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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

P.S., since it isn't in that post anywhere due to in-game voice: Stockfighter launches publicly on Friday.

link to the difference between Stockfighter and Starfighter? (i can't tell which one sounds more exciting based on the title / credentials. am i supposed to?)

Starfighter is to Stockfighter as Blizzard is to World of Warcraft. We (Erin, Thomas, and I) are a company which makes games; Stockfighter is the flagship product of the company for the foreseeable future.

Thank you!

Although... I still can't tell if this is the Starfighter tech tree or the Stockfighter tech tree. I think the confusion is intentional, and I do like that. I think. :)

edit: nobody thought notch was joking about 0x10c, and this is clearly in that vein. but an AVR is a real CPU, and suddenly... mind blown?

Starfighter is the name of the company. Stockfighter is the name of the game. So there are multiple tech trees in Stockfighter, of which this post is about one. Starfighter the company doesn't have tech trees.

> The Starfighter Low-Level Tech Tree (sockpuppet.org)

I'm not sure you read this thread. Starfighter the company definitely uses technology.

edit: was your post using in-game voice? i'm totally about staying in character :)

Stockfighter is the game. Starfighter is the company. The article you quoted is technically wrong, but since the company has only one game it is conceptually right.

Blizzard (the company) is to starfighter (the company).

> We (Erin, Thomas, and I) are a company which makes games

OK, I'm curious now.

I've seen a lot of comments from two of you (you and tptacek) here on HN, and never noticed anything in those that would have led me to guess either of you had a sufficient interest in gaming to want to start a gaming company.

Did I just not notice your comments indicating a gaming interest, or were you wise enough to stay out of gaming threads knowing they usually turn to pointless time wasting crap, or what?

I'm sure patio11 will reply, but my take: The purpose of Starfighter is to engage talented engineers long before they start searching for new jobs. When it's time for a job change, Starfighter will leverage their relationship with the player and the player's demonstrated engineering skills to connect them with employers looking for matching candidates. As high as referral fees are and as hard as great engineers are to find, this looks like a win for everybody.

What a load of marketing speak... You forgot to mention "synergy".

I think in this case, game is less "Mass Effect" or "Grand Theft Auto" and more alternate reality + really hard (programming/networking) puzzles, where the mechanics to the puzzles have some non-fictional relevance to how you would really exploit, reverse engineer and attack a network or system, thus proving competence in a few key areas.

Monetization is through taking people that have both completed and/or done really well in this game and are interested in new employment, and after a few in-person meetings with the Ptaceks and Patrick, you might get a private lunch with a CTO looking to hire (in their words, IIRC). They would get finders fees for that.

Thomas is actively concerned that I describe our products as "games" but I've been having difficulty finding a word the market understands for this, since "CTF" gets blank stares from people on both sides of the market if they don't have a security background. Neither he nor Erin would self-identify as gamers in the same way that I do not self-identify as a ballet enthusiast.

Would I self-identify as a gamer? Well, "Ran a WoW raid guild", "I main AD Jungle Evelynn but haven't gotten many games in since having a kid", "My Steam account lists 720 hours of playtime on 60 games."

I don't particularly hide this on HN and also don't particularly go out of my way to talk about it. Games, books, and running software companies are my three big hobbies; one of these seems to be most relevant here. You can probably find 5~10 comments from me if you search for WoW, Warcraft, LoL, or Starcraft, but mostly they're talking about business, like you would expect.

Why do people think "gaming" and "business" are such disparate interests anyway? Is it so hard to see the "Nevada Gaming Commission" and the "Securities and Exchange Commission" as not entirely orthogonal?

If it helps Thomas sleep better at night, I'd definitely encourage you describe your products as "experiences" instead, because seriously. Games ain't trivial.

> ...I'd definitely encourage you describe your products as "experiences" instead, because seriously.

Anyone who describes their thing as an "experience" automatically gets -1000 points. IME, when the description of a thing says that it's an "experience", it's a strong indicator that the marketing copywriter ran out of fluff words to use and reached for the most trendy and inoffensive one they could find.

It's okay if there's a lot of surrounding substantive description that makes it clear that the folks behind the thing are legit, and that "experience" was just added to meet a buzzword quota. If -however- much or all of your description centers around how much of an "experience" it is, I'm likely to skip over whatever it is that you're hawking. :(

How about "programming games" or "coding games"?? The word "games" by itself makes me think of mobile games like Crossy Road or Clash of Clans. CTF makes me think of Team Fortress.

Or Code 'em up a la Shoot 'em up?

I'm just worried that "games" are something people judge by graphics quality, and I'm not even sure we have a competitively pretty debugger.

The alternative to "game" is "programming contest"

Contest generally connotes a fixed length group activity with a single, or small and usually predefined set of winners. Game is really the correct term, IMHO, but it's still negatively associated with productivity, to the degree some people don't like to admit they play games, which is likely only true in their mind because of their overly constrained idea of what a game is.

We spend much of our childhood doing accelerated learning through play (games). There's no reason that can't continue into adulthood, except for it culturally being slightly unacceptable. That's really counter-productive.

The word "contest" is bad for us because it implies that the only reason you'd participate is to beat other people, but really your primary adversary in these challenges is Erin, Patrick, and me.

Isn't "CTF" at least as bad, with the extra bad of making no sense to most people?

It's not great, I agree, but I like that we still have an opportunity to define what a CTF is for people who aren't already CTF players.

Also: we're very much structured like a conventional CTF; it's just a CTF we're not taking down after a few days.

> your primary adversary in these challenges

"Challenges" or "programming challenges" sounds good to me.

The textfile was a fun read, best of luck!

On a tangentially related note, I'm having the same trouble with the phrase "escape room" - I'm building a game that I want people to experience, not escape from!

What about "puzzle"? The negative is that it implies a single solution, but other than that it describes what's going on pretty well.

I signed up but I don't honestly recall what it is. Is it called "Starfighter" because it's like the excalibur game from "The Last Starfighter"?

Not to speak for them, but yes...

No it is from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083943/ with Clint Eastwood and web browser that can be controlled with your mind.

Unfortunately the browser only accepts mind control commands in Russian, no i18n for you.

I'm like 99% certain it's in reference to the movie "The Last Starfighter"[0] where the protagonist, an avid player of an arcade game with the same title, finds himself recruited into an alien space fleet based on his stellar performance in the game.

The parallels should hopefully be obvious: have fun playing the game. But if you stand out, it's because you've demonstrated some set of marketable skills that other organizations are looking for. If you've set the 'contact me about potential jobs' bit in your Starfighters profile, they'll spend some effort trying to land you a gig with their client companies.

[0] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087597/

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