90% Of Everything: Links

Pinball skill is transferrable.  If you can pass, stall, nudge, and aim on one machine you can do it on any machine.  This is both a blessing and a curse for pinball developers.  The blessing is that pinball players were a captive market. The curse was that to keep the pinball players interested the games had to get more and more intricate and challenging.

Pinball developers struggled with this problem as pinball was slowly losing to video games.  Video games competed by adding levels of play with increasing difficulty.  Any new player could quickly get chops on a new game because the low levels were easy.  This ensured that new players were drawn in easily, but still they were continually challenged because the higher levels got harder and harder.  By contrast, the physical nature of pinball, its main attraction to hardcore players, meant that there was no way to have it both ways.

Eventually, to keep the pinballers playing, the games became so advanced that entry-level players faced an impossible barrier.  High-schoolers in 1986 were either dropouts or professionals in 1992 and without inflow of new players that year essentially marked the end of pinball. - Jeff Ely

Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed comments: "What game genres have similar characteristics? First Person Shooters come to mind. This challenge is magnified in a mutliplayer environment – it’s not fun to get fragged within seconds of starting a game. It’s the same experience that a new paintball player gets if they wander onto an average paintball course today – most players are now experts."

...if you're looking for an entry point into the level of discourse within the Critical-Gaming Network, a place to start developing your critical-eye, or seeking a crash course in game design then here is where you start.

First of all, if you can get your hands on a copy of the book Half-Real by Jesper Juul, read it cover to cover. This book jump started my journey into developing Critical-Gaming. The foundation and language Half-Real builds is indispensable. After reading the book, make your way through these articles. [...]

 

Bill Moggridge
Peter Morville
Scott McCloud
Jeff Patton
Liz Danzico
Jesse James Garrett
Joshua Porter
Stephen P. Anderson
Leah Buley
Dave Gray
Kristina Halvorson
Whitney Hess
James Box
Andy Budd

Speaking to journalists at the UK headquarters, with TechRadar in attendance, Facebook revealed just how many people log on each day and the stats are pretty mind-blowing. The company also noted that one of its apps, 'Farmville', is more popular than its major rival in the social-networking world – Twitter.

The biggest load of old rubbish ever has been written about the changes to Google's first click free program. [...]

How first-click free works

1. Publishers allow Google behind their paywall.
2. Google indexes their content and shows it in its results - on condition that searchers can also see it if they come via Google.
3. If seachers click a link in Google, the publisher lets them read that page of content.
4. If searchers click any other  links on the publisher's site, the publisher shows them a sign-up now message.

The drawback [...]

It is easy to circumvent First Click Free if you can be bothered. If you want to read a second story on a first-click-free site, you copy and paste the URL into google and then click the result.

[This] [...] means publishers can limit to five a day the number of pages a user can see when they come via Google

Which news organisations don't understand?

[...]

BBC: wrong

Times: wrong

Sky News: wrong

These are all wrong. Google is not doing the limiting. It's allowing publishers, who set the rules on what people to see, to limit access yet still remain in first-click free. Publishers do the limiting.