The rules of the game are only alluded to, and are so sophisticated that they are not easy to imagine. Playing the game well requires years of hard study of music, mathematics, and cultural history. Essentially the game is an abstract synthesis of all arts and scholarship. It proceeds by players making deep connections between seemingly unrelated topics. (Wikipedia)

Basically, the master of The Glass Bead Game – ‘Magister Ludi’ – is the ultimate and most revered bloke in all the land – i.e. the best person in the world. This Glass Bead Game idea got me thinking… Why is there not a game like that around now? I mean, everyone gets unreasonably excited about people singing bad songs on X Factor. But forget ‘best singer’ – what about a real competition, a competition that decides who is just the absolute, ultimate, no-further-questions best person in the world?

Idea #16: The Best Person in the World Competition

While The Glass Bead Game is a fantastic concept, I feel that the name is somewhat…shit. Let’s call our best person in the world competition X MAN.

X MAN is primarily just a competition to find out who is the best person in the world, because that’s something worth knowing. But since I know a lot of people read Ideas Exist for business ideas, let’s not pass up the opportunity for a little TV show too. Or should I say, the most successful TV show ever made. The best part about that is we will supplant the worst person in the world – Simon Cowell – from his current role as the bubonic plague of prime time TV. Our show will have a presenter much more worthy of the position. As I see it, there are several contenders:

1. The Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger
2. Wolverine
3. Stephen Hawking

I’m going for Stephen Hawking as I think he would bring the right degree of gravity to the show. He also nicely straddles the boundary between extraordinary human and robot – only someone like this can claim any authority over a gaggle of potential best person in the worlds.

But how do we decide who is the absolute best person in the world? Let’s do it in unashamedly X Factor style, since people seem to like that. X MAN begins with regional then national tournaments where competitors can earn themselves points in a diversity of events – these can also form their own national TV shows – then culminates in the international final, which ends up becoming the 21st century’s better version of the Olympics. Why’s it better? Because, a la Glass Bead Game, it’s combines scholarship, arts and sport – one challenge per episode:

1. Mixed martial arts cage fight
2. Chess
3. Make a short film
4. Ironman triathlon plus survival situation
5. A David Blaine-style unusual endurance feat e.g. standing on the top of a pole
6. Cooking
7. Soldiery
8. Music writing and performing
9. Mastermind
10. Kindness
11. Machine building
12. Orchestrate a bank heist
13. Speeches

That should do it. Whoever wins is the best person in the world.

A bit of clarification:

Make a short film – the candidates for best person in the world are just told, “Make a film.” They then have a week to do it, and viewers vote on which is the best. Same with the music writing and performing. If they are the best, they can do it.

Kindness – assessed using hidden cameras, e.g. a dirty old tramp approaches the contestants individually to ask for kindnesses of increasingly demanding nature, like “Please take me to your house for a bowl of soup”, then “Would you mind if I stay here for a week or so?” etc. The best person in the world can’t not be kind.

Machine building – like Scrap Heap Challenge but for individuals, contestants must build the required machines then race or battle with them. The best person in the world can’t not be able to build machines.

Speeches - in this round, would be best person in the world must show themself as the global leader they are about to become (the prize is presidency of Sudan), and make a rousing Obamaesque speech to the world setting out their vision.

The Final

X MAN will not be decided by a stupid vote. Rather, there will be a final round with especially loads of points to be won. What is the final challenge? Danny Thompson, in a submission to Ideas Exist, has revealed it:

Get the contestants to turn up at the track and tell them to run as fast as possible over 50 meters. Record the quickest time. Now tell them to run into a wall. If they can do it at at least 90% of their top speed, they win the prize! The wall should look very real, but doesn’t have to be

And the winner is the best person in the world. Official. (Anymore ideas for challenges to feature in X MAN? Leave a comment!)

Here’s a classic idea that blends the technology of Idea #7: Fab Labs, the style of Idea #3: Poor models and the documentariness of Idea #4: Big Tribal Brother.

As we are aware, Pimp My Ride is about turning losers’ cars into the kind of gimmicky, pimpy rides driven by richer losers who spend all their time driving around in their flatulent rides thinking they are pimp, or rather knowing they are pimp, because they are in fact pimps, and pimping was one of the illicit means by which they obtained the money to fill the inside of their cars with Playstations.

Wouldn't it be better if this was a village?

You took the words right out of my gold-grilled mouth: Rather than pimping shit cars, wouldn’t it be better to pimp shit villages?

