Very interesting insight. I don't always agree with the decisions he made (and he doesn't even agree with the decisions he made), but it's a pleasure reading someone's feelings as all the stuff of the modern world hits you at once.
I would have done nothing with the initial success too. I have a very definite "freeze" reaction to stress, which causes quite a few problems for me. I can sometimes progress to "flight", where I run away from the problem, but "fight" is very often out of reach.
it's kind of sad that so many people insist on a native app. 2048 has always worked great on my nexus 7 just using a browser, there's no need for an app. Developers shouldn't be forced to put in extra work porting webpages to native code just to ensure they don't get overrun by cheap clones in various platform's app stores.
on my Nexus 4 sometimes the page will scroll up or down as I play. I agree that you don't have to go native to fix this, but it is one of the things to consider with the many viewport sizes out there in the mobile web ecosystem.
On my Android phone, it seems to aggressively cache "web apps", so after I added it to my home screen, I've been able to play it when out of Wi-Fi and data reception.
Whoa, this is a great hack. I get so annoyed when my browser cache dumps and tries and fails to reload a page that I had already loaded.
Write up this tip as a blog post and submit to HN :-)
Hey, Gabriele here. Nothing weird going on. It just uses it for Google Analytics (the official library has a bug where it won't work unless it has full network access on Android). Of course, there are also the ads, and they also make network requests.
Not true - a phonegap-based app does not necessitate network permissions. I've even installed/used phonegap/cordova apps that require no permissions whatsoever. I've also published my own pg/cordova app on Play that and it doesn't require full network permissions.
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 design right.
Exactly, without his version of 2048 I would have never gone on to try Threes. The aesthetic of 2048 alone prompted me to pursue better looking mobile alternatives than some of the terrible clones in the App Store.
Absolutely. There's always the tendency when doing work like this to not notice when you've made the breakthrough. The inspiration 2048 (without animations) is unplayable, to be honest. There's simply no chance it could have ever succeeded without the touch-ups.
Totally, I don't even have a cellphone let alone a smartphone. 2048 was the only version I played. It got me so interested I even made an awk version. That's what I liked the best, all the creative versions people wrote based on it. Someone on here wrote, 'the only thing more addicting than 2048 is making a 2048 clone.'
I have no idea why you got multiply downvoted. I tried to compensate but doesn't seem to have helped much.
Would certainly love to see your awk implementation. I think I heard of a sed one, so awk would be the next logical progression, may be REBOL too, or its new incarnation Red.
It's long past where I should have just rewritten it in perl, tcl, or python. Running x1k might be a good starting point. You can read in onek what are the keys to press, I redefined them from the vi home keys that the awk script uses by default. Have fun!
Not all derivative works are strictly bad, in the same sense that copyright infringement (eg, downloading an album on The Pirate Bay to try it out) can be a gateway to purchasing content (albums, concert tickets) a consumer wouldn't have otherwise.
Visual design is important in games. Novel game mechanics are important in games.
In this case, I think the mechanics were the difficult thing to create. And the mechanics took months to refine.
Looking at the history of Threes -> 1024 -> 2048, I think the business incentive for copying and polishing existing game designs is clearly superior to the business incentive for designing a novel mechanic. Why make a novel mechanic when someone can just copy it? That strategy is too risky.
I think the story of these games is a microcosm for the game industry as a whole. More game sequels are released than original game ideas. And I think that has to do with the incentives we create for game developers.
I think the creator of 2048 has priced his value about right. He knows what he brought to the table, but he thinks his contribution is not the lion's share of what made 2048 special. At the same time, he does not really know how to create a system that values innovative games more highly. And all the while, an opportunity to make a lot of money is whizzing by his head.
One, as original as Threes is it's unfortunately super easy to clone. 2048 being made in a weekend being proof. Yes I know it's not an exact clone. Let's say then it was very easy to make a similar game.
There are plenty of popular games that aren't easy to clone quickly. So I'd argue the lesson there is consider making something hard to clone.
Also, he open sourced the game. That effective says "please clone this". The license effectively implies "feel free to copy this to phonegap and publish it". Which once it was popular people did.
Do you think ease of cloning is the correct metric to optimize?
Put another way, if a game developer thinks this: "This would be a really fun game! But it would be too easy to clone, so I guess I will not make it. I'll do something else." Is that a thought process that you would support?
I think it's reality. Do I like it? I'm mixed on it.
I'm sad that Threes didn't seem to get the attention that it kind of seemed like it deserved. On the other hand I think even if Threes is arguably a better game by some metric most people seem to enjoy 2048 more so 2048 brought something to the table that wasn't there before.
If you think your game is easy to clone, rather than not make it, maybe you should take that into account when releasing it. Maybe Threes should have been free? Maybe knowing it would be easy to remake they should have invested more in getting the word out? Or, maybe as you suggest they should have done something else.
Basically I think it's reality. An easy to clone game has some risks that a non-easy to clone game doesn't. You should take those risks into consideration.
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" button, which presumably means there is some monetization in there.
I don't have anything against the OP monetizing the app, but if he had the altruistic intentions that he claims, wouldn't the app be 100% free?
edit: seeing that I'm getting down-voted - it's an honest question. I don't mean it to be accusatory. I personally think the OP should monetize his creation. It's what I would do if in his shoes. I would just be honest with myself about it.
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.
He still has to pay a developer license to get it on the iPhone, that seems fair that he tries covering third party costs.
Putting non-obstructive ads with a paid option to get rid of them is very mild: more like putting google ads on a side column of your blog and a button at the bottom to tip the author.
You can get rich that way, but that is as close to a proper monetization strategy as lottery is to investment.
note: I'm not sure what type of ads the author is displaying, just speaking generally.
because he repeatedly states that profit is not a motivator, but then that menu screenshot of the app shows a "Remove Ads" button
Profit may not have been a motivator, and may still not be. But if he can make some on the side with very little effort and without detracting from the other motivators (presumably the challenge/fun of creation and improvement which is what I think most of us in software will cite as our main reason for keeping at it) or offending his other values (some developers won't have adverts near their output if they can help it, even if it is the only way to make something out of it and making money is a an active desire) then why not (either through ad-sponsored methods or directly paid)?
12 years ago, I built a site I had absolutely zero intentions of making money from. I had an interest in an upcoming video game, and thought it would make a perfect mate for an online community. So I reached out and found a talented guy online that was also interested in the game and also had the skills that I didn't (web design), and in a couple months, we launched.
After about a year or two, money became a necessity: the popularity outgrew the free bandwidth, and I was forced to find paid hosting. So I started accepting donations. But that wasn't quite enough to cover the costs, so I added ads to help supplement the donations.
But surprise, as the popularity grew, the revenue generated from the ads and the donations coming in started to largely outweigh the costs, and now I'm making a pretty decent passive income from it.
I could easily scale back to just donations now, but since the ads are there and pulling in quite a bit (for a site mostly on auto-pilot), I have no intentions of scaling back.
(I will say, though, that I don't go to the extremes that most do to monetize their site. The ads are only in the forum area of the site, and are only in two to three locations. No interstitials, no videos, no popups/unders, etc. And they're located at the top, bottom, and right vs. right in the middle of the content. Pretty much anything that would annoy me (banners don't annoy me) I keep off the site.)
I'm not saying the OP is making money out of necessity, but just that I understand going into something with the intentions of it just being a fun side project, and then later realizing the potential of making money from it.
