Art contest: win some BTC, shape the visual future of Bitcoin gaming.

[greyhawk]

Honorarium received. Much obliged.

Waachtword, my offer still stands.

[1714726414]

1714726414

[1714726414]

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[1714726414]

1714726414

[1714726414]

1714726414

[1714726414]

1714726414

[wachtwoord]

Here you go.

Boss sez, "well he's an idiot but at least he did something, so pay him .1337 to make the point to the other idiots that are also vocal about how lazy they are".

So, post an addy.

Does that mean, I won? Yay.   Addy is in the sig.

I can make something similar in quality to Greyhawk's work if you're interested  

Please don't steal my peculiar art style.  

I said similar in quality, not style

But I guess everyone knows I'm just bragging ...

Imma pay you 50 % of my artists wages for your interpretation of "Dragonne Slayers: The Fantastic Fantasy Game"

Challenge accepted!



The sad part is I actually did my best  .

Edit:

Generated a fresh address: 18UavuhPKLmYUcgEU5QDBehSHcYtHk8Jj7

[greyhawk]

That's... That must have been a whole lot of effort. 

Loving it. https://blockchain.info/de/tx/93326b5999eca95d4558f54ae6dc7c42add5abc58f555f3d6f3da30a6aed5777

[MPOE-PR]

Challenge accepted!



The sad part is I actually did my best  .

Edit:

Generated a fresh address: 18UavuhPKLmYUcgEU5QDBehSHcYtHk8Jj7

Hey, is that from some old Atari game? Seems familiar.

[wachtwoord]

That's... That must have been a whole lot of effort. 

Loving it. https://blockchain.info/de/tx/93326b5999eca95d4558f54ae6dc7c42add5abc58f555f3d6f3da30a6aed5777

Thanks! I'm pretty sure that's the first time someone paid me for my 'graphic' skills.  

Anyway, I did follow this guide to at least make it look like a dragon http://www.drawingnow.com/how-to-draw-a-dragon.html

[Xqisit]

I just don't see why you torture yourself doing it this way.
Find an artist you like, from here, or anywhere else (I'm sure you could find someone on DeviantArt) and offer them the money. You can then work with them to get a quality piece you are both proud of.

Doing these types of contests is frowned upon by a lot of designers and illustrators, because you are asking them to do (in this case potentially hours upon hours) of free work on the chance they might just win. These types of projects take a lot of effort to complete, not just on the technical aspect alone, but also thinking of the ideas and concepts.

If you don't have a lot of money to spend on a project, that is absolutely fine, but instead of holding a "contest" like this, I would argue you would be much better off contacting someone, paying them, and working with them directly.

The outcome of a design is only partly based on the designer,
a good client who knows what he is looking for and is able to communicate that effectively to the designer is going to end up with an end product he is much happier with.

That isn't to say these contests don't ever work, and you are free to do whatever you want, obviously, but this is my opinion anyhow.

Whichever path you choose, I hope you end up with a final product that you are happy with, and represents your game well.

[MPOE-PR]

I just don't see why you torture yourself doing it this way.

It's not my idea (and if you ask me it's not the best idea, either). But to quote Mr. Knowitall,

mircea_popescu Sersiously, I think the best way to go is open and I'm trying to implement that. Bitcoin generally needs a lot of it and I think to a large degree the problem is people never saw an open model at work. This for the record includes the -dev neckbeards.

Find an artist you like, from here, or anywhere else (I'm sure you could find someone on DeviantArt) and offer them the money. You can then work with them to get a quality piece you are both proud of.

There's the sticky point of the issue. Consider this bit (part of an earlier dispute with the Something Awful crowd):

Cardiovorax posted:
The difference being that there is nothing you can do with Bitcoin except own them, or sell them off for more real money with which to buy things you actually want. They matter to you because you treat them like a hard asset, not because you want to spend them on anything. That's the difference between a currency and a speculative commodity for you.

But what am I telling you that for, you know all that, and you haven't cared until now either.

So far Bitcoin has been pretty workable buying me Internet things I actually want. Example 1 (butt), Example 2 (tits). These are obviously NSFW, because the Internets are for pr0n.

So I suppose the question before us (ie, "the community") is quite plainly "can you people do anything useful, other than writing [very very bad] code, showing off your tits and shoving things up your butts".

Tie this in with an earlier dispute, on this very forum, about the importance of "infrastructure".

Quote from: crazy_rabbit on June 10, 2013, 06:09:12 AM
People are a valuable resource- the most valuable in terms of something like bitcoin.

I think that's a common misconception. Selected people are the most valuable resource, much like selected earths are the most valuable resource. People generally are about as valuable as dirt generally.

