Microstory 2467: Tagdome

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This is a funny one. It’s several giant games of tag, each one made up of a lot of other subdivisions of tag. You can come in here with just about any substrate you want, but you’ll be grouped according to strength and speed. We can’t have superstrong mechs barreling through normal organics, now can we? There aren’t too many of what they generally call weight classes, but you stay in your respective sectors, and don’t interact with the others. But you do interact with everyone else in your sector. That sector is further divided into regions, zones, districts, territories, and neighborhoods. I honestly couldn’t tell you how they decide where you’re assigned beyond the weight class for fairness. But whatever it is, the divisions are based upon the modern standardized Dunbar grouping system. Your neighborhood will have 21 people total, which is a fairly normal and manageable number of contestants to contend with. You will ultimately compete with other neighborhoods. Seven neighborhoods makes a territory of 147 people. There are three territories in a district of 441 people, then four districts in each zone of 1,764, and four zones in each region of 7,056 players. Finally, there are seven regions in the whole sector. Sorry if that was confusing, but this game is confusing, by its nature. The best players are the ones who can figure it out. How about gameplay? You play a simple game of tag in your neighborhood for some period of time, based on your sector’s weight class. Higher classes theoretically have more stamina, and can go for longer. Don’t worry about those. Only consider your own. We’ll use the example of a normal organic human sector, which is only expected to play for half an hour. As you play against each other, your points start racking up. The longer you avoid becoming a Pursuer, the more points you end up with, and the longer you are the Pursuer, the more points you lose. At the end of your neighborhood’s allotted time, your points will be tallied up. It’s entirely possible that the entire game only ever had one Pursuer who never managed to catch anybody. That’s okay. They’re always watching you. Some people got closer to being caught than others. There will be leaders on the leaderboard, who will move on to compete at the territory level. The top seven will represent their neighborhood in a game of 49 players and begin to run as a team. Things start getting more complicated here as you can work together to build enough points to open gates to other territories. If you invade them, you can get in on their game as an opposing force, and start taking away their points while making some more of your own. The games get progressively more complicated, with more intricate environments, obstacles, and even vehicles like bikes and cars. Everyone wears special clothing, which color-coordinates the teams and alliances in realtime, but it’s not uncommon to get lost and confused. That’s part of the game, and your intelligence is factored into those weight classes I was telling you about. I know this was less of a review, and more of an overview, but I don’t really want to give you my opinion. I want you to see it for yourself. If you’re not much of a runner, or you don’t feel ready for the competition, there is a spectator component, so you can just check it out to get a better sense of what I’ve been talking about.

Microstory 1423: The First Mage Games

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Later Mage Selection Games would come with better organization, and a better understanding of how to measure a competitor’s potential to become a great town mage. That didn’t mean, however, that the first one went terribly. Well, at least it could have been worse. There were some bumps, and some mistakes they wish they could take back, but in the end, it got the job done, and all the winners went on to prove to be good choices. The source mages were careful to plan it out, so things wouldn’t just fall apart. They spent a great deal of time working on coming up with appropriate challenges, because they were going to have less help with it than they did for other aspects of the new government. While the Mage Protectorate was definitely going to be a democracy, that didn’t mean everyone had to be able to express their opinion about everything. They chose not to ask the people how they wanted to handle this competition. They didn’t even consult their experts all that much. If they alone couldn’t figure out what made someone worthy of being a mage, then they were not worthy of being mages either. Besides, letting a regular person design a challenge could put the entire process in danger. If the fastest runner on the high school cross country team, for instance, suggested every town mage had to be able to run a mile in five minutes, well, that person was obviously just setting themselves up to win. The source mages were the only ones entirely ineligible to compete, so they were the only ones capable of engineering it.

The contest would last the whole day, and be composed of a series of challenges, each testing various aspects of character. They didn’t come up with a list of character traits, though, and try to match each challenge with one trait. A given challenge could allow a competitor to exhibit multiple traits, and in different ways from each other. Some of them were physical in nature, while others were academic, and some were psychological or emotional. The scoring system proved to be, by far, the most difficult component to specify. Was athleticism more important than intelligence? Maybe, maybe not. They needed experience to understand which influenced time power aptitude the most, or if neither of them mattered. They didn’t have very many examples to go on, and they didn’t want a bunch of test subjects running around with powers, who had never gone through the competition. So, without this data, their best guess seemed to be their only option. They kind of had to surrender to the fact that the second time they tried this, in twenty years, was going to be better than the first. The town had to understand this as well, that nothing was going to be perfect. Even ignoring these issues, they didn’t know if they ought to only award points to the winner, or winners, or if losers simply received fewer points. The answer was obvious to most of the mages; just because a competitor wasn’t the best, didn’t mean they weren’t good at all. Few should be so bad at something that they received zero points for their effort. Still, how many points was a challenge worth, and how would they determine the increments of scale, and how they would rate a competitor’s performance with very little in the way of comparison? Standards. How would they set a standard, and how exactly would they know when someone reached, or surpassed it, and if someone surpassed it too greatly, did that just mean they needed to reexamine the standard? All of these questions took months to answer, and even then, as previously mentioned, the system proved to be less than ideal, and more importantly, not entirely fair. So the first Mage Games actually took place over the course of two days, which were separated by a month of repreperation time. They should have known that the best way to see how well the competition would go was to do a dry-run ahead of time. Even though history would remember the Mage Protectorate as having held four games total before it fell, there were technically five, but most agreed that the first one didn’t count.