Yes, that's it. Unfortunately, not quite enough to rely on full time. I would love for it to be, and I've thought about building a broader community to gain a larger audience and potentially cover my income. But I just don't have enough time to dedicate to side projects now, having a young family and all.
Yep. I'm not here to talk trash about the idea of ad-supported apps in general. But I thought I read a post about the metal struggle over releasing a port of a game clone, not a monetized version.
The last thing I expected was ads in light of: "It took me a few days, but what eventually led me to accept this was knowing that my change of heart would not be motivated by greed. I chose to do it to save myself from feeling like I missed my chance for the rest of my life."
Oh, I get it. Missed a chance for money. Not greed. No, wait, nevermind, I don't get it at all. Why are the ads in there?
I know it's easy to fall into the advertizement rationalization trap: It costs money to put things into the world. It doesn't take anything away from the user. Everyone else does it. Nobody will blame me for it.
"I said that I wouldn’t try to profit from the game for ethical reasons. I thought that if I changed my mind, I’d be seen as a hypocrite, and I really didn’t want to be that kind of guy."
He is a hypocrite, and it does betray expectations of him (because he set them).
The original game had a donate button on it. Maybe the more "altruistic" way would have been to make a "donate" in app purchase, but is that actually allowed by app store rules? I could see Apple at least blocking it on the grounds that then anybody could put in a cleverly worded in app purchase that actually did nothing.
What exactly is your ethical basis for the expectation of altruism? I'm just not seeing it. The original post never mentioned the word, he simply said he never expected to make money off of it and felt ambivalent about the possibility after he saw the reaction of the Threes creators. Indeed, given the stated motivation that he originally posted it hoping for feedback on the design, I can't see how altruism ever figured into Cirulli's motivation.
The article has an entire section (Changing my mind) dedicated to the topic whereby the OP admits that for the most part he has been espousing that he is not motivated by $ and does not want to "profit" from 2048. If he was really ONLY motivated by getting his mobile version out there, as the original author of the game, why not just release a free version?
Again, I am not against him monetizing his app. Go for it, I say. What I commented on is that he's seemingly not being entirely honest with himself about his motivations.
I already quoted the key phrase, but here it is again:
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. All that matters is knowing that I didn’t waste a chance, no matter if I’m going to succeed or fail.
This is the paragraph in the Changing my mind section where he reveals the reasoning to release an app that includes monetization. Yet, in the same breath, he says he's not motivated by profit. Hence the confusion.
I could see making something without a profit motive and providing it for free. However, after someone else stole it and commercialized it heavily, many of the benefits of providing something for free are gone (maybe a cool community could have grown around the game? Someone coming to the creator and propose building another game?)
Now that money is being made, he'd probably rather see the money coming to him.
I added that thing to my homescreen and played it as an "app" for weeks. The only problem is 2048 gets really boring once you have a framework for how to do it.
It's nice to see the background of how he was feeling during that time. The (relatively muted) outcry of "derivative" never felt fair to me. His game is more fun to play than Threes. Millions of people agree.
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.
> 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.
You have summed up the entire game industry in a nutshell.
And yet, while the games are obviously based on the same mechanics, I find 2048 to be the better game because it is simpler. 2048 gets right to the point, and is trivial to understand. This is an important design point that is often missed: games often work best when they can be easily discovered. Stuff that slows that down (unnecessary complexity, a UI that slows down how fast you can iterate on mistakes, etc) can impact how "annoying" the game is perceived to be.
(I do they're both good games, though, and could see how either could be preferred)
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 leveled up in step with the player. However, this meant that every single monster was almost the exact same challenge, all the way to the end. ie. You may have leveled up and increased your damage output, but the monsters have increased their hitpoints and it still takes the same 3 attacks to kill anything. It removed all sense of progression from the game.
So it just goes to show that too much balance can really bore people! You need to hook a player and get them interested by giving them a sense of progression, of achievement.
Some ways that you can give a sense of achievement is by letting them work out optimal strategies, min/max'd character builds, etc. These can be unintentional or artificially included (eg. super weapons near the final boss fight).
tldr; People like a sense of progression, even if that is achieved by having an unbalanced game.
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.)
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't truly your own creation. Did it need to be milked further, or could you have moved on and created another game, riding your reputation? That's a big "if", but it would have been the right thing to do.
The original web 2048, true. And I've got no qualms with that version. OP took some open source code, modified the stylesheet, and added some animations. It caught on - cool, whatever.
However, the "official" mobile version of 2048 - which this blog post is specifically promoting - was created with full knowledge of Threes!.
But that's what makes Threes superior, for me - the needing to add 1 and 2, and the fact that they don't match each other makes for a more difficult game that requires much more thought. The fact that you can make matches with the basic tile that has the highest percentage of popping on the board every moves means that there are less consequences to not making the optimal move each turn.
That's just my opinion of course, but 2048 seems annoyingly easy - so much so that the up right down left repeat strategy is very valid to score a somewhat decent score when compared to some players.
Really enjoyed this post. As someone who has been on the "Threes! was there first!!!!" train since 2048 took shape, I think I agree with both parties. Threes! is a polished game that people can pay $2.99 for in the App Store and enjoy. 2048 is a free web game that's insanely approachable (it's free) and people "get it" immediately. They both provide immense value.
I see where the Threes! devs are coming from because, well, a lot of people called their game a 2048 clone, and I'm sure it sucks to see people playing a similar game instead of buying yours.
I also see where Gabriele comes from. The guy just wanted to make a game! He wasn't trying to steal anything from anyone, he made a lot of people very happy and he has nothing to be ashamed of, or worried about.
To be honest, I think if you take the intersection of 2048 players and people who would pay $2.99 for Threes!, you'd end up with a pretty small group.
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.
I have to say, I had a little bit of anger and resentment towards the person who posted the IOS app which made it to the top of the leaderboards as well. I might have been a little annoyed if Gabriel had posted one, but not as much as some free loader taking something open source and profiting from it.
I had downloaded Threes just weeks before HackerNews and Github went crazy over 2048. I was amused, but I never thought someone would try to profit from it the way Ketchap did. That was unscrupulous and just plain wrong on so many levels. Here's hoping that Karma catches up to him and his company 'Ketchap.' And that folks give Gabriel a break for doing the right thing in this situation.
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 because I found it early. An interesting case study of the human psyche all around.
2) At the very least I think it's a great example that while we very often find ourselves lost within the HN bubble, 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. Exciting and scary at the same time (and depressing when you realize you haven't tapped into this potential yet).
3) It definitely pissed me off to hear of friends paying for the game when I could have just sent them the link to Gabriele's github. (Note that I haven't found any versions where you have to pay to download, I'm assuming these people made some kind of in-app purchase)
4) While definitely in the extreme minority, I now have a couple curious friends who upon inspecting the original github link found the repository, and now are very interested in learning to code. I think we underestimate the power of showing people the "behind the curtain" stuff so to speak.
5) My absolute favorite observation is the amount of people who "hate math" or "just aren't good at math" who love this game. I think there's great potential to use 2048 or a derivative as an educational tool.
I feel that your second point is vitally important for creators (particularly new developers) to spend time thinking about.
For a long while I was caught in the trap of believing that I wasn't any good because none of my work had "taken off" as much as the work I would hear about on HN or TechCrunch, etc. It's a dangerous place to be, particularly because it can lead to a lack of motivation and ultimately debilitating depression. But it's also a myth, to believe you're not producing the same caliber of work as others (though you may not be, that's a discussion for a whole new thread).
