Fugu Talk

HyperBowl is now on the Thousand Apps page. Here’s just a section. Can you locate HyperBowl?

There’s been furor in the past over flag-burning, but to me, the real desecration of the flag occurs when people co-opt it for their own causes. I was recently nauseated by a Facebook campaign against the proposed Muslim worship center in New York, largely by the use of the American Flag as their logo. But I should get over it – the tactic is pretty much a cliche by now.

For example, here is an over-the-top logo for the Huntington Beach Police Officers Association:

A more clever use is on the “about us” page of the Video Game Voters Network:

Nowhere does it explain on that page that the group is founded and run by the ESA, the industry group representing game publishers. That type of omission leads the conspiracy theorist in me (and I didn’t even know I had one) to wonder who was behind the anonymous mass mailings in the IGDA that led to Tim Langdell’s ouster. Anyway, for my civil liberties advocacy, I’ll count on organizations like the ACLU – at least I know who they are.

And liberal groups are not immune, either. MoveOn exercises this tactic (and others normally attributed to Fox News), but with a bit of subtlety here – they have some stars and stripes sneaking in around the borders and background:

It’s an unseemly replacement for discourse. Which flag is bigger, yours or mine?

Despite its pitch as “Gray’s Anatomy in Space”, I started watching episodes of Defying Gravity on the PlayStation Store. (I was looking for Dollhouse, but oddly, that’s listed under Crime instead of Sci-Fi). Defying Gravity is not bad – I like the characters and story arc, could do without the cutesy music, yes, reminiscent of Gray’s Anatomy. But it’s no Firefly. So it’s fitting that when I searched for “defying gravity” on YouTube, I found this homage to Firefly.

A few years ago I attended a talk at the Santa Ana Digital Media Center given an executive from an online gaming company. Someone asked for his opinion on net neutrality and I was startled that he 1) didn’t know what it was, and 2) answered anyway that it didn’t concern him and that the free market would take care of it anyway. I’ll just pose a simple scenario – let’s say Time Warner cable strikes a deal to give broadband preference to a particular game, say WoW or Starcraft, or one of the games developed by a Time Warner studio, and conversely downgrades performance for your game. You’re hosed.

Here’s a nice quick-start graphic on net neutrality, including the latest news of Google once again stepping on and off the moral high ground.

[Via: Online MBA Programs]

I have a rule of thirds when it comes to web ads (along with a rule of popups and a rule of flashing banner ads) – I am not inclined to tweet/share/inflict a web page on others if two thirds of the page doesn’t consist of content. Like this Forbes page, which has a story surrounded by blocks of large type blaring at you to sign up for other Forbes products.

You could argue that ads promoting other Forbes products or promotions or tie-ins qualify as Forbes content (at least on my own web site, that’s the story I’m sticking with). But the reason I got peeved is at the bottom of the page, where it’s clear the entire story might have fit on this page if they’d given it, say, maybe 40% of the page.

To be fair, I’ve seen a lot worse. Indeed, I’ve followed twitter links to articles which just had one or a few sentences, surrounded by a sea of ads, requiring you to click on a link to read more of the story. Eventually, they’ll just feed us a word at a time.

This is me at work in Blue Mars. I’m the guy in shorts standing around.

Marketing isn’t rocket science, at least the way I’m doing it. For example, occasionally I try the tactic of temporarily making an app free. That definitely attracts attention, since many sites track price changes (google your app 24 hours after making it free and you’ll find a dozen sites linking to it). Yesterday the promotion garnered 8000 downloads.

But I’ve had mixed success in terms of boosting sales (in particular for the full HyperBowl app ) . My theory is that the free app crowd is largely distinct from the paying app crowd. Also, the freeloaders will drag down your ratings. For example, a couple of days ago, I made HyperBowl Rome free. Up til then, it had 3-5 star ratings and now the French are piling on with 1-star reviews. (Although there is one good French review out of the three. And by the way, Japan has also been rough on me overall on my apps, but Germany has been nice and the US is actually in the middle). Here’s the AppViz summary:

Normally, I end the promotion as soon as I get an obnoxious review that really bugs me. But I don’t actually see foreign reviews on the US App Store, and I don’t understand them until I run them through google translate, and then more often than not, it’s entertaining. Like this:

A big stew as we see often unplayable and ugly, without interest unless you like never score any points, as is the case, it is always out of time or if you love smash the screen of your device rubbing to death this game is for you, can even pad three feet below the ankle of dark nebula. TO AVOID!

So I guess I’ll let it run for a little while longer.