So, community of people ready to do what? Ready to sit around and opine on things [they don't understand, have never done successfully etc]? Ready to ask for scammer tags? Ready to create one of them "securities" based on "maff and stuff" and their "life experience" (aged 20ish)? Ready to do something useful? Actually able to do something useful?

Indeed, it's the harder road, taking a large clean mirror and forcing this community of nobody in particular to gaze into it. The gift of washing is never appreciated by the herd of cats, and perhaps it's not a rational use of resources - especially not in an "everyone for himself" sort of environment, which obviously means "absent community". But then again you know this about MP, he's never taken the easier road when the right one was at all available, and he's never taken the "rational" road to nowhere either. As the old saying goes, "millions for defense but not a penny in bribes". Exceptionally enough he actually has the millions, too.

Doing these types of contests is frowned upon by a lot of designers and illustrators, because you are asking them to do (in this case potentially hours upon hours) of free work on the chance they might just win. These types of projects take a lot of effort to complete, not just on the technical aspect alone, but also thinking of the ideas and concepts.

I trust you've read the first comment on the article, where this point is at length discussed.

If you don't have a lot of money to spend on a project, that is absolutely fine, but instead of holding a "contest" like this, I would argue you would be much better off contacting someone, paying them, and working with them directly.

I trust you've read all about the IPO which collected something like 9000 Bitcoin. That IS a lot.

The outcome of a design is only partly based on the designer,
a good client who knows what he is looking for and is able to communicate that effectively to the designer is going to end up with an end product he is much happier with.

That may be, but this isn't that.

That isn't to say these contests don't ever work, and you are free to do whatever you want, obviously, but this is my opinion anyhow.

The problem with your opinion isn't that it's yours, is that it's not particularly related to the subject at hand, especially if you've not actually read the stuff mentioned above.

[nubbins]

You guys aren't even trying, there's no "e" in "dragon".



The mad king is heavy on taxes because he's trying to secure operating funds for his kingdom. Commoners have to guard their BTC closely.

[nubbins]

Focus obviously in the above image is those two guys trading BTC in the corner. If you want to make real money you don't sell virtual cow patties or turnips, you sell physical objects. Players open their own in-game Etsy stores and sell actual physical unicorn pendants and healing crystals and all the shit you see people hawking at renaissance fairs. In-game currency is obviously BTC. Unlike Etsy and eBay, there's no fees for listing or selling. Instead, the mad king's tax men are everywhere, and if they catch you in a transaction, you have to pay the king's tax (listing/selling fees).

It's like the home shopping channel, but you can practice your archery or do quests in the meantime. Think your girlfriend is gonna mind you playing TMK 16 hours a day if you're a level 99 middleman and can buy her a new Bench hoodie once every few weeks?

[MPOE-PR]

Focus obviously in the above image is those two guys trading BTC in the corner. If you want to make real money you don't sell virtual cow patties or turnips, you sell physical objects. Players open their own in-game Etsy stores and sell actual physical unicorn pendants and healing crystals and all the shit you see people hawking at renaissance fairs. In-game currency is obviously BTC. Unlike Etsy and eBay, there's no fees for listing or selling. Instead, the mad king's tax men are everywhere, and if they catch you in a transaction, you have to pay the king's tax (listing/selling fees).

It's like the home shopping channel, but you can practice your archery or do quests in the meantime. Think your girlfriend is gonna mind you playing TMK 16 hours a day if you're a level 99 middleman and can buy her a new Bench hoodie once every few weeks?

Ok but what are the yellow sperms in the actual center?

[nubbins]

Ok but what are the yellow sperms in the actual center?

Wheat.

Why buy your drugs on the silk road website when you can log into TMK, head over to the back-alley district, and buy them from Ye Olde Opium Shoppe? Obviously lots more tax men and thugs around here, so you're much more likely to get jumped and get your BTC stolen. Unless you've purchased a protection spell, which will protect you, &c.

Win a few jousting tournaments and you're more likely to win fights. Run a store, keep your customers happy, and maybe someone steps in when you get held up, or your inventory catches fire.

Nobody gave a fuck when their Tamagotchi died. Think people will give a fuck if the money they earned selling jewelry just got robbed?

Online wallets provided by "banks", so you only need to carry your spending money on your avatar instead of your whole in-game roll.

You writing all this down?

[MPOE-PR]

[nubbins]

Best-case end result of this is that bitcoin transforms from a vehicle of speculation to a vehicle of commerce. The classic problem with opening your own dot-com online store is visibility: who's going to buy your product if they don't know about your website? How do you break out of a local market? Where does your advertising money get spent? How do you connect with your audience? Ebay and Etsy etc somewhat solved this by providing a shopping mall type setup, where people interested in spending money are browsing products; you're much more likely to get search hits for "unicorn pendant" on ebay than you are on google. Suddenly you don't need to break through the non-commerce noise, which is overwhelming on public search engines.