I think it's important for us to acknowledge just how much _luck_ plays into the success of creations like 2048. Granted, the game is stellar and beautifully crafted, but there was a lot of luck involved in the wave it got to ride, from the timing of release, to the time it was posted to HN, to the people who tweeted about it, and so on.
I think it's important for us to acknowledge just how much _luck_ plays into the success of creations like 2048. Granted, the game is stellar and beautifully crafted, but there was a lot of luck involved in the wave it got to ride, from the timing of release, to the time it was posted to HN, to the people who tweeted about it, and so on.
Hype (marketing) plays a role, but I think a game's popularity is generally a function of its addictiveness multiplied by its quality. There are exceptions, such as Goat Simulator (which was almost entirely a fad) but it seems like the inherent nature of 2048 would let it succeed in any era. It's viscerally addictive for many people, so as long as you can get some number of people playing it, it'll do fine.
It seems like another reason 2048 was successful is because it was open source from the start. There were about a dozen remixed versions of 2048, and few of those would have happened without the source code being available from the beginning. People would have made their own versions, but it would have taken a lot more time than "let's just use this code that already exists."
As a developer submitting to Show HN, there are some projects that I expected to take off and some that were mere novelties. Two of my biggest projects were things I didn't expect to make a bleep, yet the project that I considered most useful [0] never went anywhere
For "nip", I suspect that is because it quite literally is "plumbing" of a sort that people have their favourite tools for from before, whether it's awk, sed, perl, or any other language interpreter that can easily take an expression on the command line (e.g. ruby can pretend to be both awk and sed of sorts with the right command line options).
It looks neat, but it'd appeal to people who spend most of their time doing stuff with node anyway, and doesn't have other scripting alternatives they prefer for one-liners.
There's a ton of inertia for those kind of tools. E.g. even though I prefer Ruby, I tend to use awk for one-liners because I can expect it to be available "everywhere", and because I have "muscle memory" for dozens of common patterns because I started using it so long ago.
That's not a criticism of your tool - just some thoughts on reasons why it might be harder to get attention for that kind of tool.
Re: #5 - the game is incredibly popular at the local high schools in my area. I was pretty surprised how ubiquitous the game was and that all, and I mean all, of the students knew what it was and had most likely played it.
The most interesting thing was how many different algorithms the students developed to try and solve getting 2048. Unfortunately they didn't know about the web version on Github which made trying them out much faster and fun than swiping a phone for hours.
I think #5 is wrong. 2048 is based on numbers but has very little to do with math--you can play the game just as easily using only colors. At best students are learning the powers of two, and at worst they're wasting time they should've spent on chess or checkers, or basketball.
It's more than that if you take moment to think about strategy and how many tiles and turns you need to make progress. It can be a very nice case-study in exponentiation/logarithm, big-O, etc
Didn't mean to make that claim, but I'd guess that chess is better for cognitive development because its demands on working memory are limitless. This is speculative, but it's also speculative to claim that 2048 is any better for learning than Candy Crush.
> [...]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 who are so disillusioned to collectively think that their products change the world. That Steve Jobs destroyed 3 generations with 1 phrase.
NOTE: nothing wrong with the app-creator. I'm really happy for him, it's just that every time I read about a developer who changed the world (writing an application) I wanna burn my eyes on a brazier.
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.
What exactly is the changed thing? World before and world after seem exactly the same to me. Instead of talking and cloning flappy bird, people talk about and clone 2048.
Even before, people played angry birds and before other game, but I admit they did not cloned them that much - but that change came with flappy jam.
I can't speak for others, but for me, this is how 20148 changed my world
I realized, when I played 2048, that I could have built it too. This was enlightening because I realized we were confined by the limitations we place on ourselves. It changed my view of the world, at least, and hopefully of some more developers like me.
Touché. But don't worry, I've been watching Silicon Valley as well (great show).
Please note I'm not saying this was some sort of amazing act of altruism, or that Gabriele has "redefined a paradigm". But the fact remains that millions (probably?) have dedicated a portion of their daily lives to this game, and that, by definition changes things within the world we live in. I don't mean to cause offense, but I happen to think that your reaction is more of a protest that our world is now at a point where change does happen through seemingly small, insignificant, passing fancies. And while I might tend to agree with you that maybe we shouldn't be so obsessed with such things, the reality is that we are. To ignore this fact would be worse than elevating it to saying that "2048 changed the world forever, for the good of all mankind". (Which is what I believe you think I'm saying)
Sorry but changing the world is a phrase open to interpretation. To me sounds extremely pretentious as I don't have any software developer in that list.
When you mention people who change the world I picture Mandela, King, Ghandi and other political leaders who made their lives and the lives of their societies better. A piece of software can not achieve something of similar scale and importance because... There's nothing like an idea that becomes a movement.
I don't want to start a flame and I feel that this conversation is taking the wrong turn so I won't post other replies.
Humanitarians change the world but so do inventors.
I would argue that Edison, Bell, Ford and the like all changed the world significantly. Did they change it for the better? Who is to say?
Mandela, King and Ghandi certainly were overt in their motives to change the world for the better, so in many ways they may be more visible targets, but Bill Gates, Tim Berners-Lee, and the whole current raft of inventors of Twitter, Facebook, etc. have certainly changed the world.
Without technology we would still live in the stone age. Politicians don't matter. Nothing grand in a hunter-gatherer band leader ordering a fight with another band.
Democracy is not "technology", nor does it necessarily require technology. Your claim implies that democracy didn't change the world. Are you serious about this?
Development of a political (and economic) systems is dependent on technological development. Of course, the reverse is also true. Taken abstractly, we might say democracy doesn't require technology, but in the real world it doesn't happen. Democracy (I'm assuming we're speaking about the parliamentary, representative democracy) became necessary when means of production developed beyond Medieval artisanship.
> I don't have any software developer in that list.
RMS changed the world by an idea that became a movement — but it would go no where it he didn't attach them to some excellent software, practicing the idea throught [cue Ghandi "be the change..."].
Jimmy Wales changed the world, again by idea + software.
Diffie & Hellman changed the world, in a much more fundamental way. The possibility of end-to-end security didn't visibly touch people the way Wikipedia did, yet it put all our lives on a different track.
OK, that was scientific discovery, not programming but it's way closer to programming than to political speeches.
Bitcoin changed the world, again idea + software. It's unclear at this moment if a cryptocurrency changes it much — or for better — but the very fact that it's here, without anybody's permission, is novel.
The very ideas that building stuff can change the world — and that giving it away maximizes your impact — are a major change in the world!
[gross simplifications and omissions in all of the above.]
I agree. In the realm of games, Starcraft and Counter Strike changed the world, largely contributing to the creation of a new industry, where e-sports professionals can make a living playing games. 2048, while a great creation, has not changed the world in any significant way.
I guess it has to be implicitly added as soon as we speak about changing the world. At some level everything change the world and then the expression loses its meaning.
Instead of being obsessed with entertainment and other forms of self gratification, it would be nice if people focused on important problems with actual historical consequence.
So, instead of engaging in some harmless recreation, you reckon it's morally superior to go on Hacker News and chastise people for engaging in harmless recreation?
I think instead of being obsessed with criticizing others, it would be nice if people focused on just about anything else in the world.
