The Fedora RPG

A couple of weeks ago at the weekly meeting of the Fedora Design Team Mo brought an idea floating for a while inside the community: a Fedora RPG, which got a good part of the team hooked. The "game" is supposed to take the form of a badge or banner available for inclusion in web pages and being played by contributing to Fedora: creating tickets, submitting patches, building packages, helping people...

After the meeting I opened Gnote, put down my ideas about the game and then sent them to the mailing list, since the list have limiter readership, here's a copy:

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The Fedora RPG

The game is centered around a rectangular badge showing the "player" status, which can be easily embedded in a website/blog/etc.

The badge layout is as follows:

• at the top the user name/nick and general rank;
• on one side the avatar with the current set of customizations,
  customizations are enabled by honor points
• in the middle the list of classes and levels, classes are SIGs
  membership, levels are enabled by experience points and reflect activity
  inside the SIG
• at the bottom a list of medals, enabled by special quests

The name/nick is user chosen, preferable the IRC nick/FAS name, the rank is enabled by a sum of experience points, honor points and medals.
Example: Wizard Martin

As an usual Fedora contributor is member in more than one SIG, an usual character of the game will basically be a multiclass character. The level is determined by experience points, earned automatically from activity: bugzilla, trac, koji etc. - closing tickets, submitting patches, creating packages, writing wiki pages, documentation and so on.
Example: Martin is a level 2 packager, level 4 designer and level 1 desktop developer

The avatar is a panda, from a selection of initial shapes and genders with customization enabled by honor points. Customization can be items like hats, glasses, guitar, laptop, tie, can be a selection of backgrounds like bamboo, data room, disco, or can be the color of the avatar: blue panda, pink panda, green panda, etc. Each customization has a cost in honor
points.
Honor points are received from another players for activity inside the project: helping on a mailing list, writing a good blog post on planet, delivering a cool presentation at FUDCon or being the last man standing at the release party.
Example: Martin is a Blue Panda, wearing a pink cap, dark sunglasses and
having a telescope in hand.

The medals are received from accomplishing quests: winning the bi-weekly Design Bounty, bringing pizza at a release party, organizing a FAD, etc.

The experience points are earned automatically from the infrastructure, the honor points can be donated by anyone having a FAS account and medals can be granted only by players with a certain level of experience (SIG/team leaders?).

When a player starts the game he can choose the gender of the avatar (we have both male and female contributors), the general shape (we should provide at least 5-6 general body types to avoid monotony). The classes are read from FAS group membership.

Is also possible to select the badge color and maybe the graphic style (classic, modern, cartoon, sketch, etc.)

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Of course, since then the topic was on the agenda at every following meeting and with today being a relaxed day (surprisingly, for the first time ever we are not behind the schedule) we had plenty of time for discussing the game, hopefully some graphics will show-up soon. No code yet, since it is still on the design board, we don't have yet coders on board.

I think the most important elements for the game are: to be fun and to be simple. Fun so people will want to take part into it, simple so we won't get stuck in the implementation.

The question is: would you play something like this?