Video: OK Go’s "Needing/Getting"

[Yet another stunningly cool video from OK Go. -egg]

Video: OK Go’s “Needing/Getting”:

Here is OK Go’s excellent video for “Needing/Getting.” And yes, it was done “in partnership” with the maker of that particular car. According to the video description, the car “was outfitted with retractable pneumatic arms designed to play the instruments, and the band recorded this version of Needing/Getting, singing as they played the instrument array with the car… There are no ringers or stand-ins; Damian took stunt driving lessons. Each piano had the lowest octaves tuned to the same note so that they’d play the right note no matter where they were struck.”


Ian Bogost: the sarcastic game dev and academic who gave us Cow Clicker

[Holy shit. -egg]

Ian Bogost: the sarcastic game dev and academic who gave us Cow Clicker:

In Wired, Jason Tanz tells the bizarre, incredible tale of how Ian Bogost’s satirical Facebook game “Cow Clicker” became an actual, successful game, despite being designed to show how incredibly stupid and pointless the FarmVille-style Facebook games of the day were. Cow Clicker stripped the FarmVille model to its barest bones: it presented you with a picture of a cow that you could click at fixed intervals. Your friends could also click the cow. You could buy fake money (“moola”) and spend it to get extra clicks. Every click generated a Facebook update: “I’m clicking a cow.” Those with the most-clicked cows appeared on a leaderboard.

Cow Clicker became a top-rated Facebook game, with tens of thousands of players.

The Cow Clicker description appears in a longer article about Bogost’s provocative and curious career as a games academic and designer, which has seen him design games intended to simulate the boredom of staffing TSA checkpoints; sticking to a diet; working a hateful counter-service job at Kinko’s, and growing produce faster than e. coli can contaminate it.


Bogost considers A Slow Year to be one of his most important works. And yet, in the months leading up to its publication, he found himself drawn to its evil twin, Cow Clicker. Initially, Bogost planned to launch Cow Clicker and let the game run its course. But now that people were actually playing it, he felt an obligation to sustain the experience. When his server melted under the unexpected demand, he was besieged by complaints until he signed up for a cloud-computing service to handle the load. Social-game developers, many of whom saw the game as good-natured ribbing, suggested ways to improve it: Let players earn mooney by clicking one another’s newsfeed updates, for instance, which would further encourage them to spam their friends. Bogost added the feature, which he called “click on your clicks.” He also added transparently stupid prizes—bronze, silver, and golden udders and cowbells—that people could win only by amassing an outlandish number of points. (A golden cowbell, for instance, requires 100,000 clicks.)

On one level, this was all part of the act. Bogost was inhabiting the persona of a manipulative game designer, and therefore it made sense to pull every dirty trick he could to make the game as sticky and addictive as possible. But as he grew into the role, he got a genuine thrill from his creation’s popularity. Instead of addressing a few hundred participants at a conference, he was sharing his perspective with tens of thousands of players, many of whom checked in several times a day. Furthermore, every time he made the game better, he received some positive bit of feedback—more players, a nice review, a funny comment on his Facebook page. Tweaking the game was almost like a game itself: Finish a task, receive a reward.

The Curse of Cow Clicker: How a Cheeky Satire Became a Videogame Hit

(via JWZ)


User Manual First

User Manual First:

In the old days (before the web) you could not read the operating manual or instructions for an appliance, device, or tool until you got it home and unpacked it. Getting the manual was considered one of the benefits of purchasing the product. In fact, you had to purchase extra copies if you lost the original, or wanted to check it out. It was often only later when you finally had the box opened that you discovered a) it did not permit the function you bought it for, or b) it was a quarter inch smaller than it looked and so didn’t fit, or c) it was incompatible with the assessors set you already had, or d) it had no manual!

Those days are gone. You can find a PDF version of the manual for most products on the web if you search hard enough. It is not as easy as it should be, but the smarter manufacturers make it easy to download the specs of whatever they sell.

That leads to this new rule: get the manual first, before you buy.

For a large home remodel I had to purchase a pile of new appliances, lights, plumbing fixtures, hardware, materials, gadgets, and some tools. I instituted a “Manual First, Buy Later” policy, and it had immediate positive effects. Once I identified a possible candidate for purchase, I would google for its manual. Equally important as finding the operating instructions and basic specs, is to get hold of the installation instructions. There are few sites that aggregate manuals and specs of major lines, but often I would wind up at the manufacturer’s site. There I would download the PDF and read it carefully. That’s where you find out its precise dimensions, its actual power needs, its exact connections, its real compatibility. I lost count of the number of inappropriate bad purchases I avoided by studying the manual and specs first.

What baffles me are the clueless manufacturers who still don’t put their installation and operating manuals online in 2012. (I’m thinking of you, LG.) The main result of this process is simply fewer surprises. Less returns, better integration.

Plumber

I was heartened to see that even the professionals do this. Here is a snapshot of our plumber “at work” in the bathroom. He has his tablet opened to a installation PDF, and his phone is googling a help number for questions brought up by specs in the PDF.

Locating any particular item’s installation and operating specs is still not as easy as it should be. Amazon could make it the norm to have the full spec PDF for every item they sell, or Google could try to algorithmically sort them out, or some clever aggregator could centralize them all. But for now it is worth seeking them out first, any purchase later.

— KK