Games are not the loftiest goal in the world, but they do make people happy and engage their minds. Not everyone is going to cure cancer, and it is not reasonable to criticize them for not being that person. Yes, curing cancer would be grand, but we need plumbers too. Just because something isn't historically significant doesn't mean it isn't significant.
I'm not criticizing them for what they do, I'm criticizing them for the whole wooo I'm changing the world arrogance. Take it down a notch and get some perspective.
The one thing more frustrating than "woo i'm changing the world" arrogance is "woo, i'm making a difference by helping the 'woo i'm changing the world' people get some perspective."
If you don't like their arrogance, put them in their place by doing better.
I've already done better. I've contributed significantly to the first draft of one of the human chromosomes. I've helped prepare parts for the LHC by cleaning them to remove contaminants, and I've made several open and novel contributions to science.
I'm now working on changing a small area of society, but I don't make any arrogant claims of changing the world in doing so.
LOL, one of the best come backs I've seen on HN :)
I enjoyed 2048, but yeah it didn't change my life in the slightest.
And every other "world changing effect" they ascribe to it, could more
easily explained with the "butterfly effect", than the significance of
this game.
UPDATE: Downvoting with someone you disagree is fun, but try at least
offering an argument.
Oh, so you'd be one of the guys telling Zuckenberg to stop fooling around with stupid site with students' pictures, and start doing serious things?
Or telling Jobs & Wozniak that their tiny computer for hobbyists is meaningless, and they should do some serious work with mainframes.
Or perhaps you'd walk up to Picasso and tell him to stop painting triangles and squares, and get into industrial design? And scientific illustrations?
See, the effect of a project can be estimated in hindsight. 2048 made some people interested in programming, and inspired a ton of other people. Who knows, perhaps some future Einstein in 20 years will say: "it all started when I played this stupid game, that had an open source, and I decided to play with it."
I hope you can come back to this comment years later with another perspective. If you read the comments on this thread, you will see how many people learned about github and FLOSS just from 2048. Its transparency and apparent simplicity have been huge draws for millions of people. It has changed the way lots of people think about software, and it has only been around for weeks.
The fact that anyone would question that a project like this would change the world indicates that there's still a kind of meta-narrative playing out in people's minds that tells them that only established players can have any real impact on things. It may seem chaotic, but any weekend project could become just as influential as any software out there.
We're still hopefully pretty early in the history of programming.
We still need large projects and always have. Your weekend project might win you the popularity contest and make you a millionaire, but will you still be in vogue the next year or the year after? We've already seen numerous of these changing the world entertainment products come and go, and yet the world is as it was, with the same basic problems continuing to get worse.
You'll never know. There could be some little girl who played it, loved it, picked it apart and ended up getting into programming herself, and she might be the cofounder of something that improves the lives of billions. You'll never know.
I didn't downvote you, but I think that's an exceedingly narrow view of causality. We've all been inspired by books, films, games, teachers, etc. If we go on to do great things, we owe a debt to everything that got us to where we go.
> If we go on to do great things, we owe a debt to everything that got us to where we go.
I agree, but the claim was essentially that "x changes y" is a transitive relation (I tried to express this notion in a less mathematical way, but it was the best I could come up with), which is an exceedingly broad view of causality.
If "changing the world" was as simple as spending a couple of days hacking up a simplistic browser game, a lot more people would do it. Similarly, if the criteria for "changed the world" were so low, the term would essentially be meaningless.
I'm definitely using a broad view of causality, yes. Whether that's excessive or not I think depends on what you're trying to achieve. I think of it from the perspective of- would I like to encourage or discourage whatever is happening?
> If "changing the world" was as simple as spending a couple of days hacking up a simplistic browser game, a lot more people would do it.
That sorta implies (to me) that a lot of people are doing things that genuinely change the world, in the high-criteria sense. Is that really true, though? I think the world would definitely be a richer place if we had a lot more "simplistic browser games"- elegant, engaging, entertaining. I can't say in advance what that would lead to, but I'm sure a world with 100 different versions of 2048 (and I don't mean direct copies, but different games altogether that were addictive, compelling and fun in different ways) would be a relatively more interesting world.
And it'll only take a couple of days per person, no? So why isn't this already the case? Why aren't we awash in this stuff? Is it because most people are busy working on more meaningful things? (Objectively I think we can say things like ending malaria, improving education, project: water, etc are all 'more meaningful' in an anthropocentric sense... but is that what most people are working on?)
Many of those 8 million had something unforgettable and bizarrely enlightening to share with their friends, or not, as the case may be (if they don't really have any friends). I would say that you underestimate that monkey, he has brought a lot of happiness to a lot of people and he fully deserves his own reality TV show. So, yep, he has changed the world.
I much prefer the world to be changed by things like 2048, which is like an online version of the Rubik's Cube for our times.
Contrast with the world-changing ways of the politicians. Bush, Blair and co worked very hard to take the world to war, yet, ultimately, they lost and it was all a complete waste of time.
"Changed the world" could have a variety of meanings. Taken literally, it could mean "altered or affected the world in any amount." Going with such a strict definition, nearly everything changes the world.
The other extreme, the one people frequently have in mind, is "to change or alter many parts of the world very directly", such as the invention of flight.
However, a better phrase for the feeling in developer circles I think would be "touched the world." Doing so, with the internet, is easy. Like building a public bench in a city park, many people may gain small enjoyment from it, and as the one who built it, all that small joy brings you lots of excitement.
Think about it like this:
If the creator posted a link on the page for a worthy cause, he has the audience necessary to make a huge difference. Whereas if you were to start from nothing and try to create impact, it would be a major uphill battle.
The hard part is reaching enough people. He has already done that.
Another way to think about it:
Richard Sherman is a cornerback for the Seahawks. Is he having an impact? Well, they just signed him to a $58 Million contract. And part of what he does with his money is fund the The Richard Sherman Family Foundation whose goal is to help as many kids as possible have adequate School supplies and clothes.
So does Richard Sherman change the world by intercepting passes and talking trash after playoff games? You bet he does.
People who have the platform to change the world are more likely to, in either a positive or a negative direction.
Personally, and of course you can define it however you want, I think something that "changes the world" needs to be both significant and lasting. Getting people to play one game instead of another for a few months isn't either. Squeezable ketchup bottles are much closer.
No. Not at the same %: Just take a look at how many startups are deliberately stating to change the world.
The claim is pretentious and false: it gives a sense of virtue which is absolutely not there. I'm not referring to the author of minor projects, I'm referring to Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg, as well.
People that changed the world range from M. L. King, to Ghandi and N. Mandela with numerous others in between. To me is disrespectful to those who gave their lives in order to change the world to make such a claim while becoming a millionaire in the process, sitting on a cosy sofa behind a computer screen. Developers are creating technologies (from Bitcoin to OpenGPG). These are tools which can be used for good or bad (surveillance). Software doesn't take the streets, nor will pass legislations through parliaments. So it might change some aspects of every day life, but meaningful changes do not happen using iPhones: Syndications in China are illegal. And there's no technology (Tor, Bitcoin, OTR, GPG, Twitter, etc) that will make syndications legal. Only people can do that and it's not an easy and peaceful process.
The world changes when ideas turn into social/political movements and then legislation are passed. Usually many people die in between.
So if for you Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King and StartupXYZ chasing VPs are the same thing, then we have different values, views and not much to discuss.
