sjsivak

> Adobe failed to deliver, plain and simple.

Hardly. While HTML5 is great, most of the animations I have tested out still red line my processor. While you can hate Flash Player all you want (and I hope HTML5 takes over), artists will still need an authoring tool like Flash CS to do anything useful with HTML5.

This is really awesome.

This really showcases what I think HTML5 will be great for: procedural/algorithmic content.

I think Flash will still be king until someone creates an authoring tool that can allow artists to easily animate something like this.

Someone go ahead and make that tool, I will buy it.

From the article: "Doing these kinds of analyses is notoriously imprecise, in some cases amounting to little more than guesswork."

That is does not paint a very good picture, and when looking into the actual report and what industries are considered: "...rise of the digital economy, as fair use permits a range of activities that are critical to many high technology businesses, including search portals and web hosting."

I would bet that any user-generated content website is considered, and who knows what else.

From the end of the article: "... the task force should freeze their investigation, return Chen's property, and reconsider whether going after journalists for trying to break news about one of the Valley's most secretive (and profitable) companies is a good expenditure of taxpayer dollars."

If someone purchased stolen property, why does it matter who it came from? In my eyes, the analyst loses a lot of credibility with this final statement. Feels childish.

I think this is just a symptom of a greater issue. Many of us assume that when we post something on the internet (facebook) it should be private. The reality is that you are handing your information over to another entity, and you are doing so willingly. That entity has vast resources and the ability to change the terms of service and rules at will.

If you just have the mindset that anything you share on facebook will be posted on a billboard in Times Square, you can know for sure that you are getting the privacy you want.

I have been sent a handful of these spammy emails. I would not be so concerned if they did not start out with a straight up lie. The emails I see always have something like, "Did you get the email I sent you last? Please confirm your speaking arrangement below."

The first time I got one I searched high and low for the "previous email" and it did not exist. I knew then to google it and that is where it was confirmed as spam in like 2006. And did I mention I am not a CIO...

This is an interesting update on Bartle's Taxonomy of Players (http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm) from back in the MUD days. Sadly, this article is a little dated if you check out the list of games used (Dark Ages of Camelot, Star Wars Galaxies). I would love to see results from a survey like this that used players from Farmville, Mafia Wars and Restaurant City.

1. I have no idea what obligations Yelp has, legally or otherwise.

2. Legal definition of extortion (IANAL): The use, or the express or implicit threat of the use, of violence or other criminal means to cause harm to person, reputation, or property as a means to obtain property from someone else with his consent.

Seems like (to my untrained and uneducated self) that this would be Yelp damaging the Company's reputation because the Company refused to pay Yelp.

That is not it at all. The lawsuit claims (from what I read in the article) that the issue is before turning down an offer to advertise on the site for $300 a month, the company had a 4.5 star rating. Two days after the refusal, the company claims that six out of seven 5 star reviews were removed (by Yelp).

This is about being forced to pay to keep your good reviews, not about page views. The company is just saying that with a reduced rating they saw less traffic, which is to be expected.

They already exist and are called facebook credits: http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=1038

I would think your best option is to carpool with those people who are already driving. Luxury public transit already exists in most cities with private limo and car services, and at least here in Boston it is very expensive compared to the cost of a T pass. While I also hate the smell of pee (I can't say anything about the customer service because basically everything here is automated), I am fine with it since it is only $60 a month.

Am I the only person that really hoped "unbig.me" was a weight-loss related app? And the banner at the top reads "Use unbig.me to to shorten your link and earn $". Obviously you should remove the "to to" and overall that just feels like someone talking in txt to me, which I hate.

I do not use the sites listed in the article, but I have found that Epicurious (http://www.epicurious.com/) has plenty of bad recipes that are rated as such. I have had good success following the ratings and checking the comments on the recipes before trying them.

Of course, with any crowd sourced system it is good to take the time to really read through who you are getting your trusted advice from. I still remember reading a review of a Korean restaurant on yelp that had two or three one star reviews because "they did not have sushi".

