Here’s another project, slightly more complicated than remixing AbandonedArt (although getting pyprocessing working on OS X Lion is a bit challenging). This is sparked by the fact that my long time March Madness bracket league collapsed under the weight of its own success. Last year the amount of prize money in the pool raised the ire of PayPal and the organizers barely managed to get the purse out of them. This year the organizers came to their senses, realized they have better things to do with their lives, and shut the whole thing down. I wasn’t too put out, since I never won any money anyway, and picking brackets is starting to feel stale.
But there’s still a little competitive juice flowing during March Madness.
Back in my late days of undergrad, early years of grad school, there were a couple of fun contests run on USENET, (yes USENET), around college basketball. The first was bbfun, which was essentially a confidence pool over the week of Big 10 men’s basketball games. You picked the winners at the beginning of the week, ranked them in order of confidence, and the scoring was weighted by your rankings.
The second game, Matthew Merzbacher’s point total pool, had you select 8 NCAA tournament teams. You collected contest points for each real-world point your teams scored throughout the tournament. Later on Merzbacher spiced it up by adding bonus points for having lower seeded teams in your slate. In addition to the serious attempts, which could actually involve a fair bit of analysis, plenty of people entered fun theme or joke slates.
Both of these games seem eminently implementable using modern Web frameworks and toolkits. I actually wouldn’t be surprised if either or both had already been done but it would be a fun “reinventing the wheel” project. If executed smartly, probably wouldn’t be too taxing in terms of compute resources, and a small fee from a decent sized participant pool would cover your infrastructure costs. If one could navigate the purse vice gambling issue, prize money could even be incorporated.