Village the Game: Play it. Love it. Live it.

This is a great talk by Barry Schwartz about the paradox of choice. Going from no choice to a few choices in almost anything makes for dramatic improvement in our lives from picking jobs to salad dressing to spouses. However people have falsely assumed that going from a few choices to hundreds of refined choices will make us happier. In reality, it causes us stress from always wondering if we made the best choice. The happiness/life improvement curve doesn't just flatten out as we get infinitely more choices it actually goes down because of time and energy wasted on making choices.
This applies to Village because our game can potentially offer thousands of businesses choices from across the planet to start within the game. So we'll have to create algorithms just to give meaningful choices to the players because sifting thru thousands of choices will turn the game into a chore. And we can't just use relevance ranking algorithms like Google ranks webpages. The choice of businesses have to be relevant and very distinct. IF choice 1 is Kickstart pumps, means choice 2 can't be IDO pumps that are slightly cheaper but don't last as long, followed by 8 other choices of pumps to solve irrigation issues. Choice 2 has to be Sun Shines for All (solar panel rentals) which indirectly enables farmers to afford electric irrigation pumps, a meaningfully different solution for the same problem. I wonder who would be doing research on this kind of choice offering. Hmm...

As development of Village the Game moves into a new year, we've thought of many things that Village needs to succeed over the coming years. It's a lot of strategic partnership stuff not just "more computers" and here is but a sampling of Village Wishlist. If you have leads on how to make the following happen, contact the founder firstname@villagethegame.com:

• $300,000 in seed funding to hire a full time core team of game dev, IT, and simulation experts for a year.
  
• University support:
  
• Turn experimental parts of game into university research projects:
• Optimizing quality of simulation according to quality of computer specs.
  
• Dynamically adjusting gameplay difficulty to optimize fun for player.
  
• Get office space and server bandwidth donated while we do our R&D.
• To get a veteran of social enterprise on Board of Advisors.
• A seasoned game veteran like Wil Wright or Sid Meier on Board of Advisors.
• A TGB networking guru who knows all the ins and outs of realtime strategy multiplayer game development and operation.
  
• Website guru to rehaul the site and add functionality like forums, invites, myspace page, etc.
• Infrastructure for uploading and rating user-created content like 3D models, animations. Think http://www.current.tv/ for video game content.
• Partnership with Ashoka and other groups to sponsor a tournament inside VillagetheGame.com; winner of the tournament gets their village funded and built for real.
• A SecondLife programmer/guru to get us started on our presence inside SecondLife.com.
• A flash game guru to build a casual web version of Village with low learning curve that focuses on emotionally connecting to the characters in the game. Think Diner Dash* except you're serving Kickstart pumps, Kiva credit, and MightyLight to your customers instead of food. *Over 1 million copies sold at $20 a pop.

Here are all the dimensions of Warcraft II spelled out. These dimensions serve as guidelines for Village level design.