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Comment by comice | Hacker News Reader

Must admit that this seems a bit creepy to me! I guess he's just amused but I wonder if it starts him thinking, is this game monitoring me personally? How else can I be targeted?

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Well, given that he retweeted a tweet that had the explanation of how it worked, and he added the #BestFansInTheGalaxy hashtag I think he's OK. But really, I probably wouldn't have done anything like this for another celebrity, if Bruce Willis had tweeted I wouldn't try to make a Hans Gruber avatar or anything :D

If Bruce Willis Tweets, you should totally make a chubby black cop named "Al" for his opponent.

If he rolls a Yahtzee, you could make it pop up a message that says "Yippee Ki Yay, Roy!"

Because of my near-encyclopedia knowledge of 80s pop culture, I just had a bunch of ideas. Then again, who knows how many 80s celebrities are playing your game.

Ahah, don't try this with Liam Neeson, or he's gonna find his way up to you and kick your ass.

With Liam Neeson, I'd try a different tack. I'd make the opponent Joey Rosselini.

I'd make it The Beast from Krull.

Bruce Wayne... Bill Cutting... Darth Maul... the possibilities are endless!

What about Jar Jar Binks? But perhaps that would be too evil.

Or, worse, try out some improv.

He pretty much has to respond positively. Otherwise people would shit all over him for not being a "good sport."

Are you seriously so cynical that you can't even imagine that someone else could enjoy something? That's sad.

Well... Hans Gruber is not John McClane's father though...

Well if he wanted to play privately why would he post it publicly on Twitter?

I felt the same way reading the article. At the places I've worked there's a (sometimes informal) "personal information firewall" between production data and engineering, where employees could not correlate user accounts with actual people's personal info. Plenty of anonymized data to help make product decisions but no ability for rank-and-file employees to figure out "user 14339 is Mark Hamill". Scary!

Except that he also doesn't have that information. All he has is the picture that the user posted himself, that isn't linked to a user account since there aren't any.

There are no user accounts on the site, and there is no tracking of any users. I simply saw the avatar image that he posted and targeted that, so probably a few random users got Darth Vader as well.

Also, even if there were user accounts, this is a one man shop, so it would be hard for me to build a firewall between myself and myself :)

Ahh, makes more sense, thanks for responding!

This is a lovely story and I'm glad you got the response you did from Mark.

Just wondering, as one one man shop, did you have to negotiate for rights to the Yahtzee name & mechanics?

Given what other far more invasive targeting exists which most people don't notice at all, I doubt it.

Not targeting my reply to you, @cornice, directly. But how did the world end up being so paranoid?

I meant more specifically people like Mark Hamill. I'm sure celebrities feel under constant surveillance from fans. Feels like this might be taking it to another level.

But obviously he chose to tweet about it in the first place, so it presumably doesn't bother him much.

I guess on the 'constant surveillance' bit, it seems relevant that someone who knows Mark personally reached out to the site maker and suggested that he'd like this. That (plus the fact that the site doesn't actually have accounts or user data) really lowers the level of "strangers watching me" in play here.

Probably because the next person will take this well intentioned and well executed idea and take it a step too far.

Totally! Because no one has ever thought to combine public information with their access to privileged information to target a specific individual ... until now!

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