Idea #9: Pimp My Village:

1. Create a series of documentary video shorts on villages with a way-less-than-pimp standard of living. (Featuring villages that are regularly the victim of sex trafficking swipes would be a nice touch.)
2. Create a website to feature the videos – preferably also get them on MTV.
3. Using a nice Web 2.0 interface, viewers can pimp the villages themselves à la Pimp My Ride online Ride Pimper and Idea #5: Design your own bar. (more below)
4. Make a before and after film of the pimping, à la Pimp My Ride TV show.

What’s all this about a nice Web 2.0 interface? First have a look at MTV’s clever Ride Pimper:

Look at them wheels!

Now imagine the pimp flames, pimp air sock et al. were replaced with, say, pieces of pimp farming equipment, pimp water pumps, mosquito nets. Condoms. Mobile phones. And instead of a car, there’s a village.

You can sign up and credit a bit of money to your account. Better still, MTV credits the money out of their budget. Then you get pimping!

Select a villager you saw featured in the documentary – he was complaining about not having enough medicine to deal with his AIDS – drag a bottle across and put it in his hand, done!

Pimp my terminal illness

Select a school that’s empty of books – drag a book across, it’s as easy as putting a skull on the front of your Cadillac, but it actually really does something!

Pimp My Village is the next step on from charities like Jolkona and Kiva, which already make the effects of donations tangible by allowing donations that target a particular problem, area or person. What Pimp My Village does is makes the whole process just like handing someone something across the room: “Here’s a hand-plough” – Pimped!

This classic idea was submitted by Ezra Kwong. Mr Kwong, you are destined for great things.

P.s. You can pimp a man’s village one day, but if you give him the tools he needs to pimp his own village, he can pimp it himself, over and over again. Like the sound of that? Get involved with Project #1: Buy a Fab Lab

Masai warrior	Australian Aborigine	Papua New Guinean
Native Amazonian	Eskimo	Saharan nomad

…in a room together?

(With interpreters.)

A pretty interesting interesting situation is what you get. And if you film it you get Big Tribal Brother: A documentary.

When I go into the supermarket and walk along the aisles packed with every type of food you can imagine, I often wonder: What would, say, an Eskimo think if they saw all this?

Personally, I’d be keen to watch a documentary just on that: an Eskimo in a supermarket. I mean, it doesn’t even have to be an Eskimo – any native tribesman or tribal warrior would do. But why not let’s go wild and get a group of indigenous tribesmen, of different origin, together? Then take them to the supermarket. Or the cinema. Or laser quest.

According to Survival International there are over 100 tribes around the world who continue to reject contact with the outside world. Amazingly, some of them have not yet had first contact with anyone from outside their small tribe. It almost defies belief that some societies on Earth have been through hundreds of years of agricultural, industrial and technological revolutions, which indigenous people in jungles still know nothing about!

Take the Sentinelese, for example, the as yet uncontacted indigenous people of the Andaman islands in the Indian Ocean. After the 2004 tsunami washed right over their home it was feared that they may have been wiped out – until, that is, a rescue team did a fly past and took this iconic photograph of a tribesman on the beach, his longbow aimed at their helicopter:

Sentinelese tribesman

And they’re not the only ones. This next photograph was taken of an uncontacted Amazonian tribe in 2008:

Amazonian tribe

A couple of hours after the first fly past had sent them scattering into the jungle, they had painted themselves red and came out fighting. Again, the longbows.

Now I’m not suggesting we get gentlemen like this involved. If these tribes reject contact with the outside world, they could well be better off that way. Apparently they’d be fairly likely to die from catching a cold off the film crew, which would run counter to the idea for the documentary.

But there are plenty of tribal people who’ve had contact with the outside world yet still haven’t been anywhere near a supermarket. And I reckon getting a few such tribesmen together and showing them a bit of the developed world would be a totally feasible idea for a documentary. Perhaps more interestingly: what will an aborigine from the Amazon say to an aborigine from the Australian outback? How will they interact? I think it would be an eye-opener for natives, viewers and film-makers alike.

We could even make a real effort and channel some of the profits made from this documentary back into charities like Survival International that work to protect tribal people, or environmental charities that preserve the increasingly endangered places these people are indigenous to.

But let’s not really make it Big Brother style eh? They might wear fur, they might be from West Papua, but we don’t need to make them our New Guinea pigs.

Ah, that's better.

Can’t be bothered to make the documentary, but love the idea? Follow me to Amazon:

Can’t be bothered to make the documentary or follow me to Amazon, but still love our big tribal brothers?

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