How to fix Cow Clicker

Published at July 19, 2010 in Games, facebook and game design. 6 Comments

Ian Bogost created Cow Clicker, according to this tweet, as “a Facebook game about Facebook games.” And I do get it. It’s funny. Ha ha. Okay now but seriously, it could be better.

Ian, if you’re paying attention, here’s how to improve your Facebook game about Facebook games.

1) Reduce the Click Window: Currently I can only click my cow once every six hours. MouseHunt lets me sound the hunter’s horn every 15 MINUTES. And I can cook cheeseburgers in Café World in only five. Procrastination and distraction operate on fairly tight cycles. How often do we refresh our RSS Readers? Our Twitter pages? Facebook? Try a 15 minute window. Let me click my cow every 15 minutes.

2) Make the Stream Stories Actually DO Something: You’re spoofing the infamous “Lost Cow” viral, but you’ve missed why it started a trend. People aren’t clicking cows for their health. They’re clicking them because they get something for it (namely, a cow). If a newsfeed is not incentivized, it’s only valuable as advertising to new players, and a reminder to those who haven’t played recently. When incentivized, every player has a reason to click it. Click click click.

Try awarding one Click to each player who clicks a Cow Clicker Stream Story. And while you’re at it, award one Click back to the poster for each player who clicked. All your newsfeeds do right now is breach the platform policy (VI.A.1, if you’re curious).

3) Prime the Mooney Pump: Paying players are a little like vampires. Once they’ve tasted blood, it’s hard to stop. Wet their fangs with 15 Mooney — enough for one low-level cow, and enough left over to make them want to reach for cooler cows.

You can then keep priming the pump with small amounts of Mooney awarded to players. Create a low instance in which upon clicking, a cow in your pasture will, ahem, “drop” some Mooney. More cows in your pasture means higher chance of Mooney droppings, means more of a reason to invite friends.

4) Send me a Highland Coo: I guess this won’t actually help you in any way, but they just look so fuzzy.

Sight Unseen

Published at July 9, 2010 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

In a recent video, Zero Punctuation’s Yahtzee Croshaw described Nintendo’s 3DS — first introduced at E3 — as “a concept that is literally impossible to demonstrate in picture or in video, which rather shoots the advertising potential in the foot.”

A snicker-worthy comment, but one that touches upon an interesting problem that’s been increasing in relevancy over the last decade.

The earliest I remember it was on some of my favorite VHS tapes: ads “showing” the impressive sights and sounds available on those fancy new DVD things.

More recently it’s television commercials “showing” us the superior color and clarity of High Definition Television — as viewed on our inferior standard definition TV’s.

And now, it’s Nintendo trying to “show” us their new 3D technology, and Apple trying to “show” us their impressive new Retina Display. But how do you advertise a feature that’s beyond the spectrum of what your advertising medium can do?

The Nintendo 3DS is reportedly quite a thing to behold, but unless you’re actually beholding it in person, you have no way of witnessing the portable’s magical no-glasses 3D effect. Nintendo’s solution? Hundreds of women with 3DS’s tethered to their persons, to give the audience at their E3 keynote an opportunity to see the devices up close.

Likewise, Steve Jobs remarked during Apple’s unveiling of the iPhone 4 that they had to install a special digital projector just to give the WWDC keynote audience a better idea of the clarity and depth of the phone’s “Retina Display” resolution.

It’ll be interesting to see how Nintendo chooses to approach marketing the 3DS when it’s closer to launch, and I’m very curious to see if Apple ever plans on making a bigger deal of the Retina Display in their ads (thus far, only one iPhone 4 ad has aired, focused entirely on their FaceTime video calling feature).

In the meantime, enjoy the short spec ad I threw together for the iPhone, in a posthumous collaboration with John Hughes.

Foursquare: games, services, and game-like services

Published at July 5, 2010 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the link-bait.

I worked alongside Dennis Crowley at area/code over the summer of 2007, so it’s been fun for me to watch the meteoric rise of Foursquare. From its debut at SXSW in early 2009, to its $20 million Series B round announced just last week, I’m incredibly happy for Dens and his growing Foursquare family.

(I also feel slightly vindicated for all those times my friends poked fun at me for “checking in” wherever we went last year. So there’s that.)

Foursquare is an incredibly fun service, improving dramatically over the experience offered by Dodgeball — Dennis’s former startup. But it’s also a service somewhat at odds with itself.

At its core, Foursquare is both a competitive location-based game, and a collaborative location-based communication service. That’s a little wordy, but here’s how it plays out in user stories:

Foursquare the Game:
As a player, I want to check in, and become the Mayor of, as many places as possible.

Foursquare the Service:
As a user, I want to let my friends know where I am, and find out where my friends are.

