to me, Mark Steere. This professor's proposal seriously fell short of that.

I told said physics professor that his proposal, while essentially a good, interesting concept was also flawed. It was extremely vulnerable to cheating. Even if the students were not told the name of Atoll for example, there's a three page article on Atoll in the current issue of Games Magazine which is in all of the major bookstores in the country. Atoll is already played on one game site with the certainty of more to come. If you google "hex variant" Atoll shows up on page 5 of the results, and Atoll is still only three months old. As the months pass, Atoll will become ridiculously easy to find using search engines. There' s about 1 degree of separation between students and their friends who are already well aware of Atoll.

Regrettably I had to deny the professor's request. There were just a lot more minuses than pluses. I have to protect my trademarks and copyrights, and this professor didn't seem to be taking my best interests into consideration.