tl,dr: It looks incredible, like no other game you'll see today, and it grapples with deeply interesting themes – but it's extremely annoying to play and suffers from a serious lack of editing. There's just too much friction to become truly immersed. Still, other games can only wish their failures were this daring.
Out of curiosity - did you read the book before playing the game?
I'm asking because as I said in my comment - I really loved the game, but I do wonder if knowing the secret of Regis, The Invincible and its sister ship made it easier to play and overlook some of the mechanical problems(which in my opinion really weren't that much of a deal, I think I got lost driving the rover once but like, meh).
I didn't, no. I've read a lot of Stanislaw Lem but The Invincible never quite hit my radar. I can see how knowing the story would've made it a bit easier to get on with, though.
Author here: I was being overly conservative with the 20m, yes. Assuming the cutaway view in the post is to scale (it's from an architectural firm), it shows the inner screen dome is quite a lot smaller than the exterior structure – perhaps 70-80m tall; so 40-50m might be more accurate.
Oh your statement might be correct, that the average distance to closest point on the screen probably is about 20m, and guaranteed to be less than 1 radius (more like 0.5 radius perhaps.) If the cutaway is accurate, and it probably is, the interior is smaller than it feels like. So I may be underestimating how far away 20m is. I felt further than 20m away standing on the floor, but I probably wasn’t. But, what I’m really saying, is that the direction to the closest point and the average viewing direction are only similar for the best center seats, and they’re as much as orthogonal for the bad seats, the further away from the center you sit. The average view is probably greater than 1 radius, you’re generally looking across the center of the sphere. I am picking a bit, but this is also an important part of why there are no terrible seats, the viewing experience is more uniform because the view across does not correlate with your distance from the nearest point. I think this relates to why it feels immersive and works.
Author here: Postcard from Earth only allows people to sit in more central seats, whereas music performances let people sit and stand much closer to the edges. In other words, it’s probably not that bad if you’re in the worst seat, though definitely not as good.
Interesting piece! I’m co-creator of Zombies, Run! so I’m glad to see it mentioned here - we designed it to be in the best interests of players, which is why it doesn’t feature streaks or leaderboards or other ways to manipulate you into overexercising or playing more than you want to.
That said, I’m more sanguine about gamification than the author. There are indeed many games to choose from, but the ones that are most concerning that those we have little choice but to play, whether they’re from our employers or in our schools and colleges, or built into devices and platforms like the Apple Watch and iOS.
If you’re interested in this subject, I wrote a book critiquing gamification called “You’ve Been Played” - the NYT called it illuminating and persuasive!
I share the concerns about excessive gamification. I should look up your book. Just the other day I noticed how instances of "level up" and "unlocked" are increasingly common ways of describing achievements and I dislike it because it implies your success is measured inside of structured constrains designed by others to control your behavior.
Question: what / how were the were the discussions on to not include leaderboards, streaks, etc? What what was the primary motivation behind the game? From your comment, it seems play to play rather play to win?
The goal of a fitness app, including gamified fitness apps, should be to help users achieve healthy fitness goals.
Theoretically, streaks are a way to encourage and recognise commitment – often people will use streaks to motivate themselves in writing a book or completing chores. However, it's inadvisable for people to exercise every single day for weeks on end. Of course, apps could build in rest days and lower-impact exercises to make streaks easier to maintain, but very few do and even then, it's hard to know the user's context – perhaps they've been ill and they need even longer to rest. It's pretty clear to me that streaks, as commonly implemented, are merely a way to boost retention at the expense of the user's interest.
I think leaderboards are fine in some circumstances. We use them in our own one-off virtual race events so people can benchmark themselves against others. However, we don't maintain weekly or monthly leaderboards for fitness in general because they end up being boring or even demotivating. When I had a Fitbit, the rankings were always the same, the walkers in London always trouncing the drivers in the US. I expect the only effect was to make the people at the bottom of the leaderboard depressed. For everyone who feels great ascending a leaderboard, there's someone who feels bad descending it.
