The ZX Spectrum was my first computer and I was a bit too young to write any software for it sadly, but it was my second (TV Pong was my first) introduction to gaming...on a black and white TV.
Still managed to get into tinkering with computers and it opened a big door for me later in life. I am now a game developer (designer/engineer), and might not have gone down this amazing path if it wasn't for the familiarity with computing at an early age.
It was such an important computer and I'm glad to see the price of capable computers continuing to fall, so that more and more kids can have a similar experience to mine.
The loading sounds still give me chills!!
If you're looking to relive the loading sounds as a musical toy, check out the ZX Plectrum.
Aphex Twin included the loading sound inbetween some of the tracks on his Richard D James album and it pleases me no end that he did. That you can also make the loading sounds with your own mouth is also a giant plus!
I thought I was having a stroke when I first booted up the NES virtual console and the start screen from Mario Land (original GameBoy) flashed on screen for a split second. Anyone else have this experience, all most two years ago?
At great expense to my carrier I have out and out refused to take part in creating these predatory practices. If you could hear the contempt that "some" game devs have for their customers, you might never buy a game ever again. It really is quite shocking...and the contempt exists from top to bottom, its everywhere. That isn't to say there's not a vast number of of honourable people in the industry, not at all.
It's only to say that we as a whole are allowing the demons run amok.
I have seen the damage that compulsive behaviour can do to our most vulnerable in society.
Lives ruined, homelessness, suicide, familial dissolution, the list goes on.
Children, people with mental dysfunctions, suffers of brain injuries, even people with Parkinson's disease (on l-dopa).
All the people in our society that can control themselves the least are the target. And these people are precisely the target, specifically these people, the 0.001% of players that make up the majority of their revenue.
Some companies find out who they are and continually and specifically court them with free t-shirts, beta access, 'free' in-game gifts, etc. In some companies its a whole department that do this kind of customer management. Developing personal relationships all to keep them hooked.
Now most companies don't do this, its much more automated and in-game that this Catfishing, if I can use a term like that.
At the fundamental level predatory games are not actually games they are variable ratio reinforcement schedule machines. Think Guinea pigs in a lab being rewarded for pushing a button.
An ultra advanced slot machine that continually changes it's odd's depending on what the app thinks you will be vulnerable too. And it attacks.
Now, if you aren't a vulnerable person you will see the obvious things like the pop-ups asking you to spend money or a timer mechanism. And you might think how stupid people must be to fall for that, but you wont see the game's dynamic balancing, because you are not the target. If you're not the target you will never progress further up the attack protocol. So it will always just look like an innocent game to most people.
Its insidious and immoral.
(I'm mostly talking about mobile games...mostly)
Having worked in the games industry on Facebook and mobile games, I don't think your perspective is representative.
Most f2p games are targeting a % mix of whales, dolphins, flounders, guppies. You might shoot for 0.1% whales, 10% dolphins,40% flounders, 50% guppies.
The whales will have an outsized impact on revenue for their count, and you largely can't plan for them to arrive. They're typically (very) wealthy people for whom spending $10,000 on a game is cheaper than the watch on their arm. Game companies absolutely set up a VIP customer service team for these players, this is the experience they expect everywhere in life. It's the difference between them playing your game for 2 months or 6 with a significant revenue impact.
Dolphins will be upper-middle class big spenders. They might try to collect every premium hat in your game, or regularly spend during special events. Again to them dropping $200/month in a game is not a hardship. In fact it's cheaper than most other hobbies they could do with their affluence like golf or skiing.
Next is the flounders, the goal is just to get them to spend at all. There might be some singular obviously valuable purchase in the game such as a season pass. This is basically game subscription services repackaged for the modern day.
The rest don't pay. You keep guppies around in hopes you can graduate them to flounders at some point down the line. In the meantime, they are cannon fodder for your matchmaking queues.
None of these psychographic groupings aim to exploit easily manipulated people. Rather the pay bands expand to match the disposable income of various economic classes. This is the same thing that has happened in other industries for a very long time. Some people rent skis, some bring their own, others hire personal trainers, and some rent the entire ski club for a private event. Go to a concert and some have nosebleed seats, others are front row, some watch from boxes, others pay to meet & greet the band after the show.