And so you set up your shop in TMK and start selling the chainmail shirts you used to sell on etsy, and someone sends you bitcoins for one of them, and now instead of hoarding those bitcoins or cashing them out for USD, you spend them on something else in-game, because now YOU'RE the person in the middle of a market with a pouch full of coins in your pocket. And so on.

[nubbins]

"Grinding" (never heard the word used in this context before) would be replaced by just purchasing skills in-game with BTC, or by hiring other players who've grinded/bought their way to the physical/financial/etc state you want them in. Why spend 3 weeks collecting magic levels when you can buy a shop protection spell, or hire a tough to hang around your door? Obviously there will still be some grinding/farming happening, but it won't be necessary and will only be for those who want to earn BTC without providing or creating anything that the public deems useful / worth buying.

In-game tech support requests get sent to the Hall of Wisdom, where you can read the ancient scrolls of FAQ, or hire an expert to help you organize the items in your shop, hone your farming skills, etc.

Want an off-limits area of the map opened up? Approach the Council of Elders, who will decide amongst themselves whether or not to enable it. Can they be bribed? Who knows.

Make (or lose) some quick money by stumbling into a gambling house, and trying your luck at some dice.

Based on how much money a character is spending in-game, more or fewer money-making opportunities will present themselves. Little kid who's farming wheat for 1mBTC a day? He might get lucky and find a 25mBTC coin in the soil every once in a while. Shop owner who pushes BTC10 of revenue a month out the door? Maybe the mayor gives him a prime location for his new shop, or the keys to the city.

Fact of the matter is that the splash page is a red herring; nobody gives a fuck about the splash page. Any dummy with a Wacom tablet can pull one together in a couple of hours. The meat and potatoes of this "create a splash page and we'll make a game around it" contest is that you're fishing for game ideas without saying as much. So I'm going to keep sketching out details of the game that's gonna put S.MG on the map (we've only scratched the surface), and you and MP are going to either take the freebies I've given you so far and run with them, or you'll realize that this project is enormous, too big for yourselves and one 20-hour-a-week programmer, and start, y'know, paying the people who are creating your game for you. Or I'll get tired of handing out freebies and you'll miss out on all the ideas I haven't come up with yet.

Assembling a round table of people who aren't idiots is a good start; more ideas will obviously follow when the council of non-idiots realizes that their ideas aren't just being pissed into the wind.

[MPOE-PR]

Best-case end result of this is that bitcoin transforms from a vehicle of speculation to a vehicle of commerce. The classic problem with opening your own dot-com online store is visibility: who's going to buy your product if they don't know about your website? How do you break out of a local market? Where does your advertising money get spent? How do you connect with your audience? Ebay and Etsy etc somewhat solved this by providing a shopping mall type setup, where people interested in spending money are browsing products; you're much more likely to get search hits for "unicorn pendant" on ebay than you are on google. Suddenly you don't need to break through the non-commerce noise, which is overwhelming on public search engines.

And so you set up your shop in TMK and start selling the chainmail shirts you used to sell on etsy, and someone sends you bitcoins for one of them, and now instead of hoarding those bitcoins or cashing them out for USD, you spend them on something else in-game, because now YOU'RE the person in the middle of a market with a pouch full of coins in your pocket. And so on.

You know wheat doesn't look like that.

The meat and potatoes of this "create a splash page and we'll make a game around it" contest is that you're fishing for game ideas without saying as much.

Nope, actually not at all. See

If you have a great idea consider I've just insulted you terribly. It'll be easier for both of us.

None of this crap is a contribution, or useful, or welcome. We don't need ideas, we don't want ideas. We have plenty of ideas, and I can assure you nobody over at S.MG even reads or ever will read any of this crap, outside of me, and my orders are to just discard it whole.

The job is to draw not to run the mouth. Stick to it.

[nubbins]

You know wheat doesn't look like that.

And YOU know how to hide your curiosity, almost.

[nebulus]

Here you go.

Damn, you got skills....

[Mike Christ]

You guys may as well give up, I got this contest in the bag.

[legendster]

What are you people, French?

When I say talent I don't mean sitting around all day talking about "how things should be". That isn't talent, importantly. Even more importantly, that isn't useful. Nor is it valuable. Nor is it in fact welcome, outside of the society of idiots and the confederacy of dunces.

Now let's go into details:

Of course there is talent!    

Compare and contrast with:

32. What happened to the cute little unicorn!]
 *Poof*. Initially I thought adding a few vignettes might be a nice way to showcase community talent and funnel some coins from the rich fat cat to the starving artist, but alas there wasn't much in the way of talent to showcase. Maybe in time.