My career in fitness gamification is based around the idea making exercising genuinely fun is the best way to motivate people. Competitive sports do that for a lot of people, but it can be relatively inaccessible. Zombies, Run! uses immersive audio storytelling and actual gameplay rather than just badges and XP and levels to make things exciting. It's not for everyone but it works for a lot of people.
I can’t answer for OP and I hope he does. I can say I’m designing a product at my company and have our team a set of golden rules for it.
Among them is we will respect the user. From being fair on pricing to data collected. If I get a hint of someone not in line with that, they would be off the team, no debate.
We’re lucky that the thing we’re building is not our core business, and it only has to be successful, not MBA-milk-everything-you-can-all-the-time successful.
For me, I have the power to make this a reality. For someone that doesn’t, do what you can.
A lot of love here for A Fire Upon the Deep (predicted fake news via "the net of a thousand lies") and A Deepness in the Sky (great depiction of cognitive enhancement, slower-than-light interstellar trade), but less so for Rainbows End, which is perhaps a less successful story but remains, after almost two decades, the best description of what augmented reality games and ARGs might do to the world.
> A Fire Upon the Deep (predicted fake news via "the net of a thousand lies")
Predicted ? A Fire Upon the Deep published in 1993, at which date Usenet was already mature and suffering such patterns - although not at FaceTwitTok scale.
But still, I love Vinge's take on information entropy across time, space and social networks. A Deepness in the Sky features the profession of programmer–archaeologist and I'm here for that !
> Predicted ? A Fire Upon the Deep published in 1993, at which date Usenet was already mature and suffering such patterns
I still remember the moment when I realised that the galactic network in 'Fire...' was in fact based on Usenet (which I used heavily at the time), especially how it was low bandwidth text (given the interstellar distances) and how it had a fair number of nutters posting nonsense across the galaxy ('the key insight is hexapodia'). Great author, who'll be sadly missed.
I recently re-read Rainbows End, and I think "do to the world" is an appropriate phrasing. It's a strikingly unpleasant vision of a world in which every space is 24/7 running dozens of microtransaction AR games... I found the part where Juan walks through the "amusement park" particularly effective, where little robots would prance around trying to entice him into interacting with them (which would incur a fee).
I think it's also one of the best descriptions of living at the onset of massive, disruptive technological changes, and how disorienting (and occasionally terrifying) this would feel. The fundamental problem with that book, for me, is that the main protagonist is (deliberately) an utterly loathsome individual, who somehow ends up as a good guy but doesn't seem to do very much learning or self-reflection.
The photos they featured are Notion, but if you look at the "Date Me Directory" they linked it appears to be mostly Google Docs. The author certainly could have been more specific.
Self-promo: If you're interested in the rise of gamification, how it works (and doesn't work), and how it's being used in workplaces, schools, governments, and social media, I published a book last year called You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All.
I've been designing games for twenty years, and I'm CEO at Six to Start, the co-creators of Zombies, Run!, one of the most popular examples of gamification to date. I also originally trained as an experimental psychologist and neuroscientist.
The most prevalent forms of gamification, including the ones mentioned in this link, are ultimately based on behaviourism as a theory of motivation. It's not that points and badges and levels don't work – clearly they do, particularly for some people – it's that there are other ways people motivate themselves and others, and the better forms of gamification harness them.
Self-promo successful - just bought your book on Amazon! ;)
I actually did Zombies, Run! over the pandemic and we had a great time doing it - honestly one of the few examples of gamification that works. Really it's so good that I didn't even think of it even as gamification, which is saying something. I also worked in the game industry for years and gluing on trophies or points onto some otherwise irrelevant task is not true gamification, it's just the most basic example of "if you measure it, they will do it".
tl,dr: It looks incredible, like no other game you'll see today, and it grapples with deeply interesting themes – but it's extremely annoying to play and suffers from a serious lack of editing. There's just too much friction to become truly immersed. Still, other games can only wish their failures were this daring.
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