[Solecismic]

One of the features of The College Years which received the most buzz was the inclusion of nearly 14,000 American high schools, nearly every public school in the country with at least 100 students.

Back in 2001, when the original game came out, that represented a significant portion of the database a computer game could handle without slowing down to the point where the feature caused more annoyance than it created excitement. There was no attempt to rate or model individual schools. It was just a list, with schools divided into small, medium or large student bodies.

That was seven years ago. Today, computers have much more RAM. While games should still run on Windows '98, I'm no longer expecting speed or efficiency on ten-year-old computers. Graphics-oriented gaming companies stretch the limits of computers with respect to frame rate and numbers of polygons. I try to stretch it with regard to the size of the statistical database.

That's essentially the difference between a text-based simulation and a graphics-based simulation. Is new development focused on database or on pictures?

Each new version of Front Office Football has stretched its internal database significantly. When or if The College Years is updated, there's certainly room to expand the memory reserved for information about high schools. So, the question before the panel today is: should the high school model see significant expansion?

There are many ways this feature could be expanded. The simplest is assigning a reputation to each school, along with a little more tracking of how players perform once recruited. The most advanced is adding full rosters for each high school, playing out games and adding every senior to the recruiting database.

Personally, I'm not sure I want to go to that extreme. There are at least 50,000 high school football games played every year. While I'm fairly certain today's computers could handle this simulation, it would take some time, require significant development effort, and I'm not sure it would add a lot to the experience.

More likely, I would favor finding volunteers to refine my database of high schools, providing reputations as well as a more inclusive list of schools which actually field football teams. Each school could then develop a reputation with each college coach, perhaps providing pipelines for recruiting talent.

What would the panel like to see?