He isn't being cynical, he is reacting to pretentiousness and pomposity, and quite rightly too. And of course developers do not have a monopoly of such self aggrandisment.
Developers are most certainly not the only group of people who suffer from this.
I also think that there's actually some truth in feeling like you can change the world through code. There have been a huge number of code projects that have impacted out culture a whole lot over the last 20 years and in many ways they've been by far the most visible cultural lampposts.
Regarding point 1, to add to that weirdness, all of this closely followed the massive App Store success of Threes, which 2048 is nearly a clone of (and I understand that Threes is nearly a clone of another earlier game).
I wasn't sure, but I thought that there was an even older game that was extremely similar to 2048 and Threes. I remember people got upset when the Threes developers accused 2048 of cloning them [0], because they thought Threes was itself a clone of something earlier.
Regarding #3:
I'm actually annoyed seeing my friends who all play 2048 on their phones. Not even the one Gabriele made, some clone by 'Ketchapp'. I often tell people about Threes but they've never heard of it. I show them Threes and then say that "it only costs $1.99" and straight away they basically tell me to get lost because it costs money.
5) I hate math because I am not good at it. But It's not so much math in this game as it is logic. Also having gone through Cisco Networking in highschool the pattern 2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512,1024,2048 was drilled into my head.
5: While there may not be that much use for memorising and recognising powers of 2, it's still something that, oddly enough, a lot of CS students seem to struggle with. 2048 could be perfect for that purpose.
Now if there was only a game, similarly simple and addictive, that implicitly taught how logic gates work, maybe we wouldn't be so far from having everyone have a basic idea of how computers work... I believe that the best type of learning is implicit, so there's certainly a lot of potential here. Your observation also shows this characteristic that some people just hate being explicitly taught and can't seem to learn that way, but get them to do something they enjoy and is also designed to teach, and they learn surprisingly quickly without realising it.
I hate seeing people quit because they've been too successful all of the sudden, like the Flappy Bird guy, too, and not necessarily because "they've made it" and don't want to work anymore, but because they're freaked out about launching a "failure" next (at least in comparison with the previous breakout success).
The difficulty for the Threes guys was that they spent a lot of time polishing what was a very simply concept. Nothing wrong with this, but it made their game straight forward to clone. If someone was releasing Tetris for the first time in the current climate they would have the same problem.
I've been playing the mobile web version daily since this hit HN. It is a great little game for those times when you are standing in a queue or waiting to see someone. Who cares who came up the idea first. Yours is very mobile friendly. Credit goes to Gabriel for that.
I don't understand the concerns about theft and ethical issues about profiting from this. The license on GitHub says I am welcome to copy the source, modify it, and sell copies. Maybe I take that too literally, but if you see a popular game that people are willing to pay for, and there isn't already one in the app store I think you should take advantage of MIT licensed code and put it up for people to enjoy. Anyone who doesn't like the idea is welcome to make a better version and offer it for free.
I am strongly against blatant copies of apps someone is basing a business on, but I support making apps based on open source code, and making fun games available to as many people as possible.
>I don't understand the concerns about theft and ethical issues about profiting from this. The license on GitHub says I am welcome to copy the source, modify it, and sell copies.
Because 2048 was a version of 1024 but he didn't realize until later that 1024 was a version of Threes which was a commercial product in the app store. So he kinda sorta MIT licensed someone else's commercial product.
They do have a tiny mechanical different but it's much smaller than what you normally consider a clone.
FYI for those searching for this on Android: (1) it isn't on Amazon yet (or at least I couldn't find it), and (2) to find it on Google Play, you have to search for Gabriele Cirulli if you want to find the actual game he's talking about. He links to the app in his post but, because I had a bit of trouble finding it, here it is:
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 creativity are hindered by copyright. While git (via github.com) made it technologically trivial to clone the source, it's the lack of the "don't touch it - somebody will sue me" barrier that allowed a huge number of people to try their hand at a variation.
To re-use a quote used by Mr. Lessig[2], said by composer John Philip Sousa as the technology of the phonograph (and the ability to restrict the use of music through copyright) quickly became widespread:
"These talking machines are going to ruin artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy, in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day, or the old songs. Today, you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal chord left..."
I believe talk about "profit" or "lost opportunities" misses the forest for the trees. The potential of future personal profit on a small game like this can be very hit-or-miss, but the contributions to our shared culture have already been huge. The fact that the game caused an incredible amount of attention - with multiple people sending messages about taking the idea further - is conclusive evidence of the cultural impact it had.
The reaction by the authors of "threes"[3] (linked from this article) is an interesting example from the other side. It is clearly annoyed at the loss of profits that 2048 may have caused. Their game is also proprietary, restricting the possibility of making a legal derivative work. this eliminated one of the big sources of initial "word of mouth"/"viral' attention their game received.
I'm not trying to argue for the elimination of copyright[4] or other sweeping changes. For some works - especially games and other works of art - the monopoly benefits of copyright are probably worth the loss of some popularity. I simply suggest that there are other benefits besides "profit". As this article mentions, even stuff like "lack of stress" can be a huge advantage; knowing you've been able to impact so many people is something many artists dream about and hope for their entire lives[5].
TL;DR
If you're thinking of trying to squeeze some profit from a small work like this, you may want to consider letting it spread in our shared culture and taking the fame and reputation as the author of a Cool Game/App.
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.
You seem to be unaware how so much of what seems "original" to you is derived from prior art. This is strange, because you describe (and deride) the phenomenon moments before you ignore it.
Oh dear, the children are downvoting you. This is the inevitable consequence of an educational system where copying and pasting from the web counts as original work. These people actually believe that copying is being creative.
232 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadLooking forward to trying your app version.
Would certainly love to see your awk implementation. I think I heard of a sed one, so awk would be the next logical progression, may be REBOL too, or its new incarnation Red.
https://github.com/msliczniak/onetenth
It's long past where I should have just rewritten it in perl, tcl, or python. Running x1k might be a good starting point. You can read in onek what are the keys to press, I redefined them from the vi home keys that the awk script uses by default. Have fun!
Edit; Oh wow, thanks for the heads-up!
https://github.com/themattrix/sed2048
Not all derivative works are strictly bad, in the same sense that copyright infringement (eg, downloading an album on The Pirate Bay to try it out) can be a gateway to purchasing content (albums, concert tickets) a consumer wouldn't have otherwise.
Isn't that the opposite? Shouldn't you have kept it private since it was based off of someone else's work?
In this case, I think the mechanics were the difficult thing to create. And the mechanics took months to refine.
Looking at the history of Threes -> 1024 -> 2048, I think the business incentive for copying and polishing existing game designs is clearly superior to the business incentive for designing a novel mechanic. Why make a novel mechanic when someone can just copy it? That strategy is too risky.
I think the story of these games is a microcosm for the game industry as a whole. More game sequels are released than original game ideas. And I think that has to do with the incentives we create for game developers.
I think the creator of 2048 has priced his value about right. He knows what he brought to the table, but he thinks his contribution is not the lion's share of what made 2048 special. At the same time, he does not really know how to create a system that values innovative games more highly. And all the while, an opportunity to make a lot of money is whizzing by his head.
One, as original as Threes is it's unfortunately super easy to clone. 2048 being made in a weekend being proof. Yes I know it's not an exact clone. Let's say then it was very easy to make a similar game.
There are plenty of popular games that aren't easy to clone quickly. So I'd argue the lesson there is consider making something hard to clone.
