Rules of the Game

Every year there is a huge game exhibition in Essen. This year it was called SPIEL '05. The exhibition focuses on board games. Like every year, we visited it again yesterday. There were clearly less people this time because we'd decided to visit the exhibition on Thursday (the first day) instead of the usual Saturday. It seems that EVERY PLACE is packed in Germany on Saturdays. The supermarkets are full of people and the only time they are even fuller is on a Sunday when the supermarkets are unusually open because of a bank holiday on Monday or some other reason. The way people behave seems to be that when the weekend is a day longer, you absolutely must buy groceries for four extra days.
I'm really into all kinds of board games and I've been wondering why. It is perhaps the clear rules and limited time that appeal to me. Unlike in real life, the rules have been spelled out and each player knows them. It is also very clear what the object of the game is, i.e. how to win. And even a game that's going badly will end sooner rather than later. After which a new game can be started with hopefully better luck/tactic.

This fascination with rules is clearly visible in my technique of code inspection. It makes a lot of sense to clearly dictate the rules required of the software source code. There are a few ideal things, which all source, no matter in which programming language it is written, should fulfil. These ideals can be spelled out as absolutely correct rules, which nobody should ever violate. Then the authors of code can try to follow these explicit rules, or advice, as best they can. The checkers in code inspection have an easy task of just looking for rule violations. That's almost all there is to it.

Anyway, yesterday was spent in the exhibition, today I had a business lunch with a former colleague. Yrjö (I can't tell you how to pronounce that, but it's not pronounced Y-R-Joe like a customs officer in America once thought.) is thinking about starting his own company and he wanted to know what I know. So I told him. Now we know approximately as much about starting a company in Germany and it isn't much yet. But we are learning.

I also bought a router to get both of my computers connected to the Internet at the same time. That would be neat. Now I'm going to start preparing for tomorrow. I'm going to deliver a challenge to Stefan, another former colleague and friend of mine. He's still my friend, I mean.

By the way, we managed to buy 7 new board games in the exhibition. Most were older games in discount, and we only tested one game. I don't enjoy playing the games in that kind of crowd, there's a constant humming of hundreds of human voices in the background. But we test played Louis XIV, which seemed like a decent enough strategy game, which we bought.