I do not think anyone is asking for all of Mahalo to be blocked. The major issue is the insane amount of auto-generated pages that are not given a noindex call and are also added to the site map xml file.

These actions appear to be conscious choices to make sure that google will index these pages, which according to several sources, have nothing but "scraped" content and are therefore spam.

The talk is the excellent, the video is terrible and does not show the slides at all. You can view the slides here: http://www.slideshare.net/jesseschell/beyond-facebook

Good point. The dev commentary for Half-Life 2 and Portal is really awesome, and very useful for level designers. For Half-Life 2 they talk a bunch about setting up dramatic scenes and in Portal they cover a lot of the ways they had to stop people from cheating. The Portal one is great for really learning how to do a great interactive tutorial. I remember a specific part where they talk about why they had to place a wall in a certain spot so that people would learn to use the portal gun in a specific way.

Good level design is a closely guarded secret, but you can break-down and study all the great levels yourself. However, some really interesting stuff can be found on the World Creation chapter of the World of Warcraft: Behind the Scenes DVD. Chris Metzen starts by talking about how important it was for them to get the trees to feel right before they could really do anything else. It is pretty fascinating.

A note somewhat related to level design that I am always reminded of is OldManMurray's Time to Crate review system for games: http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/39.html

True, but if you were also trying to play Left 4 Dead 2, Modern Warfare 2 and Bioshock 2 you would be in a worse spot.

Even if you just focused on a single game like World of Warcraft, there is enough content and stuff to do that you would probably use up all your leisure time.

I have a monstrous backlog of games I feel I should play, sitting right next to the pile of books I should read and movies I should watch. Sadly, I have accepted the fact that I will never be able to get through them all.

Drucker's problem is that he is trying to enjoy the "kitchen sink" of the game industry. This is like saying you enjoy cooking as your hobby and then you try to learn the best culinary techniques of French, Spanish, Italian, Thai, and Creole. You can't expect to become a master and experience everything in all of these areas.

My Advice: Pick the platform or genre you enjoy the most and focus on those games. You will never get to sample them all.

Here is a good explanation of Persistence of vision which relates to how the Human Eye actually sees motion. In reality, your eye does not work in frames.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_of_vision

And here is a breakdown of Motion Perception:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_perception

Sure, you can try to discredit me because I just graduated from grad school this spring, but I have been making games for a while. To be honest I have never heard of Jeff Vogel before nor have I heard of Spiderweb Software, therefore I have not played any of his games. This is not an attack on him, he seems to be a successful indie game developer.

I realize he wrote a whole article, I did not read it all, just the bold stuff. This sort of idea about difficulty has been sprouting up since casual games hit the main stream a few years ago. Most people seem to think casual games got so popular because they are so easy, I totally disagree. That is what my comment was based on.

As for making the game "too easy" (notice I said "too easy") being the worst thing, how much fun is it to play an 8 year old in basketball? How fun is it to play chess against someone that has never played before? How many games have you been bored with because they are too easy. Making a game too easy is bad, it will just make players stop playing. The key is finding the balance between difficulty and skill (go ahead and graph it based on your playtesting surveys) and riding that curve up and to the right the entire way.

The reward can be independent of difficulty. The reward is juicy feedback. It is empowering. The problem is most people assume the reward must be something relevant to the game mechanics, like a bigger sword, but that is not true. The reason I used Peggle as an example is because user feedback basically has nothing to do with the actual game. The fireworks, soundtrack, bling-y graphics, all of that is what puts the game over the top. You think that the extravaganza that happens at the end of each level has any impact on the difficulty of the game? No, it just makes the player feel awesome. Sure, it is not as tough as Ikaruga, but have you tried the Master Levels? They are not easy. The feedback is not part of the difficulty.

As for the actual bold parts of that article:

"People will forgive a game for being too easy. They will never forgive it for being too hard." (I switched it since he disagrees with the opposite)

Eh, I guess. But there have been times when I have died while playing the game and I did not blame the game, I blamed my skill. It was not the game's fault. It is bad to make a game too difficult, just as bad as it is to make a game too easy.