Also, he open sourced the game. That effective says "please clone this". The license effectively implies "feel free to copy this to phonegap and publish it". Which once it was popular people did.
Put another way, if a game developer thinks this: "This would be a really fun game! But it would be too easy to clone, so I guess I will not make it. I'll do something else." Is that a thought process that you would support?
I'm sad that Threes didn't seem to get the attention that it kind of seemed like it deserved. On the other hand I think even if Threes is arguably a better game by some metric most people seem to enjoy 2048 more so 2048 brought something to the table that wasn't there before.
If you think your game is easy to clone, rather than not make it, maybe you should take that into account when releasing it. Maybe Threes should have been free? Maybe knowing it would be easy to remake they should have invested more in getting the word out? Or, maybe as you suggest they should have done something else.
Basically I think it's reality. An easy to clone game has some risks that a non-easy to clone game doesn't. You should take those risks into consideration.
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" button, which presumably means there is some monetization in there.
I don't have anything against the OP monetizing the app, but if he had the altruistic intentions that he claims, wouldn't the app be 100% free?
edit: seeing that I'm getting down-voted - it's an honest question. I don't mean it to be accusatory. I personally think the OP should monetize his creation. It's what I would do if in his shoes. I would just be honest with myself about it.
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.
Putting non-obstructive ads with a paid option to get rid of them is very mild: more like putting google ads on a side column of your blog and a button at the bottom to tip the author.
You can get rich that way, but that is as close to a proper monetization strategy as lottery is to investment.
note: I'm not sure what type of ads the author is displaying, just speaking generally.
12 years ago, I built a site I had absolutely zero intentions of making money from. I had an interest in an upcoming video game, and thought it would make a perfect mate for an online community. So I reached out and found a talented guy online that was also interested in the game and also had the skills that I didn't (web design), and in a couple months, we launched.
After about a year or two, money became a necessity: the popularity outgrew the free bandwidth, and I was forced to find paid hosting. So I started accepting donations. But that wasn't quite enough to cover the costs, so I added ads to help supplement the donations.
But surprise, as the popularity grew, the revenue generated from the ads and the donations coming in started to largely outweigh the costs, and now I'm making a pretty decent passive income from it.
I could easily scale back to just donations now, but since the ads are there and pulling in quite a bit (for a site mostly on auto-pilot), I have no intentions of scaling back.
(I will say, though, that I don't go to the extremes that most do to monetize their site. The ads are only in the forum area of the site, and are only in two to three locations. No interstitials, no videos, no popups/unders, etc. And they're located at the top, bottom, and right vs. right in the middle of the content. Pretty much anything that would annoy me (banners don't annoy me) I keep off the site.)
I'm not saying the OP is making money out of necessity, but just that I understand going into something with the intentions of it just being a fun side project, and then later realizing the potential of making money from it.
The last thing I expected was ads in light of: "It took me a few days, but what eventually led me to accept this was knowing that my change of heart would not be motivated by greed. I chose to do it to save myself from feeling like I missed my chance for the rest of my life."
Oh, I get it. Missed a chance for money. Not greed. No, wait, nevermind, I don't get it at all. Why are the ads in there?
I know it's easy to fall into the advertizement rationalization trap: It costs money to put things into the world. It doesn't take anything away from the user. Everyone else does it. Nobody will blame me for it.
"I said that I wouldn’t try to profit from the game for ethical reasons. I thought that if I changed my mind, I’d be seen as a hypocrite, and I really didn’t want to be that kind of guy."
He is a hypocrite, and it does betray expectations of him (because he set them).
What exactly is your ethical basis for the expectation of altruism? I'm just not seeing it. The original post never mentioned the word, he simply said he never expected to make money off of it and felt ambivalent about the possibility after he saw the reaction of the Threes creators. Indeed, given the stated motivation that he originally posted it hoping for feedback on the design, I can't see how altruism ever figured into Cirulli's motivation.
Again, I am not against him monetizing his app. Go for it, I say. What I commented on is that he's seemingly not being entirely honest with himself about his motivations.
I already quoted the key phrase, but here it is again:
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. All that matters is knowing that I didn’t waste a chance, no matter if I’m going to succeed or fail.
This is the paragraph in the Changing my mind section where he reveals the reasoning to release an app that includes monetization. Yet, in the same breath, he says he's not motivated by profit. Hence the confusion.
Now that money is being made, he'd probably rather see the money coming to him.
It's nice to see the background of how he was feeling during that time. The (relatively muted) outcry of "derivative" never felt fair to me. His game is more fun to play than Threes. Millions of people agree.
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.
You have summed up the entire game industry in a nutshell.
(I do they're both good games, though, and could see how either could be preferred)
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 leveled up in step with the player. However, this meant that every single monster was almost the exact same challenge, all the way to the end. ie. You may have leveled up and increased your damage output, but the monsters have increased their hitpoints and it still takes the same 3 attacks to kill anything. It removed all sense of progression from the game.
So it just goes to show that too much balance can really bore people! You need to hook a player and get them interested by giving them a sense of progression, of achievement.
Some ways that you can give a sense of achievement is by letting them work out optimal strategies, min/max'd character builds, etc. These can be unintentional or artificially included (eg. super weapons near the final boss fight).
tldr; People like a sense of progression, even if that is achieved by having an unbalanced game.
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.)
You already had the gift of recognition, even for something that wasn't truly your own creation. Did it need to be milked further, or could you have moved on and created another game, riding your reputation? That's a big "if", but it would have been the right thing to do.
However, the "official" mobile version of 2048 - which this blog post is specifically promoting - was created with full knowledge of Threes!.
That's just my opinion of course, but 2048 seems annoyingly easy - so much so that the up right down left repeat strategy is very valid to score a somewhat decent score when compared to some players.
I see where the Threes! devs are coming from because, well, a lot of people called their game a 2048 clone, and I'm sure it sucks to see people playing a similar game instead of buying yours.
I also see where Gabriele comes from. The guy just wanted to make a game! He wasn't trying to steal anything from anyone, he made a lot of people very happy and he has nothing to be ashamed of, or worried about.
To be honest, I think if you take the intersection of 2048 players and people who would pay $2.99 for Threes!, you'd end up with a pretty small group.
I think everybody won here.
That to me, speaks volumes towards the dev's character.
I mean after all this publicity and everyone(well too many to lie about it) know it is a derivative of another game.
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.
I think it would be OK to be poorly written, but not both.
I had downloaded Threes just weeks before HackerNews and Github went crazy over 2048. I was amused, but I never thought someone would try to profit from it the way Ketchap did. That was unscrupulous and just plain wrong on so many levels. Here's hoping that Karma catches up to him and his company 'Ketchap.' And that folks give Gabriel a break for doing the right thing in this situation.
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 because I found it early. An interesting case study of the human psyche all around.
2) At the very least I think it's a great example that while we very often find ourselves lost within the HN bubble, 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. Exciting and scary at the same time (and depressing when you realize you haven't tapped into this potential yet).
3) It definitely pissed me off to hear of friends paying for the game when I could have just sent them the link to Gabriele's github. (Note that I haven't found any versions where you have to pay to download, I'm assuming these people made some kind of in-app purchase)
4) While definitely in the extreme minority, I now have a couple curious friends who upon inspecting the original github link found the repository, and now are very interested in learning to code. I think we underestimate the power of showing people the "behind the curtain" stuff so to speak.
