My favourite interview question

No one here or on the original page seemed to consider they should design a Monopoly game on the net to be "fun." Especially since Hacker News is about and for entrepreneurs, it would seem natural to turn an idea like that into money. Monopoly is a game. It should be fun. It had better be fun, or the design doesn't matter because it won't sell.

What makes the game fun? Part of it is the interaction between players, laughing, joking, scheming, and posturing. How do you bring that to a game played over the net? Is text chat sufficient, or can you easily do voice? What do you display to the players? Certainly part of the board needs to be displayed. When I play, I like to see what people have for properties and money. Will I be able to see that Alice has a stack of $500 bills or that Bob has nothing larger than a $50?

The original question is a very cool thought experiment, imho. My initial reaction was that to design this, I'd want to sit and play some games of Monopoly to see what to include and to see what the game is really all about. I've played hundreds of games of Monopoly, but that's not the same as designing a fun game to play over the net. Running through this little thought experiment helps raise many questions about how the game will work. Does each player have a complete client, or is this a server based system (or is it somewhere in between)? How do you handle dice rolls? How quickly can people start a game?

You need to know what you're going to create before you start applying tools to create it.

I didn't get into what I would call the "product management" aspect of the question in that post, but if it doesn't bore you to hear it, I have participated in interviews where this question was asked of non-technical people, specifically a product manager and a web designer.

I don't remember if "fun" was specifically discussed, but the discussions were more focused on what users would do and see, very much in keeping with your second paragraph.

The product manager was also asked to consider the exercise from a competitive perspective. What could be done to differentiate a new site from an existing, popular site? is the strategy to be simplere and easier? To cater to power users running into limitations of the existing site? And so on.

"If the candidate uses up all of the interview time trying to obtain perfect requirements, we have a problem. In the software development I do, the requirements are never perfect. I don’t demand that a candidate try to create an agile, iterative process on the spot, but I look for someone who knows when to say 'close enough, let’s move forward.'"

I think this is a great reason why most interviewing techniques fail. The interview is not a reliable model of the work environment. This is especially true given the fact that people love "gotcha" interview questions which are essentially brain teasers which require you to know some arcane trick to get the question right.

I have seen great candidates spend a lot of time trying to understand a simple problem in an interview. These are people who under normal working conditions would never waste tons of time trying to get a perfect spec before starting work. But, because of the types of interviews people try and pass over as being "reliable indicators of future performance" candidates get stuck trying to find the trick in each question. If you have a candidate spend their entire interview trying to tease out a spec it sounds like a better indicator of the low quality of the interviewer rather than the candidate to me...

When people start heading that direction in an interview, be sensible and say, "Do you feel like you need a complete spec before going on? I promise there's no trick I'm trying to get you to fix" and you'll get the response you're actually looking for.

I've been working on a board-game program lately and I've created a "referee" object that's responsible for enforcing rules, handling workflow, turn taking, etc. Works really well for me.

This was exactly my immediate reaction, but mostly because I never really found Monopoly to be all that fun in the first place. Instead, my friend and I pooled together our monopoly dollars and made a monopoly casino.

There's not really a good digital equilvalent to this, but that's the tricky thing about monopoly: the things that set it apart from other games are the hardest to transfer to a digital analogue.

This reminds me of the ongoing quest to make a popular online version of Cosmic Encounter. I grew up playing the paper version with every expansion. There were so many aliens to be (and we frequently played with two/person) that the dynamic was different every game. But to add a new power to the digital version can require a whole new set of rules, and so they always fall startlingly short. [as a brief example, the Filch power, when coupled with it's power card, allowed you to cheat by secretly taking cards from the discard pile and whatnot until you were caught - this is nearly impossible to accurately mimic digitally]