Four short links: 16 November 2009

Visualizing Adventures, Droid Deployments, Fly Vision, and Mass Meat For You

1. Choose Your Own Adventure -- numerical and visual analysis of the Choose Your Own Adventure novels. The distinguishing characteristic of My Kind Of People is that they appreciate the quantitative study of the commonplace. (via Bryan O'Sullivan)
2. Tracking Droid Numbers -- uLocate, the makers of the Where app for Android, have been tracking the growth of the Droid phone using the data they get from the Android app store. (via BoyGenius Report)
3. Fly Eyes Makes Better Robot Vision -- to make smaller flying robots, researchers would like to find a simpler way of processing motion. Inspiration has come from the lowly fly, which uses just a relative handful of neurons to maneuver with extraordinary dexterity. And for more than a decade, O’Carroll and other researchers researchers have painstakingly studied the optical flight circuits of flies, measuring their cell-by-cell activity and turning evolution’s solutions into a set of computational principles. [...] Intriguingly, the algorithm doesn’t work nearly as well if any one operation is omitted. The sum is greater than the whole, and O’Carroll and Brinkworth don’t know why. Because the parameters are in constant feedback-driven flux, it produces a cascade of non-linear equations that are difficult to untangle in retrospect, and almost impossible to predict. (via Slashdot)
4. Meat Band Aids and Mass Production of Living Tissue -- Apligraf is a matrix of cow collagen, human fibroblasts and keratinocyte stem cells (from discarded circumcisions), that, when applied to chronic wounds (particularly nasty problems like diabetic sores), can seed healing and regeneration. This Gizmodo Q&A is informative.

The Minds Behind Some of the Most Addictive Games Around

If you've wasted half your life playing Peggle, Bejeweled, Zuma or Plants vs. Zombies, blame these guys!

The gaming industry tends to focus on the high end products, first person shooters that crank out a bazillion polygons a seconds and RPGs which spend more time developing the plot in cut scenes than in actual gameplay. But for every person playing Borderlands, there are scores playing casual games like Bejeweled and Zuma. PopCap Games has been at the forefront of casual game development, with a catalog that includes bestselling titles like Peggle and Plants vs Zombies, in addition to the two previously mentioned. I recently had a chance to talk to Jason Kapalka, one of the founders and the creative director of PopCap. We discussed the evolution of PopCap, how the casual gaming industry differs from mainstream gaming, and the challenges of creating games that can be engaging, without being frustrating.

James Turner: Could you start by talking a little bit about your background and how you came to PopCap and what you did before then?

Jason Kapalka: My career in computer games started back in the early '90s, when I was writing for the magazine, Computer Gaming World, doing various reviews and articles. In '95, one of the editors from the magazine left to join an internet dotcom start-up in San Francisco called TEN, the Total Entertainment Network. He invited me to come down there and work there, which I did. And TEN evolved over the dotcom boom and bust cycle, from a very hardcore gaming service into what eventually turned into Pogo.com around 1999. I worked there initially on hardcore games. One day, I was working on Total Annihilation tournaments, and then the next day, someone said, "Hey, design bingo." And I was sort of like, "Oh. Bingo? Okay."

That was the beginning of my casual game design career, I guess. And yes, I was there at Pogo. I helped design a lot of the structure for their casual games until around 2000 when I left, and Pogo eventually went on to get bought by Electronic Arts, of course. I left in 2000 and started PopCap with two other guys, Brian Fiete and John Vechey who are these guys from Indiana that I'd met earlier, around '97. They had made an internet action game called ARC that we'd produced on TEN, and we stayed in touch. In 2000, we all thought we wanted to try something different. So we all left our respective companies to start PopCap. As you might remember, 2000 was not the best year for internet companies. So we didn't really realize that the entire industry was collapsing. We had an interesting time initially. Luckily, our ignorance protected us, I guess.

