Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

2048, success and me

gabrielecirulli.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 233 posts

Re: 2048, success and me

#71

Post by pauselaugh »

swalsh wrote: post #11

He seems so worried about taking someone else's credit, that he's missing the value HE brought to the table. He made the game approachable. The visual style of the game made it more fluid, which made it more approachable. At least to me, the two games he derived his own from don't seem to pull me in the same way. The app has a similar appeal. In games, there's a lot of value in visual design... he got the visual desi…

"I didn’t feel good about keeping it private, since it was heavily based off of someone else’s work."

Isn't that the opposite? Shouldn't you have kept it private since it was based off of someone else's work?

Re: 2048, success and me

#72

Post by jmduke »

adwf wrote: post #60
spiek wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny that you say that 2048 "gets really boring" after a while, but that it is "more fun to play than Threes". It's interesting that the balance and effort that went into Threes resulted in a game that (to me) is more complex and possesses more staying power. However, it is still regarded as not as good as a game with more immediate gratification and significantly less staying power. edit: for clarification.

I'm always wary of game designers who espouse "balance" all the time. The only place you ever need balance is in a multiplayer game as people like be on an even playing field. In single player games however, too much striving for balance can lead to a very boring game. One of the classic failures in this regard was Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. It had a balancing mechanism for all the enemies in the game, so that they lev…

I don't quite agree with you here. I think Elder Scrolls is a bad example to give because the series as a whole is probably one of the most unbalanced RPGs there are: even in Oblivion, the 'balancing mechanics' you refer to just encourage more unbalanced play -- as opposed to, say, Galsiah's Character Development in Morrowind which is ultimately a balancing mechanism but promotes more aspects of gameplay and prohibits undesirable behavior.

Balance is best used as a function to encourage meaningful and difficult gameplay, which I'd argue can be defined largely as the number of interesting choices a player has to make. I think 2048 does a poor job of this relative to Threes: after around a week of play I was able to consistently win using the corner strategy. In Threes, the variance in tile distribution means there is no such panacea.

(That being said, I agree that pursuing 'balance' in a game is like pursuing 'colors' in an artwork. It's a road to reach some desired destination: not a goal in of itself.)

Re: 2048, success and me

#73

Post by L_Rahman »

atmosx wrote: post #65
pdeuchler wrote: post #27

A couple of OT thoughts... 1) It was very odd seeing something go from the HN "new" page, to the front page, to seeing people talk about it on twitter, to hearing about it from friends who have no idea what a "github" is, to my mom asking me to help her download this new game all her friends are playing. I still don't know how I feel about it. And yes, for some reason I feel like I have some sort of ownership simply…

> [...]we need to remember that (hubris aside) what we do everyday, even if it's just a side project we did for fun one evening, has the potential to change the world in an instant[...] Really? So '2048' changed the world. I have this feeling that developers change the world more often than Cartoon/TV-heros save thew world these days. How many apps away from world peace?! ps. Developers are the only group of people w…

This is slightly unfair.

Not everything that qualifies for the phrase "changed the world" needs to solve a significant problem like poverty, health or hunger.

Sometimes just being present in the minds of a lot of people is sufficient to qualify. 2048 first took over HN for a entire month. I'd open HN every day anticipating a different port. Then it went mainstream and has since been played potentially many thousands even millions of minutes. I think that qualifies as changing the world in a tiny way.

Don't you?

Re: 2048, success and me

#74

Post by joshdance »

grrrando wrote: post #21

Well, we all have the opportunity to steal things in everyday life. But in the human space outside of the twilight zone we call "HN", there are laws that keep people from profiting from stolen material. Unfortunately, you're enabled by the app stores and their allowance this type of theft. Calling it an opportunity doesn't mean you should take it. You already had the gift of recognition, even for something that wasn'…

Disney used others stories for their movies. He used others games for his game. Derivative doesn't not equal stealing.

Re: 2048, success and me

#75

Post by armandososa »

That was a good read, but I think that in the fear of losing an opportunity he ended up blowing it entirely by releasing a PhoneGap app which is very slow and unresponsive even when it's very well designed.

Re: 2048, success and me

#77

Post by grrrando »

DanBC wrote: post #44
grrrando wrote: post #21

Well, we all have the opportunity to steal things in everyday life. But in the human space outside of the twilight zone we call "HN", there are laws that keep people from profiting from stolen material. Unfortunately, you're enabled by the app stores and their allowance this type of theft. Calling it an opportunity doesn't mean you should take it. You already had the gift of recognition, even for something that wasn'…

Stolen? Come off it. Games have a long history of being cloned and improved on.

Agreed, but I'd argue that the only "improvement" 2048 made over Threes! was its pricetag.

Re: 2048, success and me

#78

Post by mturmon »

FilhoDaPuTa wrote: post #43
FilhoDaPuTa wrote: post #24

I have been playing the 2048 for Android in the Top 1 of 2048 apps and now tried this guy original. Well it sucks.. the original programmer 2048 is so slow and laggish in comparison it makes it unplayable for who's coming from the other one. Visuals are also better.

Why are you down voting an helpful critic to the programmer. Only praising comments allowed ?

Your comment was rude. It is also so poorly written that a reader can't tell what you're trying to say (other than "well it sucks"). On reflection, probably you can figure out why "well it sucks" isn't actually helpful as a comment.

I think it would be OK to be poorly written, but not both.

Re: 2048, success and me

#79

Post by pauselaugh »

pdkl95 wrote: post #47

The thing I found most interesting about the 2048 was the sudden assortment of variations that immediately followed. It was a perfect example of how the thing we call "culture" works: people recursively sharing their interest in something, often without even trying ("hey, that looks cool. What are you playing?"). It is also a powerful argument in the idea (described very nicely by Lawrence Lessig[1]) that culture and…

Bullshit. Culture does not consist entirely of repeated derivatives, that's the thing we call "being a poser," and that is more specifically the shitty part of culture where someone takes a good idea claims it as their own.

Culture doesn't have a built in versioning system in place, so when something does all the right things it isn't a given that the predecessors are given credit. There are far too many derivative works that completely crush the inspiration and predecessors...

The reason why is that the derivative work has nothing to do except tweak and improve the initial work, where the initial work had to concept the thing and give it a form out of nothing.

Convenient then, that someone comes along and takes something 90% good and makes it >90% good and everyone claims how it is better and so important that they brought such innovation to it.

Zzz.

The app store, steam, even triple a titles are glutted with this revisionist crap. So when you look around and see 9999999999 clones and attempts at "betterment" for every 1 work you'll know why.

Re: 2048, success and me

#80

Post by pauselaugh »

iambateman wrote: post #18
kohanz wrote: post #13

Thanks to the help of my parents and my friends, I realized that the only way to get over this without feeling like I had missed an opportunity would be to embrace it and produce an app. I wouldn’t be doing it for profit, though. In fact, that is not what matters to me. I'm slightly confused, because he repeatedly states that profit is not a motivator, but then that menu screenshot of the app shows a "Remove Ads" but…

The conclusion was that he changed his mind and profit is on the table for him. I guess altruism lost to profit. But considering money is the only way to develop good, interesting games in the long-term, it's the most "altruistic" thing he could do.

Not at all. Look up Effective Altruism.

We need to stop the apologia for people who do minor tweaks to existing properties and have a "dilemma" about if they should profit over it.

Post reply on HN