"People will happily forgive a game for being too easy, because it makes them feel badass. If a game is too hard, they will get angry, ragequit, hold a grudge, and never buy your games again."

My whole argument is that you do not need to make the game easy to make the player feel badass. Even then, if the game is too easy players will think it is pedestrian and not play it.

"When a player is on the default difficult level, has built his or her characters poorly, and is playing straight through the main storyline with mediocre tactics, that player should almost never be killed."

I would think this is a problem with the tutorial or how complicated the game is. It should be straight forward to see progression of most players and know roughly at what point they would be at throughout the game. If they do not know how to play (have mediocre tactics) that is probably not a difficulty problem. I would look at what made the player think those choices were good, and then try to figure out how you can reinforce the right ones with juicy feedback.

TOO LONG DID NOT READ VERSION: Your game might not be too difficult, it might just need more/better feedback for the user to make them feel awesome. If your game is too easy it will fail, probably the same way if it is too hard.

People often confuse "making a game easy" with "making a game rewarding". The worst thing you can do is make your game too easy, the best thing you can do is reinforce every single correct user action with positive feedback and a reward.

The almighty example: Peggle.

Von Ahn just has teaching envy for Randy:

http://www.thelastlecture.com/

Although I never took a class with either, I was at the Last Lecture and went to the Entertainment Technology Center (the program Randy built with Don Marinelli). Every time I saw Von Ahn speak he did not hold a candle to what I saw Randy do.

When CS5 comes out everyone will be able to make flash apps directly for the iPhone right? It seems a pretty hefty cost to hand over half your revenue just for a slightly early release and "shepherding" through the app store approval process.

Sure, they probably were not the first ones to come up with the idea of bringing a social farm game to facebook either. However, it is clear that once Zynga and Playfish found this idea they could rapidly turn it around too.

It is a bit scary as a small developer to know that you need to share your idea with publishers, but to also realize that they can turn around and dump so much money on your idea that they could produce something much much faster that you cant even hope to compete with them.

It is just a different climate than web based startups. Console game especially are pretty much not possible without publishers, which is not something a 3 man web startup ever really has to worry about.

If VCs were keeping tech teams in house that could potentially jump an idea i think the startup community might see the value of ideas a bit differently.

The idea may not be, but the moment it becomes a demo it can be worth quite a lot. The story, characters and gameplay can be very valuable, it is how the idea is sold to publishers. This is just like scripts in the movie industry. Most publishers have internal studios, that could possibly be sitting idle. While it is not often done, there is the opportunity for a publisher to move on a developer's idea much faster than the developer could.

The video game industry is brutal, especially with people doing copy cat projects. Look at the current farm games on facebook. The first one was FarmTown, made by a small group. Now some of the facebook powerhouses have released the exact same game with nearly identical gameplay and even similar art (FarmVille from Zynga and Country Story from Playfish).

Or just look at the rivalry between Rock Band and Guitar Hero.

The execution is still worth much more, but I think there is still a need to protect the idea.

Is anyone else really curious what sort of degree the author of this article has? I just graduated in May and almost everyone I know with a CS or engineering degree found jobs pretty easily. It was only the bottom of the barrel that struggled, and even most of those people still managed to find something in their field.

They did a good job by being honest and I think it is probably a great idea to get out of the online job recruitment sector.

I just wish they would have read over that goodbye note, or at least spell checked it.

Having mutating rules is a pretty organic and dynamic game design idea. One other game that does this really well is called Fluxx: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluxx

The actual game flOw (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(video_game)) came out of this research. The use of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's theories of flow have been part of game design for a long time, and most of the stuff in the thesis is basically common sense with a few interesting thinking points.

Some other great literature on games that also discuss flow can be found in Jesse Schell's book (http://www.amazon.com/Art-Game-Design-book-lenses/dp/0123694...) or in Steve Swink's book (http://www.amazon.com/Game-Feel-Designers-Sensation-Kaufmann...).

(edit: no coffee yet)