PopCap started from there, just the three of us working out of our apartments. And over time, we'd say, "Well, I guess we need to hire an artist." And I'd say, "Well, I guess we need to hire maybe another guy here to program this stuff." And then eventually, maybe someone should look at the books or whatever, so we'll hire someone to take care of the bookkeeping. And it kept going like that until eventually we thought that maybe we needed an office. And from there, suddenly, we've got nearly 300 employees now in 2009. So it's been an interesting kind of experience. We never really intended PopCap to get anywhere near as big as it has today.

James Turner: How would you describe PopCap's place in the market today?

Jason Kapalka: I guess it's a bit odd. Casual game companies exist in these strange spaces where they're often the developer and the publisher at the same time. And then they also publish stuff with other guys, where they're sort of rivals, but also they're partners. There's a lot of this co-opetition thing going on. PopCap is obviously a developer, and we develop a lot of games. We used to publish other people's games. And we still do indirectly. in that we have SpinTop Games. which is a company we bought a couple of years back. They distribute a lot of other people's games through their site. But primarily, I think we develop and then publish titles. But we primarily focus on publishing our own titles. So we're kind of a self-publisher, I suppose.

James Turner: That's actually something I wanted to ask you about because one of your distribution channels now is Steam, which is another company's portal for their games and others. How do you see that relationship?

Jason Kapalka: Steam's been really good. We work with lots of different portals. Steam is one of many that our typical game would go out on. On Steam, on Real Arcade, Big Fish Games, Yahoo Games, MSN, WildTangent, a whole bunch of smaller channels. So Steam was just one of several. It's been interesting in that it was developed differently than a lot of those other ones. Steam is definitely much more of a hardcore game distribution channel than something like Real Arcade. So initially, when we started on Steam, it was uncertain whether our games were going to really fit in. Initially, a lot of the ones we tried on Steam didn't really work too well for their audience. Hidden object games don't do especially well with Steam users, for example.

The turning point for Steam was probably when we did Peggle Extreme with Valve. I don't know if you remember that. Peggle had just come out, and the guys at Valve really liked it. We were talking and we had some weird ideas. Someone had the odd suggestion to do sort of a miniature-themed version of Peggle that featured all of the Orange Box's characters, the Half-Life, MT Team Fortress guys. It was a really strange idea, because that was a fairly mature violent kind of franchise. And certainly, it didn't seem like the obvious fit for Peggle. But, on the other hand, we thought, "Well, what the heck? We can try it and it's only going to go on Steam anyway so it's not like it'll offend the soccer moms necessarily." So we tried that out, and it went up. And we were all kinds of nervous because we didn't know -- it had launched initially as a free download with the Orange Box. And even though it didn't cost people anything, we were still kind of wondering if there was going to be this big backlash from the hardcore community about, "What the hell is this cheap little pinball thing doing in the middle of my Orange Box product."

But actually, the response was really good. I mean, the Orange Box guys all really liked Peggle a lot. And ultimately, that led them to go and seek out and buy the regular versions of Peggle which made Peggle suddenly this fairly big success on Steam. Which a month or two ago, before that, didn't seem very likely that this game with unicorns and rainbows would be selling well on Steam. So after that, that sort of seemed to kind of be -- it sort of opened the floodgates a little bit. And now a variety of our games do very well on Steam. Obviously, Plants Vs Zombies was the last one that had quite a hit there. Not everything. There's still some of our games that are clearly more casual and that don't particularly work well on Steam. But the ones that do work there seem to really work well.

James Turner: There seems to be a fairly different expectation level for casual games in terms of graphics and such. Do you think that's a natural result of how they're produced and what they're intended for? Or could you see something like Plants Vs Zombies but with the graphics levels of a Half-Life?

Jason Kapalka: It's certainly possible. I mean in some cases, we're not intentionally trying to make the games low fidelity. We try to do the best art direction we can. Although the usual contradiction, or decision to be made, there is we also want to make games as accessible as possible. So we want Plants Vs Zombies to play on every crummy netbook and seven-year-old computer your mom has and all of these types of things. And so that tends to mean that we try to work and have good art, but usually make the technical requirements very modest. We've been working at making things that can scale well so that on a good computer, you'll get a really nice experience and it'll still scale down to play on a lower-end computer. But that can be challenging in itself. So usually, we err on the side of not worrying about the graphics being too high-end because our experience is showing that a good game with not very fancy graphics can sell very well, like Plants Vs Zombies. And I think that game has good graphics, but it's definitely limited. It's only got 800X600 resolution and so forth. But on the other hand, we've seen plenty of games in the casual space that have really good graphics and they sell very poorly if they're not a fun game. So accessibility and fun definitely, for us, end up being a first priority over graphics. And especially 3-D or technically impressive graphics versus just good art direction.