There’s obviously a great deal more to the service (the incredibly helpful Tips and To-Do’s, and the increasingly promising promotional deals and venue specials), but in both instances Foursquare is fundamentally about the relationship between the user, her social network, and the venues.

So here’s the rub: As a game, Foursquare is easily exploitable. Users can create venues (like their own apartments), check in to locations without even walking in the door, and capitalize on Mayorships in places in which they might have an unfair advantage (like a place of employment).

Foursquare could crack down more heavily on these “game exploits”, but those restrictions would work against the service.

At the end of the day, this makes Foursquare less a game, and more a game-like service. It’s an interesting and quickly-growing category, and Foursquare’s proudly paving the way for a more playful and game-like approach to social media. I just can’t wait to see what’s next.

Pardon our dust.

Published at May 3, 2010 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment


Sorry folks. In the midst of a transition to a new blog template. Apologies for the rough edges.

The Window in Which to Impress

Published at September 2, 2009 in general. 0 Comments

I have too many friends who are unemployed, or otherwise occupied by occupations beneath them. The thing is, they’re all awesome. These are talented, brilliant people whose paper CVs fail to properly convey the whole of their skills.

We recognize that there is a vastness to one’s expertise that easily exceeds the bounds of an 8.5×11 page, which is why I suppose interviews are conducted. But the market is so flooded that even qualified candidates are being phased out before the interview stage. The window in which to impress has gotten smaller, which is why the resume/cover letter combo have an unrealistic amount of weight placed upon them.

The only recourse is to redefine the new candidate experience. Deliver more info in less time. The key to all of this is your online identity. It’s what happens when an employer sticks your name in Google, and I’m calling it the Real-Time Resume.

Spam Poetry: Springtime for Twitter

Published at August 17, 2009 in general and spam poetry. 0 Comments

From: Kathie Lugo «siphono@redvips.com»
Subject: Springtime for Twitter
Date: April 23, 2009 3:21:12 AM PDT

and that made me think of all the insomniatic nights that she stayed up with me and mirrored my every move and snuggled me right out of my anxiety into dreamland long after grant and cate had drifted off

what do you look for in a best friend

the girl loves a project i mean LOVES it was like so fun to her to print them off plan how she wanted to present them go to the store for candy sign and put them together she just bossed me around and made sure i tied the string right

1 luce 2 Untitled 3 Working 4 Stove Top

i couldnt find a video of him performing it but listen to the lyrics

ten months after we were married i was a stay at home mom living the student life again while grant went back to school a few months later another unplanned event- my mom passed away suddenly

me um we didnt have disney games when i was five
we lived on a corner in a typical oc tract neighborhood

i really really need my bedroom to be simple and uncluttered and white for calming purposes you know what i mean
from toast

all the sudden im 30 i thought id be driving a mini van full of kids and happily decorating my own home but life has shown me again that i am not in control and as i wait for more children and a sense of being settled

what im listening to this morningagain

my room is clean and im knitting

like this one for instance my older brother uploaded it while reminiscing about the old buggie he rebuilt in the 80s

cate and i went through some of the free options around the web for valentines to download and print

breakfast i always have two eggs and salsa always i dont really get sick of it and it would really stink if i did because theres not a lot out there for breakfast actually when you are at your ideal weight and ovulating regularly you can have any kind of whole grain hot cereal without a problem you know steel cut oats etc i am not quite there yet berries and grapes are pretty low on the glycemic index and i have those too oh and i love cottage cheese with fruit
snacks NUTS i would die without nuts i love roasted almonds cashews peanuts i also love those roasted edamame they taste like nuts even though theyre not and nuts taste really good with a few slices of swiss cheese also deli meat slices celery with peanut butter on it a few whole grain crackers with cheese beef jerky sugar free snack packs stuffed mushrooms hard boiled eggs string cheese protein bars crudites and more NUTS

plan to be surprised

off to the kindergarten valentines day party

i never thought life would then take me to utah to attend byu and then off to serve as a missionary for a year and a half but it did and it was hardest most surprising most rewarding experience of my life

What Twitter does for customer service

Published at August 13, 2009 in general. 0 Comments

Within a day of posting both tirade and tweet against them, Simplenote’s devs contacted me directly via Twitter reply, blog comment, and personal email apologizing for the password change user-experience, and pledging to fix it for the next build. It’s already been fixed, and I’ve been using Simplenote non-stop ever since.

Fact is, Simplenote’s devs did exactly the right thing. They addressed the problem directly, and humanized themselves. And they did it using Twitter, the humanizing service.

I like referring to Twitter as a “flattening” kind of platform. It’s the type of site where Shaquille O’Neal can have the same banal posts about sandwiches as this person. It proves that celebrities are (spoiler alert!) people too, and it’s where people go to interact with other people, on an uninteresting, sammich-eating level.

