Dare 2011

"Teams applying from the island of Ireland will need to have a mix of students from both the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland. Each team will need to have at least 2 members from each region. "

2 team members from another region? Yikes. It can be hard enough to put a team together at all (at least when I was still a student it was. Hopefully that has changed!) without a pretty big road block like that. Of course if it does get students networking its all good!

It could be a huge boon for games in Ireland in the future if some lasting relationships are formed because of this, but I can see it putting an extra level of strain on Irish teams. You HAVE to find someone from another region who compliments your existing skill sets and on short notice. I see teams choosing badly or accepting someone because they just need someone, anyone from the other region in order to be able to enter.

Also a lot of teams will be planning to enter months in advance, they have their team put together and suddenly they have to jettison two people? How long ago was this change announced? I mean the closing date is 3rd of April.

Is this done to reduce the number of teams entering from Ireland as a whole? I had a quick look at the site but couldn’t find anything about the number of teams accepted per country. There is a certain amount of logic to that if they want to turn DARE into a global competition.

I’d suggest that they should scrap selection quotas in regions altogether if they want to continue to expand as a global competition, but I’m sure they are worried about losing presence in a region or country if teams consistently failed to qualify from that area. Still seems like bad reasoning to me.

I’m not sure this will be a huge problem next year as people will have plenty of warning and perhaps a number of colleges can assist in networking in a semi-official capacity. This year though I think Irish teams just got the short end of a sticky stick.

What are peoples thoughts on this?

I have to agree with you John, the logistics of putting together a team is tough enough as it is, without the prequisite of needing to half at least 2 of each from north and south of the border.

I remember putting a submission together in 2004 and we were lacking a programmer, as the 4 of us were formed in CGHND. We almost didn’t get to submit as we simply couldn’t find one. We were lucky enough to get in contact with a guy from Trinity in the end.

Reading the rules for this years Dare, certainly raised an eyebrow. I can’t see this working too well, but then I’m not sure what kind of a profile the competition has developed over the past few years.

It was the lack of contact and networking between colleges back in the mid 2000’s that seemed to cause problems.

Would love to enter this but can’t see us getting a chance to find someone from up North who works well with the rest of the team/could make it down for team meetings etc. before we put forward the proposal.

Ohh well, I would have loved to enter but I doubt it’ll happen at this stage.

Old rules indicated that all IP was owned by DtbD. They would be willing to give the IP back to you if you wished to persue it. So, the ownership of the rights will probably depend on who developed it. Although, that’s going back a bit…

Back in my day the IP was held until the team reached consensus on what to do with it.

This was to prevent any single team member leaving the competition mid way through and somehow preventing the remainder of the team from using the IP