James Turner: You would think Nethack and Rogue would be the ultimate proof that you can have good game play without good graphics.

Jason Kapalka: Sure, I love Roguelike games. We have lots of Nethack fans over at PopCap, which seems a bit weird in that they're obviously not very casual in many regards. But yeah, they're good exemplars of that principle that graphics are not as important as game play.

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Four short links: 23 October 2009

Beautiful Information, Teen Game Designer, Creative Science Writing, Open Source Schools

1. Information is Beautiful -- gorgeous descriptions of the design of infographics. For once, a design discussion that might be useful to mere mortals like me.
2. Australian Teen Crafts "Sneaky" Games -- video interview with a 16 year-old winner of the IFTF, Sun, and BoingBoing Digital Open. Great to see game design, a topic we've followed on Radar, getting uptake by the people about to enter the workforce. "I love index cards," says Harry, "And I was thinking -- hmm, how can I incorporate them into a project?" So he designed and printed these game cards, and "spread the seeds of sneakiness and espionage" into the unsuspecting pockets, math books, binders and bags and jackets of his schoolmates. (via BoingBoing)
3. Science Writing Shortlist -- the Manhire Prize is New Zealand's most prestigious award for creative science writing. The shortlisted entries are available via this link, and make for enlightening reading. Interestingly, there are two prizes awarded: one for fiction and another for non-fiction; New Zealand has a tradition of encouraging interaction between the arts and sciences.
4. Fedena -- an open source school management system, built in India, using Ruby on Rails. (via Brenda Wallace)

The iPhone as a Gaming Platform: Share of Top Apps By Category

As a follow-up to my recent post on the Top Grossing Apps list on iTunes, I examined three lists highlighted in the app store: the Top Paid, Top Free, and Top Grossing Apps. Believing that many users scan these lists, developers covet a spot on any of these Top 100 charts.

In my previous posts, I've highlighted that Games is the largest^† category, accounting for about 20% of unique apps. The graphs below show that the gaming category has a much larger share^†† in each of the three Top 100 lists:

68% of the Top Paid, 67% of the Top Free, and 50% of the Top Grossing apps were Games. Other categories that had disproportionate share of apps in the Top 100 rankings include Social Networking, Photography, (and to a lesser extent) Sports, and Utilities.

In contrast, three of the five largest categories (Books, Travel, Education) were severely underrepresented in each of the U.S. iTunes Top 100 Charts.

(†) Size of a category is measured in terms of unique apps.
(††) Data for this post was from the two weeks ending 10/4/2009. I consider an app as being in the Top 100, if it was listed among the most popular (free, paid or grossing) apps, sometime during those two weeks.

Four short links: 28 September 2009

Science Blogs, Concussion Games, Packet Sniffer, and an Astonishing Product Name

1. Sci Blogs -- aggregated and hosted blogs from New Zealand scientists and researchers. A planet aggregator has become a key part of building a community, even outside programming.
2. Super Better, or How To Turn Recovery Into a Game -- Jane McGonigal had a concussion, and created a game to keep her doing things that aided her recovery. Interesting discussion of how to build a game around a serious real-life problem. And honestly, people: if she can make concussion into a game, surely you can make your crap websites suck less?
3. Justniffer -- packet sniffer that identifies HTTP requests and emits an Apache-style logfile showing what was requested. (via Simon Willison)
4. Vegemite Names New Spread -- the original name was crowdsourced in 1923. They decided to repeat the process for their new product, a spread made from Vegemite and Cream Cheese. The winning name came from an Australian web designer: "Vegemite iSnack 2.0". This does not appear to be a joke (no mention that the commercial will use music from Rick Astley). Unsure which will make Americans more ill: the name, the idea of eating Vegemite mixed with cream cheese, or the idea of eating Vegemite at all.