I know I won't convince you one way or the other. I've seen statements eerily similar to yours before, that I feel that it might be a regurgitation from some article or book somewhere.
Note the use of dehumanising terms, literally calling customers animals and 'cannon fodder'.
This is what this (part of the) industry thinks of the people that play their games, cattle.
You have to call cohorts something. I know a gaming company that went very publicly out of their way to refer to the cohorts as Big Spenders, Hobbyists, etc. It didn't save their company. What you name your buckets doesn't matter.
SaaS companies call customers Users, talks about Activating and Retaining them, put them in Buckets. If this is your bar for dehumanizing then this must be a very frustrating website for you to visit.
Do you not shop at grocery stores? They put the milk and eggs in the back to psychologically manipulate you into walking past other items. And you're stored in their database as nothing but a phone number! So dehumanizing.
No grocery store has my personal details...and yes I also have a big problem with grocery stores employing that tactic against children. Its psychological abuse and I will never, have never, taken a child in these places.
Horrible behaviour is not acceptable because other companies do it. What kind of argument is that?
Calling customers a User, is calling them a human being with a certain behaviour attached (using your app/service).
Naming your customers animals is a reflection of attitudes towards these customers. A hostile attitude I have tackled multiple times and every time I have called out, walked out, or changed the company. Its hard, not for everyone and I cant recommend it. I am just too aware of the tragic social impact of these tactics, and I have to try and not make the world a worse place.
From a manufacturers point of view its a really hard sale, a smaller device will alway have 'poor' battery life or use a less powerful cpu to keep the battery life on par with bigger phones. Either way reviewers will tank it for either of these reasons. As well as not enough room for a flagship camera array, again reviewers will pan it for this reason also.
Couple that with a niche audience and the cost of ordering a batch of different sized screens (in smaller quantities), it's just not that attractive a market to get into.
In short, they would be trying to sell a device with smaller profits that they KNOW will get panned by reviewers to a niche audience.
> a smaller device will alway have 'poor' battery life or use a less powerful cpu to keep the battery life on par with bigger phones.
I am not convinced by this -- not least because it will also have a smaller and lower-resolution screen, which brings with it power savings.
Before I switched to iOS, I had a Sony Xperia Mini Pro -- the second version. Slide out keyboard, absolutely tiny. And it was _very_ powerful indeed for its price and size in its day, with surprisingly good battery life (from a really tiny battery) and an incredible display.
Can't tell you how many admiring looks it got even from iPhone owners. Decent camera for the time (and a hardware shutter button), and a fantastic little thumbs keyboard.
I then had an iPhone 5S and SE. The 5S was an older device by the time I got it, but the SE was/is very capable and it has excellent battery life (especially by Android standards), again because it's driving a smaller, lower-resolution display.
It might be a tough sell in the Android market, but I think it could be done again well technically.
There just isn't enough interest to persuade app developers to support a smaller screen format, and web developers won't do it either.
> I am not convinced by this -- not least because it will also have a smaller and lower-resolution screen, which brings with it power savings.
having a smaller display (and possibly downgrading/downclocking the gpu accordingly) saves some power, but the power draw of other components doesn't scale with the size of the screen. the display doesn't account for enough of the overall power budget to offset having less energy to power everything else. it's possible to make a small phone with "acceptable" battery life, but they'll never compete with bigger phones on that front.
btw, apple doesn't have some magical solution to this scaling problem. their small phones have significantly worse battery life than their larger offerings. it's just that their overall efficiency advantage makes a small iphone more viable than a small android phone.
> btw, apple doesn't have some magical solution to this scaling problem. their small phones have significantly worse battery life than their larger offerings. it's just that their overall efficiency advantage makes a small iphone more viable than a small android phone.
Agreed. Am currently in the SE 2020 and its battery life is terrible. Apple is expected to announce a SE 2022 and I'm curious how the battery life will be with it supporting 5G and a better SoC. If it's the same/worse, I'm going to upgrade to the 13 mini.
Not sure I can agree. I’m using an iPhone SE (2016), the original, and my battery life is still pretty darn good. Routinely outlasts my SO’s Pixel 4a, and her 3a before that. I have swapped out the battery twice since my original purchase, but I’d do that for any phone.