That happened last year. The very untalented, exceedingly verbose Bitcoin community of the time proved itself unable to provide three 155px by 68px bits of line art. (Coherence with today's "Bitcoin community" is extremely low, obviously. The average lifespan of a Bitcoin communitard being what, six to nine months.)

Also compare and contrast with the 10 BTC Photoshop contest coupla months ago.

So, when I say what I say I have something I'm basing myself on. When you say what you say you're basing yourself on what, your inner feeling that you in fact are talented? You're not talented, because if you were you'd be working. Hard to digest, perhaps, but if you can take the time to type out that post of yours but won't take the time to prove your talent you are in fact an untalented if verbose hack, and you know this.

It could be a really awesome project to work on! I just don't have enough info about it to even consider it.

It actually is a really awesome project to work on. That you hesitate and then paint that hesitation in terms of "not enough info" could be construed to mean one of two and only two things.

Thing number A: You are more willing to write than you are willing to read, and as such you've not read:

ThickAsThieves Tying the splash design, to the name, to potentially (i assume) the entire concept definition is a large bet.
mircea_popescu It is. It’s there to signify exactly how open this shit is. The artist can run with it. I mean it. I let him name it, it’s a symbol of creative control. I want it to be that.

which is a pity, as it's in the original article.

Thing number 2: You are not an artist, which means to say you're able to execute if someone else is telling you what to do, but you yourself have no inspiration, no vision and nothing actually creative to contribute. This is fine, nobody is required to be special or relevant, but it also means that there's no talent involved.

Example: Instead of offering 2.0 for the "winning submission" offer .5 but require that people send portfolios and then choose 3 people to do the job. You pay all three for their work. Then, when you choose one you like the best, you can ask the 'winning designer' to edit their design 2-3 more times for an additional .5.

Yes, this is how the poor but numerous view the world, no different really from the celebrated "if BitBet was paying users even more then we would make more Bitcoin!!!". It just so happens that being involved in this "wonderful community" etc gives you a direct link to the rich and successful, and here's how they view your thinking there: "could you transform this grand opportunity for the talented into a doling out to the untalented? instead of something based on achievement could we have a little nibble based on simple existence?".

The answer, in short, is no. No you cannot. It is true that the welfarist governments have turned the existence of a few special select few into this fictitious world whereby you get a little bread and a little juice just for existing, but we are currently working at dismantling all that. This is in fact what Bitcoin is for: making it so that it's impossible for a select few to get "social benefits" at the expense of the hard working, the rich and the successful.

The fact of the matter is that most people don't have enough skill, enough ability and most importantly enough inclination to work (usefully!) so as to justify their consumption. The future for these people, which prophetically self-identified as "the 99%" recently, is starvation. If you think unemployment is bad now....

On the other side of the planet, you can't insulate yourself from risks. Being part of a start-up is being part of a start-up, you can't play 9 to 5 office on one end and then cash in like an entrepreneur on the other end. You don't get the benefit of signing your name on tomorrow's megafranchise without putting a lot of your work at risk. Joanne Rowling pitched her book to almost one hundred publishers over years before being accepted, on a very tight contract. You're more than welcome to wait for someone to pay you a generous salary a year in advance and then make you famous, but if you hold your breath for it you'll die. And if you don't hold your breath for it you'll get sick of Ramen sooner or later.

So to sum up my message to the starving, unknown artist: You can't wait out money. Money waits you out. Money doesn't need to eat, and money doesn't give a shit. Either you have talent, in which case you slave away (literally, I do mean slave away, twenty-two hours a day for weeks and weeks) to make the most of this wondrous, splendid opportunity or else you have no talent, no purpose and aren't welcome in the world. And I do mean it, generally, the world. Even the birds shit on you, because they don't like you down there.

That's about it.

Here you go.

Boss sez, "well he's an idiot but at least he did something, so pay him .1337 to make the point to the other idiots that are also vocal about how lazy they are".

So, post an addy.

So why not use Elance ?

[nubbins]

ThickAsThieves Tying the splash design, to the name, to potentially (i assume) the entire concept definition is a large bet.

mircea_popescu It is. It’s there to signify exactly how open this shit is. The artist can run with it. I mean it. I let him name it, it’s a symbol of creative control. I want it to be that.

We don't need ideas, we don't want ideas. We have plenty of ideas

So many ideas that you're looking for art direction from a forum full of 14 year olds and currency speculators.

The job is to draw not to run the mouth. Stick to it.

The job

job

Job? I thought this was a big giveaway where people got paid pennies for scribbling in MSPaint?

"Job" would be where you try to find people who aren't idiots, and pay them money. The important part is that they're not idiots; everything else can be learned.