Four short links: 7 July 2009

Motivation, R, Games, and Open Source Medicine

1. Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them -- Tests done since 1933 show that people who talk about their intentions are less likely to make them happen. Announcing your plans to others satisfies your self-identity just enough that you’re less motivated to do the hard work needed. I have noticed this myself. It must be balanced against the other finding that public commitment increases probability of followthrough, which might work in sales but seems to fail miserably in getting me to do anything productive. (via migurski on Delicious)
2. Rseek -- search engine for info on R. Necessary because of the non-unique project name. (via Benjamin Mako Hill)
3. Treasure World (Offworld) -- Nintendo DS game that turns wifi spots into collectible treasure. You have to explore the real world as you play the game, another of these games that mix the online and offline worlds. (via waxy)
4. 50 Successful Open Source Projects That Are Changing Medicine -- notice the large number of electronic health record (EHR) suites. What are the chances of any of them getting a slice of Obama's EHR money that the ex-RedHatters behind The Axial Project are going for? (via timoreilly on Twitter)

Four short links: 11 June 2009

Trends, Graffiti, Games, and Streaming Video

1. Trending Topics -- full source code for trendingtopics.org, Wikipedia trend analysis. Rails app running on the Cloudera Hadoop Distribution on EC2. (via mattb on Delicious)
2. Graffiti from Pompeii -- I can't help but read these as Tweets. Herculaneum (on the exterior wall of a house); 10619: Apollinaris, the doctor of the emperor Titus, defecated well here (see also olde style Twitter) (via OvidPerl on Twitter)
3. Online Games Dominate Beijing Startonomics -- presentations from sessions on Chinese game business at Startonomics conference. Though there are many differences between the US and China games market, the one that stands out most is China’s ability to massively monetize games. Tencent, a leading Chinese web portal, social network and game developer, famously announced revenue of over $1 billion earlier this year, much of it coming from their avatar service. (via TinaTranT on Twitter)
4. Ustream's Audience for Apple iPhone Announcement Greater Than Cable News -- Ustream is amazing, you can take a consumer handycam and video broadcast live to a greater audience than many TV shows get.

Four short links: 1 June 2009

Spymaster, Arsenic, Maps, and Happiness

1. Spymaster -- a faux-spy game on Twitter: Each player becomes a master of a spy ring based upon their Twitter followers list. The more people that follow you and are playing characters in Spymaster, the more powerful your network will be. As a spymaster, you can perform tasks or attack other spymasters on Twitter. With each successful attempt, you will gain virtual currency and points that allow you to grow even stronger. I'm nervous that it's a project of a classified ads company, but intelligent friends appear to be enjoying it, but that may just be be the jaded eye of a world-weary veteran of pyramid schemes and spamalots.
2. Getting Arsenic Out Of Water -- MIT Technology Review piece about the IBM discovery that a chemical used to pattern chips also acts as a membrane to remove arsenic. More stuff that matters. (via roterhund on Twitter)
3. Mapumental -- MySociety folks making maps useful. It's the continuation of time travel maps, where bus, train, tram, tube, and ferry timetables are mashed with real estate prices to show you where you can live for what you can afford and how long a commute you want. A new twist is crowdsourced "how scenic is this area?" data, so you can choose other dimensions for where you might want to live. New dimensions on transportation data and travel planning.
4. What Makes Us Happy? (The Atlantic) -- the real world is a lot more complex than trivial "get happy fast!" self-help books would have you believe. This longitudinal study shows how complex happiness and misery are. Vaillant’s other main interest is the power of relationships. “It is social aptitude,” he writes, “not intellectual brilliance or parental social class, that leads to successful aging.” Warm connections are necessary—and if not found in a mother or father, they can come from siblings, uncles, friends, mentors. The men’s relationships at age 47, he found, predicted late-life adjustment better than any other variable, except defenses. Good sibling relationships seem especially powerful: 93 percent of the men who were thriving at age 65 had been close to a brother or sister when younger. In an interview in the March 2008 newsletter to the Grant Study subjects, Vaillant was asked, “What have you learned from the Grant Study men?” Vaillant’s response: “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.” (via timoreilly on Twitter)