5) My absolute favorite observation is the amount of people who "hate math" or "just aren't good at math" who love this game. I think there's great potential to use 2048 or a derivative as an educational tool.
For a long while I was caught in the trap of believing that I wasn't any good because none of my work had "taken off" as much as the work I would hear about on HN or TechCrunch, etc. It's a dangerous place to be, particularly because it can lead to a lack of motivation and ultimately debilitating depression. But it's also a myth, to believe you're not producing the same caliber of work as others (though you may not be, that's a discussion for a whole new thread).
I think it's important for us to acknowledge just how much _luck_ plays into the success of creations like 2048. Granted, the game is stellar and beautifully crafted, but there was a lot of luck involved in the wave it got to ride, from the timing of release, to the time it was posted to HN, to the people who tweeted about it, and so on.
Hype (marketing) plays a role, but I think a game's popularity is generally a function of its addictiveness multiplied by its quality. There are exceptions, such as Goat Simulator (which was almost entirely a fad) but it seems like the inherent nature of 2048 would let it succeed in any era. It's viscerally addictive for many people, so as long as you can get some number of people playing it, it'll do fine.
It seems like another reason 2048 was successful is because it was open source from the start. There were about a dozen remixed versions of 2048, and few of those would have happened without the source code being available from the beginning. People would have made their own versions, but it would have taken a lot more time than "let's just use this code that already exists."
[0] https://github.com/kolodny/nip
It looks neat, but it'd appeal to people who spend most of their time doing stuff with node anyway, and doesn't have other scripting alternatives they prefer for one-liners.
There's a ton of inertia for those kind of tools. E.g. even though I prefer Ruby, I tend to use awk for one-liners because I can expect it to be available "everywhere", and because I have "muscle memory" for dozens of common patterns because I started using it so long ago.
That's not a criticism of your tool - just some thoughts on reasons why it might be harder to get attention for that kind of tool.
The most interesting thing was how many different algorithms the students developed to try and solve getting 2048. Unfortunately they didn't know about the web version on Github which made trying them out much faster and fun than swiping a phone for hours.
(but yes, learning the powers of two is only a tiny fraction of math)
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22342854/what-is-the-opti...
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 who are so disillusioned to collectively think that their products change the world. That Steve Jobs destroyed 3 generations with 1 phrase.
NOTE: nothing wrong with the app-creator. I'm really happy for him, it's just that every time I read about a developer who changed the world (writing an application) I wanna burn my eyes on a brazier.
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?
Even before, people played angry birds and before other game, but I admit they did not cloned them that much - but that change came with flappy jam.
I realized, when I played 2048, that I could have built it too. This was enlightening because I realized we were confined by the limitations we place on ourselves. It changed my view of the world, at least, and hopefully of some more developers like me.
Please note I'm not saying this was some sort of amazing act of altruism, or that Gabriele has "redefined a paradigm". But the fact remains that millions (probably?) have dedicated a portion of their daily lives to this game, and that, by definition changes things within the world we live in. I don't mean to cause offense, but I happen to think that your reaction is more of a protest that our world is now at a point where change does happen through seemingly small, insignificant, passing fancies. And while I might tend to agree with you that maybe we shouldn't be so obsessed with such things, the reality is that we are. To ignore this fact would be worse than elevating it to saying that "2048 changed the world forever, for the good of all mankind". (Which is what I believe you think I'm saying)
When you mention people who change the world I picture Mandela, King, Ghandi and other political leaders who made their lives and the lives of their societies better. A piece of software can not achieve something of similar scale and importance because... There's nothing like an idea that becomes a movement.
I don't want to start a flame and I feel that this conversation is taking the wrong turn so I won't post other replies.
Anyway, nothing personal against you or the dev.
Best of luck with everything
I would argue that Edison, Bell, Ford and the like all changed the world significantly. Did they change it for the better? Who is to say?
Mandela, King and Ghandi certainly were overt in their motives to change the world for the better, so in many ways they may be more visible targets, but Bill Gates, Tim Berners-Lee, and the whole current raft of inventors of Twitter, Facebook, etc. have certainly changed the world.
Without technology we would still live in the stone age. Politicians don't matter. Nothing grand in a hunter-gatherer band leader ordering a fight with another band.
Democracy is not "technology", nor does it necessarily require technology. Your claim implies that democracy didn't change the world. Are you serious about this?
RMS changed the world by an idea that became a movement — but it would go no where it he didn't attach them to some excellent software, practicing the idea throught [cue Ghandi "be the change..."].
Jimmy Wales changed the world, again by idea + software.
Diffie & Hellman changed the world, in a much more fundamental way. The possibility of end-to-end security didn't visibly touch people the way Wikipedia did, yet it put all our lives on a different track. OK, that was scientific discovery, not programming but it's way closer to programming than to political speeches.
Bitcoin changed the world, again idea + software. It's unclear at this moment if a cryptocurrency changes it much — or for better — but the very fact that it's here, without anybody's permission, is novel.
The very ideas that building stuff can change the world — and that giving it away maximizes your impact — are a major change in the world!
[gross simplifications and omissions in all of the above.]
Adding the "in any significant way" qualifier essentially means you agree that 2048 changed the world.
(Disillusion is the disappointment/cynicism/&c. you experience when you find out that you used to be deluded.)
Maybe your definition of 'change the world' is too stringent.
Squeezable ketchup bottles changed the world too.
Instead of being so uptight about how people use the phrase why you don't you start trying to create your own impact?
I think instead of being obsessed with criticizing others, it would be nice if people focused on just about anything else in the world.
Games are not the loftiest goal in the world, but they do make people happy and engage their minds. Not everyone is going to cure cancer, and it is not reasonable to criticize them for not being that person. Yes, curing cancer would be grand, but we need plumbers too. Just because something isn't historically significant doesn't mean it isn't significant.
If you don't like their arrogance, put them in their place by doing better.
I'm now working on changing a small area of society, but I don't make any arrogant claims of changing the world in doing so.
I enjoyed 2048, but yeah it didn't change my life in the slightest.
And every other "world changing effect" they ascribe to it, could more easily explained with the "butterfly effect", than the significance of this game.
UPDATE: Downvoting with someone you disagree is fun, but try at least offering an argument.
Or telling Jobs & Wozniak that their tiny computer for hobbyists is meaningless, and they should do some serious work with mainframes.
Or perhaps you'd walk up to Picasso and tell him to stop painting triangles and squares, and get into industrial design? And scientific illustrations?
See, the effect of a project can be estimated in hindsight. 2048 made some people interested in programming, and inspired a ton of other people. Who knows, perhaps some future Einstein in 20 years will say: "it all started when I played this stupid game, that had an open source, and I decided to play with it."
How has 2048 changed the world?
The fact that anyone would question that a project like this would change the world indicates that there's still a kind of meta-narrative playing out in people's minds that tells them that only established players can have any real impact on things. It may seem chaotic, but any weekend project could become just as influential as any software out there.
We're still hopefully pretty early in the history of programming.
I agree, but the claim was essentially that "x changes y" is a transitive relation (I tried to express this notion in a less mathematical way, but it was the best I could come up with), which is an exceedingly broad view of causality.
If "changing the world" was as simple as spending a couple of days hacking up a simplistic browser game, a lot more people would do it. Similarly, if the criteria for "changed the world" were so low, the term would essentially be meaningless.
