OK, just having 2 conflicting thoughts:
1. Thinking about it more, I am starting to think that, unless there's a really remarkably appropriate term that sounds great, the name should do more to convey what the project is actually about rather than sounding fancy or interesting. With that in mind, and considering some of the other ideas on this thread, I am thinking now of the name "CrowdGameX", which is intended to convey that this is a Crowdsourced Game eXperiment, plain and simple. If the experiment goes well, maybe other projects will spring up with more specific and interesting names, but this being the first one, maybe it's appropriate to name it something relatively straightforward. I was thinking also that there will not be a separate name for the larger project independent from the specific (CleanGame-based) SGDK2 project. But now I am led to thought 2...
2. It doesn't seem right to name the SGDK2 file "CrowdGameX.sgdk2". It should be more specific to what the game is like, like MineCraft. But I still think having 2 names is going to get confusing. So maybe we should focus more on what the name of this first project is going to be rather than the nature of the whole crowd-sourced game experiment. Sure this project will be a *type* of experiment in crowd-sourced gaming, but we're not starting a company here; we don't need to name a company (at least not yet
. The homepage for the game can talk about the larger philosophy/experiment. But as for a name, I think we just need to name this particular game. People will learn about the experimental aspects in other ways. That doesn't mean the game name can't include any hint of the larger project (it could still have an X), but there should at least be some hint of the content of the game itself in the name.
So taking both of *those* thoughts into account, CrowdGameX doesn't seem right because when you think of the content of the game, it's not so much about how it is crowd-sourced, especially at the beginning when very few people have touched the game. But the word "Our" does seem more appropriate because it's... less philosophical, and more just referring to this game as one that multiple people "own". But the noun to go with it is the trick. OurGame is still too generic. OurGameX? Still not speaking enough about the content of the game. Yes, the content of the game could change wildly, but there should at least be some vague attempt at referring to the content like "world" or ... heh... "planet" (just not a "little big" one).
Thinking... IotaBuildIt! This might be the silver bullet of names in that it accomplishes many things:
1. It sounds like "I oughtta build it", so it's kind of catchy in that way (multiple meanings)
2. Iota means a very small amount
3. The idea of the overall project is for people to build their own pieces of the world
4. The (current) idea of the game is to build nano-robots that accomplish certain tasks.
5. Each contribution to the project can be very small (like an iota)
6. Nano-bots in the game are very small things that you build
7. "I oughtta build it" suggests that people really *should* help build the game, we really invite them to add their own content
How do you all feel about "IotaBuildIt" (or possibly some variation of this thought) as the name for the project and the game?
Edit: One more thing: 0 results on Google, so we would "own" that term.
Edit 2: We could also use the unique iota symbol "ɩ" in a logo. It's a unicode character that looks a lot like "i", but it has no dot. So even with a single character we can hint at this game/project... ɩBuildIt
ɩBuildIt
I like the Times font representation better.