Four short links: 4 May 2009

Maps, Africa, Protein, and Rockets

1. Old Japanese Maps on Google Earth Unveil Secrets -- Google criticised for putting up map layers showing the towns where a discriminated-against class came from, because that class is still discriminated against and Google didn't put any "cultural context" around it. Google and their maps didn't make the underclass, Japanese society did. Because they're sensitive about having the problem, they redirect their embarrassment into anger at Google. You could make a long and profitable career in IT consulting simply by charging to say "it's not a technical problem" and you'd be right more times than wrong.
2. See Africa Differently -- using the Internet to reframe a continent. Videos, essays, and more, all designed to get you seeing the majority of Africa, which isn't defined by conflict and famine. (via NY Times book review)
3. Fold.it - Solve Puzzles for Science -- science harnesses our "cognitive surplus" by inviting us to help solve the problem of protein folding, one of the hardest in biology. (via auckland_museum on Twitter)
4. Arduino Telemetry Payload in Class C Rocket (Jon Oxer) -- Because class-C rockets are so small and light they can't lift much of a payload and I had to keep the mass of the electronics as small as possible. You can get a sense of scale from this photo which shows a small white bundle in the bottom of the nosecone. Inside that bundle is an Arduino Pro Mini 5V/16Mhz, a 433Mhz transmitter module, and a Lilypad 3-axis accelerometer. PCBs ... in ... Spaaaaace!

Four short links: 17 Mar 2009

Startups, databases, iPhone app marketplace, and how to launch:

1. Weary of Looking for Work, Some Create Their Own (NY Times) -- a story about a new tide of entrepreneurs forced into it by the economic times. The goal for many entrepreneurs nowadays is not to create a company that will someday make billions but to come up with an idea that will produce revenue quickly, said Jerome S. Engel, director for the center for entrepreneurship at the Berkeley Haas School of Business. Mr. Engel said many people will focus on serving immediate needs for individuals and businesses.
2. Redis -- another key/value pair database, but this time with atomic operations to push and pop. The reinvention of databases continues apace ....
3. Gaming on the iPhone--Natural Selection in Real Time -- as the number of games has risen, the price has dropped. But that's where things have begun to settle, just a short time after the App Store started featuring games for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Five bucks is to the iPhone what sixty bucks is to the PC: the high end of the price scale. And the expectation is that, if you're gonna tempt someone to fork over a Lincoln for your hard work, it had better be something special [...] The iPhone is a relatively easy platform for developing games, where you can generally create a game with a small budget and short development time, and be looking at potentially large returns. But the market has become so crowded with casual games that it has become incredibly hard to get your game noticed.
4. Don't Launch -- an eminently reasonable answer to the question I've often been asked. Don't chicken out and do a closed beta; get real customers in through real renewable channels. Start with a five-dollar-a-day SEM campaign. Iterate as fast and for as long as you can. Don't scale. Don't marketing launch. I love everything this guy writes. If he ever publishes a collection of his laundry lists and telephone doodles, I'll preorder it on Amazon.

Four short links: 20 Feb 2009

Accessibility, trails, Pacman, and power today. Have a fun weekend!

1. Social Accessibility Project -- clever IBM approach to solving web accessibility problems: a sidebar for Firefox that lets people with assistive devices like screenreaders say "hey, I had this problem with this page", and a crowd will help fix it. (via Derek Featherstone's Webstock talk, notes here)
2. Why I Want a Million Quid (mySociety) -- Tom's onto something. I am hooked by this vision of "systems where each person who is helped to solve a problem leaves a trail of advice, contacts, insider information and new user-friendly web services behind them". We're used to the data people leave behind being discrete and implicit (another purchase for the recommendation engine) rather than longitudinal and explicit (people who looked at this item eventually went on to find their answer here).
3. The PacMan Dossier -- everything there is to know about Pacman, from designer Toru Iwatani's inspiration and design process, through to the logic errors behind bugs and why it's better to move the joystick before you reach the turn. (via Grand Text Auto)
4. Two Stanford Students Rethink the Light Switch -- a power switch with a network connection and tactile feedback: teh awesome.

