Oscar Par-tay
Stacey and I just got back home from Holly's Oscar party, which, like all parties, took place at Alex Court's house. The very coolest thing about this particular Oscar party in comparison with all the other Oscar parties I've had the pleasure to enjoy was the computer-enabled pick-the-winners contest with continually updated standings projected on the wall. Yes, seriously.
One of Holly's friends, Jameson, whose last name I do not know and whose first name I may well have misspelled, created and programmed the game. He ran it from his 15" PowerBook. The game itself was very well designed, especially considering how dreadfully mediocre a game where you pick Oscar winners easily could have been.
For each award category, each participant had ten points to wager on the nominees for that award. Put all ten points down on Seabiscuit or spread your points among nominees in any way you like. As each winner is announced, you score the points you wagered on the winner and lose the rest. The projected leaderboard tracked the scoring in each category, as well as a running total for each player and various other statistics.
Of fifteen or twenty people attending, I finished in second place with 177 points, behind winner Joe Mulder, who had 192. As there were 24 awards, the perfect score would have been 240.
In addition to the game itself actually being gamable (Do wager 10s to maximize your potential score, or spread you wagers to play more conservatively?), the truly remarkable thing was that Jameson is apparently part of the miniscule subset of people who know how to program their computers and also have excellent design sense. Not only was the game fun, the leaderboard wasn't ugly.
A most excellent Oscar evening.
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