iPod wars: Brad vs Pat
Saturday, July 22, 2006
I've been challenged to a modern form of jousting over the Internet based on one's music collections - iPod wars. I'm not expecting to wipe the floor with my music one bit as I keep a lot of stuff I'll probably never get around to. This little game might just uncover the gold in every competitors' collection, particularly mine!
Just a refresher on the rules courtesy of this match's instigator, Brad: you put your iPod/iRiver on random and list the first 10 tracks. We then compare tracks against each other and find out who wins. You are allowed one skip also.
So here's my musical gauntlet to throw down:
Peabody - The Weight Just Right (5/10)
The Vines - Rainfall (8/10)
The Hives - Theme from... (6/10)
Arctic Monkeys - Fake Tales Of San Francisco (9/10)
Spiderbait - Chest Hair (6/10)
The Panics - My Best Mistake (7/10)
The Hives - A Get Together To Tear It Apart (8/10)
Khonnor - An Ape Is Loose (Skipped)
Arctic Monkeys - Mardy Bum (9/10)
Travis - Side (9/10)
The Reindeer Section - Cartwheels (7/10)
Total: 74/100
A bit repetitive, but pretty decent. If you please, Brad?
15 comments to this post
En guarde!
I'm happy to be over-ruled, but it appears this one's yours to take! I had five of your songs already and I think your ranking's about as accurate as mine, so congrats!
Has anyone ever set up a league for iPod wars? I wouldn't mind being the first! Think anyone else out there has got game?
How do you decide a score/rating?
No hard and fast rules at all, just pure opinion, but I agree with Brad's rankings for the songs I knew of his.
Obviously if we had a league I'd write up some rating system, like 10 is one of your favourite 100 songs, 9 is 200 maybe...I really don't know. You're the numbers man, right?
Anyone mind if i throw my "ipod" into the arena? I put it on my blog at some stage for you guys to rate.
Do it, Brodie. We can have a three-way (ooh la la!)
You know what would be cool? We could set up a website (at ipodwar.com or something) where people can sign up and challenge people to wars, with the general public voting for who they believe the winner is out of each battle. You could then keep track of peoples' win/loss records, have a leaderboard, etc.
Man, that would rock.
Of course, you'd probably have heaps of people abusing the rules and not actually using their shuffle feature but just picking 10 songs arbitrarily, but it would still be cool.
And you could make it so that you keep track of which song wins the most comparisons, and which tracks are most often part of winning collections... the possibilities are mind-boggling!
It seems like something last.fm would sponsor too... so it's probably doable.
I think I found the original inventor, too... http://www.kittenpants.org/bt/ipodwar.asp
Funny you should mention this: I was looking for some rules for iPod war. Even those ones you linked (the best I've seen so far) aren't specific enough: they depend on court-style defence (i.e. arguments) just as we depended on self-assessment of your songs.
I played against Jiggy earlier and he thought, to quote, "each track was ranked against each track in the other person's list - i.e. track 1 vs. track 1, etc" so there's different game varieties that are possible.
I'm yet to decide if it's:
1) Team score-based (Brad-Pat style)
2) Song score-based (versus/head-to-head/Jiggy style)
Scores generated by:
1) Each player themselves
2) The opposing player (unlikely unless you were among friends)
3) The players' consensus (i.e arguments)
4) Popular vote
5) A % split of the methods listed above?
I wouldn't mind calling in Dean to create a Fantasy sports style points based system. Like, you could brand your strongest track as your "marquee" song that's worth double points in head-to-head matches.
Brad, that is a sweet idea that could really work. To get over the non-shuffling abusers, you should have to send in your list of tracks (can iTunes easily export your library of tracks into a HTML/XML/understandable file?) to let the songs be randomly generated at your site, rather than at the iPod level.
And this incredibly long comment is punishment for Brad triple-posting. That's a first here at Tales Of A Caffeine Junkie.
Or you could just not publish what the top songs are? Would that avoid cheating as well? I spose people would figure it out by looking at previous winners though.
If the opponent had to rank them, I'd throw them 30 songs to rank (containing the 10/11 that were selected) so they couldn't be harsh on all of them or they'd be an obvious cheat.
But that would involve listening to 30 tracks rather than 10/11. Hmph.
What are you basing your rankings on?
quality of song?
musicians skill?
enjoyability? (is that even a word?)
A master opinion of how much you like it? I can't really say quality, because even that asks more questions of how you determine quality.
I'd say less on musicianship though, unless it helps you enjoy it, of course.
I posted mine on my blog
Mine is on my blog now too.
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