Four short links: 30 Jan 2009

Two serious links and two fun today, thanks to Waxy and BoingBoing:

1. EveryBlock Business Model Brainstorming -- Adrian Holovaty's project was funded by a Knight Foundation grant that's about to run out. The software will be open sourced but he's inviting suggestions of business models that would enable the project team to continue working on it full-time. Having used and created open source to show newspaper companies how to do journalism online, will he now work on an open source way for them to make money?
2. Infrastructure for Modern Web Sites -- Leonard Lin lays out what's required in systems and platforms for modern web sites. Perl succeeded in part because its data types were the things you had to deal with (files, text, sockets). Will the next gen of tools (the 'Rails killer' if you will) offer users, taggable objects, social objects, etc. as primitives?
3. Academic Earth -- takes open courseware from different universities and integrates them into a coherent UI. Transcripts. Slurp.
4. Love2D -- a Lua-based 2D game engine. I'm looking at it to see whether it works for me as the next step for 9 year-old kids interesting in programming games in my computer club.

Four short links: 28 Jan 2009

Sensors, games, recession indicators, and book prep in today's four short links:

1. New Networks Take Nature's Pulse - an article in Christian Science Monitor about sensor networks. Makezine pointed out that hobbyists are building low-cost versions with Arduinos. Sensor networks are part of the "Web meets World" change we're in, where the Web ceases to be something you sit down to interact with. Instead, our everyday life will inform and be informed by the Web in ways we won't realize.
2. Interactive Fiction Goes to Market - a company, Textfyre is readying new text adventure games ("interactive fiction") for the iPhone market. I dream of a day when the text adventure world becomes lucrative again (the tools like Inform are divine) but I can't help think that the iPhone is the wrong platform. The make-believe keyboard makes text entry such a chore that it would seem to count against text adventures. I hope and wish that I am proven wrong and some day the CEO of Textfyre buys the house next to me just so he can build a huge mansion and paint on the walls "Nat Torkington thought the iPhone was the wrong platform for text adventures".
3. You Know It's a Recession When More People Search for Coupons Than Britney Spears - interesting tidbit from Bo Cowgill, who runs Google's internal prediction market. His blog is full of fascinating pointers to prediction market research. Between him and David Pennock, my prediction market cup runneth over.
4. How To Write a Book - Steven Johnson writes, on BoingBoing, how he uses DevonThink to gather and organize his book thoughts and structure before actually sitting down to produce the words. I love reading about the act of literary creation (I have a long shelf of "how to write mystery novel" books that I can almost quote chapter and verse), the way it's so different for every author yet so the output is so similar.

Four short links: 27 Jan 2009

Fantasy, feedback, facts, and flies, all will be revealed in today's links of loops and life:

1. Blueful - a story told in text, but delivered through the medium of web sites. It's like an xkcd cartoon embodied in the web. Interesting, artistic, and makes you look at web sites in a new way. From Aaron A. Reed.
2. The Case Against Candy Land - Steven Johnson talks about how dull the children's games of our youth are. "What’s irritating about the games is that they are exercises in sheer randomness. It’s not that they fail to sharpen any useful skills; it’s that they make it literally impossible for a player to acquire any skills at all." Every process in life should have a feedback loop that lets you get better at it.
3. Journo Data - a Guardian journalist publishes data resources about the US economy as Google spreadsheets. This is the start of something interesting, where the raw data is available from journalists not just the (textual or programmatic) interpretation. As mentioned in the fantastic presentation Tim just linked to, access to the data behind our world view is essential if we are to critically assess that world view.
4. Userfly - a usability tool that records and then recreates your users' sessions on your web site, so you can see where and when they type, click on, backtrack, etc. (via

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Four short links: 9 Jan 2009

Four questions, one per link: what next, can it solve a big problem, what's the final boss for Python programming, and why on earth would anyone want yogurt that glows in the dark?