So when a company tweets at you — and especially when they @reply to you — it doesn’t feel like a company. It feels like a person. And the weird thing is that it happens a lot.

On my account alone, I’ve gotten replies to complaints/concerns/questions lobbed at game studios, ISPs, software devs, WWDC party hosts, business card printers, and even, erm, artsy erotica sites. Every time, the attention paid on a single-customer level is surprising, and even frustrating experiences and lame parties just feel better when someone makes that tiny effort.

What does Twitter do for customer service? It makes it not feel like customer service; it makes it feel like people. And that’s kinda cool.

Simplenote User Experience FAIL

Published at July 22, 2009 in general. 2 Comments

Hey, here’s a fun exercise. Pay $1.99 for Simplenote, an iPhone note-taking app that came heartily recommended by John Gruber as a be-all, end-all replacement for Apple’s native Notes app, largely because it features syncing.

Write a few notes. Remark that the UI is sparse but easy to use.

Now register a Simplenote account for syncing. And while you’re typing in your password, mistype a few keystrokes because — let’s be honest — typing on the iPhone isn’t always a perfect science. Since there’s no “confirm password” field (where you would normally type your password a second time for just this purpose), click Done.

Now try to login to the web app. Discover your password isn’t working. Click the “Forgot your password?” prompt, and once you receive it, realize you typed it in wrong. Whoops, but it happens. Now try to change the password using the iPhone app.

Oh wait, you can’t.

Hmm, okay. Well, you can change it on the web app, so do so.

Now go back to enjoying Simplenote. Ride the Muni, wait in long lines, and use Simplenote to record brilliant diatribes, award-winning blog entries, and first-draft formats for your fabulously well-received Keynote presos. Giggle to yourself as you marvel that every last character is (presumably) syncing to the web effortlessly.

Wait a few days and log in to the web app, and notice that all your diatribes, blog entries, preso notes, etc., aren’t there. Hunh.

So go back to the iPhone app, go into settings and force sync. Notice the tiny little “sync error” message that appears in the lower right, with no popup dialog telling you that a major, bullet-point feature of this paid app is failing for some unexplained reason.

Now remember that password kerfuffle from a few days back, and use your Holmesian logic to deduce that the iPhone app doesn’t know the new password — just the old mistyped one.

So go into the app’s settings to “Change Login Details.” Get a big scary confirmation prompt warning you that changing those details will erase all non-synced notes. As in, all the notes that haven’t been syncing because the passwords didn’t match. As in, the exact opposite of what you want to have happen.

Spew rage about this whole ridiculous process on Twitter, take a deep breath, and e-mail yourself all your notes one-by-one. Then change account details to the new password. Now copy and paste the emailed notes into the web app. Hit “Force sync” just to make sure they copy over.

Plan your diatribe against Simplenote. But do it in TextEdit just to be safe.

I’m working on “omg hire me”

Published at August 19, 2008 in game design and general. 1 Comment

As I mentioned in my last post, next month’s Escapist game is a board game called “omg hire me.” It’s about the mundanity of job searching, and specifically about the “loop” practiced during this process.

Unlike some of my other titles, the game design is not straightforward. As is typical for me, I know what I want the game to feel like, but I don’t know how to get there. So far, the gameplay is divided into several stages, which comprise the loop:

  1. Update Resume
  2. Search for Jobs
  3. Compose Cover Letter/Application
  4. Rinse and Repeat

Every time a player completes this loop, they increase the likelihood of being called in for an interview. The interview itself is a separate minigame, the successful completion of which increases the odds of actually receiving a job offer (and thus winning the game — I’m not even dealing with salary negotiations as a mechanic).

At the moment, job interviews and job offers are handled by two separate dice. If a player completes the search loop, they receive a number from 1 to 20. Every round, the interview die (a d20) is rolled. If your number is rolled, you enter the interview event. Successfully completing the interview earns you a number for the job offer die (a d10 or d12), which is also rolled each round. If one of your job offer numbers is rolled, you win.

So basically, it’s all about luck. Just like a real job search!

I’m at WordCamp. It’s time to update my blog.

Published at August 16, 2008 in meta and my games. 0 Comments

Attending WordCamp seems like as good a time as any to start posting here again. I fell off the wagon a bit recently — new jobs tend to have that effect — but I hope to get back in the habit of musing about game design. Starting… later.

I’m still publishing over at the Escapist. This past month’s game is Turfy, a Risk/DiceWars-inspired game about jungle gym warfare. It’s not the game I originally intended on publishing. I’m hoping to polish that one and get it up end of this month. It’s called “omg hire me,” and it’s semi-autobiographical.

On the topic of WordCamp, it’s always nice working in an environment of like-minded individuals. Yes, I came to a conference to get work done. I’m weird like that.