I briefly had a 6S, before I grew so sick of the size that I got my current SE. The SE’s battery is 90% the size of the 6S battery, and the 7/8/SE 2020 only increases the battery size incrementally past that point. The SE 2016 is about a mm thicker than those phones and that makes all the difference.
The Sony Xperia Compacts routinely had great battery life compared to the larger models, too — all for an extra mm or two of thickness that I, at least, cannot perceive. Phone manufacturers are just so hooked on making “7mm” phones with a 2mm camera bump they’ve forgotten that they could just omit the camera bump, curve the edges a bit if necessary, and dramatically improve battery life.
> There just isn't enough interest to persuade app developers to support a smaller screen format, and web developers won't do it either.
On iOS supporting smaller screen sizes is fairly trivial as long as you’re using the apple-blessed layout APIs and not doing silly things like using static widths. It’s a bit more hairy on Android (simply due to the overwhelming mediocrity of Android Framework) but not anything too terrible.
It might be more annoying with cross platform frameworks though.
Battery capacity depends on the volume, not surface; that means thicker phones can compensate for small length and width. For the use cases of small phones, some increase in thickness is perfectly acceptable.
I made a game quite similar that took me years to complete. And I feel this is much more immediately engaging, could just be me being hyper critical of my own work...but its always amazing to see how other designers approach similar ideas.
Wow, I haven't seen this before, Some interesting things here.
I wonder what he would make of VideoGames...well points 5 through 12 some up a good chunk of video games. But I wonder about more indie/experimental games?
Particularly 'Zen' or wellness games, as the "cause for negligence" rang a bell for me. What if a game is more of an aid, or inspirational story, or other uplifting experience?
I'm making one right now, so this is a great list to have come across.
My game is an abstraction of the Zen calligraphy practice of Ensô, where every day you paint an uninhibited ink circle on a blank sheet of paper.
I spent some time breaking down what the daily discipline was for me, and then translate these elements into a game. Theres a lot more to it than that but that's the (very) basic starting point. As I'm nearing release I can see there are definite places it falls short. Though I started with the intent of it NOT being a "cause for negligence", hopefully my intent shines through.
Engineering, design, art, music, etc.
I started my career as an abstract painter and sculptor. Then transitioned into 3d animation, then web design, then into back-end web engineering. Found I was decent at that, then moved into web games(flash). I've been making games and interesting public interactive projects ever since.
Nothing you've probably heard of, maybe the ZX Plectrum (if you are British), a musical toy for android and iOS that is fairly popular.
If I would call my self anything it would be artist.
From my heard usage of the term it usually describes a person that has deep understanding of a lot of things and hence can do almost anything with it. Like imagine a full stack developer but with deep domain knowledge in every related field. Widening that knowledge is usually just one project with a new stack away. Often x10devs and INTJs as one might guess.
Yeah...it can mean different things depending on context. The meaning you probably refer to is one of them, but generally it refers to someone rare and in-demand.
A sad day indeed. A true democratising force in computing, without his work I wouldn't have ever thought someone like me could write software. Even If I was too young to write at the time, the ZX Spectrum was my first/only video game experience, small games made by one or two people that my family could afford or borrow.
This led me into making indie games and software dev, it gave me the idea of 'why not me?', the ZX Spectrum might not have been the door, but is sure was the key into a much wider world for me.
It also led me to recreate my favorite thing about the ZX Spectrum, the loading sounds as a musical instrument. The ZX Plectrum.
The ZX Spectrum was my first computer and I was a bit too young to write any software for it sadly, but it was my second (TV Pong was my first) introduction to gaming...on a black and white TV.
Still managed to get into tinkering with computers and it opened a big door for me later in life. I am now a game developer (designer/engineer), and might not have gone down this amazing path if it wasn't for the familiarity with computing at an early age.
It was such an important computer and I'm glad to see the price of capable computers continuing to fall, so that more and more kids can have a similar experience to mine.
The loading sounds still give me chills!!
If you're looking to relive the loading sounds as a musical toy, check out the ZX Plectrum.