1. End Times - gloomy piece on the future of journalism, to be added to the large pile of other gloomy pieces on the future of journalism (e.g., Bad News, Good News). The critical problem is still how to pay for journalism if the new media revenues are significant lower than old, and if the new media economics decree that journalism is dead then who fills the social good role that journalism's death will leave?
2. Ward Cunningham's Visible Workings - an intriguing glimpse, from March last year, into the way Ward lays out web interactions. Nice system for laying out these interactions, but it's also fascinating for how it makes transparent what will happen as a result of the data you submit. How scalable is this? Could it tackle privacy?
3. Project Euler - fun programming exercises that require more than math to finish. We learn by doing, not by reading, so interesting exercises are part and parcel of training. It's interesting to see educators are moving from being authors to being game designers, providing a series of staged challenges that make us stronger by defeating them. I'm presently dieing in as many ways as I can while learning iterators and generators in Python, as a way of ensuring I have Python's "game physics" sussed.
4. Rise of the Garage Genome Hackers - more on hobbyist molecular biology. It mentions DIYBio, the Cambridge biohacker collective that I first heard about at BioBarCamp. (via Glynn Moody)

Asynchronous Multiplayer Mobile Gaming

With all the news on Friday about Apple's release of iPhone OS 2.2, there was another iPhone news item that got less attention than it deserved. Two young iPhone developers, Danielle Cassley and Jason Citron, released the sequel to their much-acclaimed iPhone puzzle game, Aurora Feint. Aurora Feint II: The Arena (iTunes link) introduces the concept of 'casual asynchronous massively multiplayer online gaming' for iPhone. That's a mouthful, merging a number of distinct terms into one. Let's break that down into its individual pieces:

• Casual games have simple rulesets and can be played in a short amount of time, such as Blackjack or Mindsweeper.
• Asynchronous games allow for people to participate without playing at the same time, such as turn-based games like Chess or Scrabble.
• Massively multiplayer online games have persistent, shared worlds, such as World of Warcraft or for you parents of youngsters out there, Club Penguin.

This combination of gaming elements is very appealing in the mobile market. It's a perfect lifestyle fit. People want to play games in short increments of time. This may be during a commute on public transit or waiting in the doctor's office. People want to play games on their own schedule. Not every player in a game can dedicate the same period of time to participate. People want to play games with real people, especially people they know. A shared game world provides this opportunity.

Aurora Feint II accomplishes this through the use of 'ghosts'. A human player builds up a character in the game world that has the ability to act autonomously while the player is offline. The player's ghost can be challenged in the game world at any time, and when the player returns to the game world, the ghost can be controlled directly. It's a novel approach and solves a number of problems with people wanting to play with their friends on their own schedules.

Casual asynchronous massively multiplayer online gaming is going to be a hot market for game developers and it's a natural fit for mobile devices. Expect to see more iPhone titles like this in the near future.

Games & Markets: Rules Matter

As children (or even now as adults) most of us enjoyed games, whether they are sports, video games, board games, whatever. The defining quality in any of these pastimes is the ability to win in direct competition with others. What makes these games enjoyable is that once the rules are learned or agreed to by participants, skill should become evident as the winner emerges. Sure, luck is an element, but a firm strategy and great tactical moves in a game like Risk make a difference. They also allow a player to exhibit his skill. Even in the case of my own childhood, growing up on the streets of NYC, everyone knew and agreed on which buildings were in foul territory for a game of stickball. The same is true in markets.

Today we have entered a period in American financial history where the rules we lived by for so long have vanished. Markets are supposed to determine value as well as winners and losers. If a Firm employs a bad strategy in the game, it becomes evident in the stock price. Investors are rational even in their irrationality. The reason people pull their assets from the market at this point is simple--a fear of losing further, given uncertainty. This uncertainty, which started in mortgages, has now been exacerbated by the uncertainty and inconsistency of both the Fed and Treasury’s intervention into US markets. The Government’s inconsistent actions of choosing who will live or die in the battles of Bear Run, Lehman’s Crossing and AIGs-burg have given investors agita. Increased violations of a prime market rule: either you have moral hazard or you don’t. There is a reason Star Trek captains had a Prime Directive.

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