> If "changing the world" was as simple as spending a couple of days hacking up a simplistic browser game, a lot more people would do it.
That sorta implies (to me) that a lot of people are doing things that genuinely change the world, in the high-criteria sense. Is that really true, though? I think the world would definitely be a richer place if we had a lot more "simplistic browser games"- elegant, engaging, entertaining. I can't say in advance what that would lead to, but I'm sure a world with 100 different versions of 2048 (and I don't mean direct copies, but different games altogether that were addictive, compelling and fun in different ways) would be a relatively more interesting world.
And it'll only take a couple of days per person, no? So why isn't this already the case? Why aren't we awash in this stuff? Is it because most people are busy working on more meaningful things? (Objectively I think we can say things like ending malaria, improving education, project: water, etc are all 'more meaningful' in an anthropocentric sense... but is that what most people are working on?)
sorry for wordiness
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DBuk91phkI
Many of those 8 million had something unforgettable and bizarrely enlightening to share with their friends, or not, as the case may be (if they don't really have any friends). I would say that you underestimate that monkey, he has brought a lot of happiness to a lot of people and he fully deserves his own reality TV show. So, yep, he has changed the world.
I much prefer the world to be changed by things like 2048, which is like an online version of the Rubik's Cube for our times.
Contrast with the world-changing ways of the politicians. Bush, Blair and co worked very hard to take the world to war, yet, ultimately, they lost and it was all a complete waste of time.
The other extreme, the one people frequently have in mind, is "to change or alter many parts of the world very directly", such as the invention of flight.
However, a better phrase for the feeling in developer circles I think would be "touched the world." Doing so, with the internet, is easy. Like building a public bench in a city park, many people may gain small enjoyment from it, and as the one who built it, all that small joy brings you lots of excitement.
Besides, this game might just be a stepping stone for something bigger.
The hard part is reaching enough people. He has already done that.
Another way to think about it: Richard Sherman is a cornerback for the Seahawks. Is he having an impact? Well, they just signed him to a $58 Million contract. And part of what he does with his money is fund the The Richard Sherman Family Foundation whose goal is to help as many kids as possible have adequate School supplies and clothes.
So does Richard Sherman change the world by intercepting passes and talking trash after playoff games? You bet he does.
People who have the platform to change the world are more likely to, in either a positive or a negative direction.
It's probably correct. How many fictional heroes are there, compared to how many real world developers?
ps. Developers are the only group of people who are so disillusioned to collectively think that their products change the world.
Lots of non-developers think their efforts can change the world:
http://right-brain-law.blogspot.com/2013/07/i-went-to-law-sc...
http://admissions.uoregon.edu/majors/political%20science "Get Ready to Change the World"
http://sydney.edu.au/arts/donors/change_world.shtml "10 ways an arts degree can change the world"
Do you have a real point to go with the bitter cynicism?
The claim is pretentious and false: it gives a sense of virtue which is absolutely not there. I'm not referring to the author of minor projects, I'm referring to Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg, as well.
People that changed the world range from M. L. King, to Ghandi and N. Mandela with numerous others in between. To me is disrespectful to those who gave their lives in order to change the world to make such a claim while becoming a millionaire in the process, sitting on a cosy sofa behind a computer screen. Developers are creating technologies (from Bitcoin to OpenGPG). These are tools which can be used for good or bad (surveillance). Software doesn't take the streets, nor will pass legislations through parliaments. So it might change some aspects of every day life, but meaningful changes do not happen using iPhones: Syndications in China are illegal. And there's no technology (Tor, Bitcoin, OTR, GPG, Twitter, etc) that will make syndications legal. Only people can do that and it's not an easy and peaceful process.
The world changes when ideas turn into social/political movements and then legislation are passed. Usually many people die in between.
So if for you Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King and StartupXYZ chasing VPs are the same thing, then we have different values, views and not much to discuss.
I also think that there's actually some truth in feeling like you can change the world through code. There have been a huge number of code projects that have impacted out culture a whole lot over the last 20 years and in many ways they've been by far the most visible cultural lampposts.
[0] http://asherv.com/threes/threemails/#letter
Now if there was only a game, similarly simple and addictive, that implicitly taught how logic gates work, maybe we wouldn't be so far from having everyone have a basic idea of how computers work... I believe that the best type of learning is implicit, so there's certainly a lot of potential here. Your observation also shows this characteristic that some people just hate being explicitly taught and can't seem to learn that way, but get them to do something they enjoy and is also designed to teach, and they learn surprisingly quickly without realising it.
I think that this is a big missed opportunity for him (even if he had enough "success" from the original game alone)
I tried Gabriele's but it's indeed (sadly) inferior, by the size of the board and the input lag (on my Nexus 4).
http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_success_failure_a...
I hate seeing people quit because they've been too successful all of the sudden, like the Flappy Bird guy, too, and not necessarily because "they've made it" and don't want to work anymore, but because they're freaked out about launching a "failure" next (at least in comparison with the previous breakout success).
I am strongly against blatant copies of apps someone is basing a business on, but I support making apps based on open source code, and making fun games available to as many people as possible.
Because 2048 was a version of 1024 but he didn't realize until later that 1024 was a version of Threes which was a commercial product in the app store. So he kinda sorta MIT licensed someone else's commercial product.
They do have a tiny mechanical different but it's much smaller than what you normally consider a clone.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gabrieleci...
It is also a powerful argument in the idea (described very nicely by Lawrence Lessig[1]) that culture and creativity are hindered by copyright. While git (via github.com) made it technologically trivial to clone the source, it's the lack of the "don't touch it - somebody will sue me" barrier that allowed a huge number of people to try their hand at a variation.
To re-use a quote used by Mr. Lessig[2], said by composer John Philip Sousa as the technology of the phonograph (and the ability to restrict the use of music through copyright) quickly became widespread:
"These talking machines are going to ruin artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy, in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day, or the old songs. Today, you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal chord left..."
I believe talk about "profit" or "lost opportunities" misses the forest for the trees. The potential of future personal profit on a small game like this can be very hit-or-miss, but the contributions to our shared culture have already been huge. The fact that the game caused an incredible amount of attention - with multiple people sending messages about taking the idea further - is conclusive evidence of the cultural impact it had.
The reaction by the authors of "threes"[3] (linked from this article) is an interesting example from the other side. It is clearly annoyed at the loss of profits that 2048 may have caused. Their game is also proprietary, restricting the possibility of making a legal derivative work. this eliminated one of the big sources of initial "word of mouth"/"viral' attention their game received.
I'm not trying to argue for the elimination of copyright[4] or other sweeping changes. For some works - especially games and other works of art - the monopoly benefits of copyright are probably worth the loss of some popularity. I simply suggest that there are other benefits besides "profit". As this article mentions, even stuff like "lack of stress" can be a huge advantage; knowing you've been able to impact so many people is something many artists dream about and hope for their entire lives[5].
TL;DR
If you're thinking of trying to squeeze some profit from a small work like this, you may want to consider letting it spread in our shared culture and taking the fame and reputation as the author of a Cool Game/App.
--
[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/larry_lessig_says_the_law_is_strang...
[2] ibid.
[3] http://asherv.com/threes/threemails/
[4] While I do believe we should eliminate most "IP" laws, that argument is for another day.
[5] said best by the comic PFSC: https://31.media.tumblr.com/2cbf666fc1881d6c0f158a6bece2bb95...
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.