We’ve become more interested in the response than in the event that occasioned it. The emanations from the Miley performance very soon overtook the performance itself, and they were stranger and more interesting.
Sasha Weiss on reactions to Miley.
All this time, we wondered what the guy in Edvard Munch's The Scream was reacting to. Munch saw all of this coming long before this year's VMA's.
Every child dreads this day: sooner or later, your parents will come to you, innocently wide-eyed, to ask you about twerking. How you handle this difficult conversation is extremely important and could have a significant impact on the way your parents think about twerking for years to come. You may prefer to put off the big “twerk talk,” but remember that it’s far better for you to be the one to explain than for them to learn on their own by searching YouTube.
A critical first step is to acknowledge that twerking is a normal part of life and that there is nothing shameful in their questions. They’re parents, after all, and this is the sort of thing they hear about on NPR, and, well, they’re curious.
A coercive monetization model depends on the ability to “trick” a person into making a purchase with incomplete information, or by hiding that information such that while it is technically available, the brain of the consumer does not access that information. Hiding a purchase can be as simple as disguising the relationship between the action and the cost as I describe in my Systems of Control in F2P paper.
Research has shown that putting even one intermediate currency between the consumer and real money, such as a “game gem” (premium currency), makes the consumer much less adept at assessing the value of the transaction. Additional intermediary objects, what I call “layering”, makes it even harder for the brain to accurately assess the situation, especially if there is some additional stress applied.
This additional stress is often in the form of what Roger Dickey from Zynga calls “fun pain”. I describe this in my Two Contrasting Views of Monetization paper from 2011. This involves putting the consumer in a very uncomfortable or undesirable position in the game and then offering to remove this “pain” in return for spending money. This money is always layered in coercive monetization models, because if confronted with a “real” purchase the consumer would be less likely to fall for the trick.
From The Top F2P Monetization Tricks by Ramin Shokrizade. F2P stands for free-to-play and refers to games where you can start playing the game without paying. The most popular of such games, at least it certainly seems that way, is Candy Crush Saga. I know a few people who are struggling with a borderline addiction. When you add up the man-hours that have been dedicated to the game, it might be the most potent destroyer of productivity in recent human history.
Shokrizade makes a convincing case that Candy Crush Saga lulls the user into thinking they're playing a game of skill when in reality it's a game of luck (Shokrizade calls it a game of money, as noted in the excerpt below). Unable to make the distinction, players stuck on the more difficult levels later in the game end up making in-app purchases to keep feeding their addiction.
A game of skill is one where your ability to make sound decisions primarily determines your success. A money game is one where your ability to spend money is the primary determinant of your success. Consumers far prefer skill games to money games, for obvious reasons. A key skill in deploying a coercive monetization model is to disguise your money game as a skill game.
King.com's Candy Crush Saga is designed masterfully in this regard. Early game play maps can be completed by almost anyone without spending money, and they slowly increase in difficulty. This presents a challenge to the skills of the player, making them feel good when they advance due to their abilities. Once the consumer has been marked as a spender (more on this later) the game difficulty ramps up massively, shifting the game from a skill game to a money game as progression becomes more dependent on the use of premium boosts than on player skills.
Note that the difficulty ramps up automatically for all players in CCS when they pass the gates I discuss later in this paper, the game is not designed to dynamically adjust to payers.
If the shift from skill game to money game is done in a subtle enough manner, the brain of the consumer has a hard time realizing that the rules of the game have changed. If done artfully, the consumer will increasingly spend under the assumption that they are still playing a skill game and “just need a bit of help”. This ends up also being a form of discriminatory pricing as the costs just keep going up until the consumer realizes they are playing a money game.
It's tough not to admire the skill with which Candy Crush Saga was built. Something about destroying tiny colored candies satisfies some reptilian instinct in people in the most addicting way possible. The guile with which the game entices users into forking over for in-app purchases makes me a bit squeamish, but no more than a casino should.
If you're going to give in to the temptation of CCS, just know that it's largely a game of luck, and resist the temptation to fork over dough when you get stuck unless you know what's being done to your brain and you're okay with it.
Tennis players have been getting bigger for years. When Lendl emerged as a force in the early 1980s, rare was the top-ranked man who was more than 6 feet. A decade later, Andre Agassi, at 5-11, and especially Michael Chang, at 5-9, were considered undersize overachievers.
In those days, Boris Becker, at 6-3, contended that men’s tennis was not only trending tall but would eventually be dominated by players well over 6 feet. While part of his prediction has not come true, it may be premature to say he was wrong.
Heading into United States Open, 9 of the top 32 men’s players were at least 6-5 — the tallest being Karlovic and the American John Isner, at 6-10. During this summer’s hardcourt season leading into the United States Open, del Potro defeated Isner in the finals in Washington. Raonic, a 22-year-old Canadian, made the final in Montreal, where he lost to Rafael Nadal. Isner upset No. 1 Novak Djokovic in the quarterfinals in Mason, Ohio, and outlasted del Potro in the semifinals before losing in two tiebreakers to Nadal.
“Every sport is going up and up,” Lendl said. “Look at basketball — and I don’t understand basketball — but I do know that the guys who were playing center before are playing wings now, or whatever you call them.”
More by Harvey Araton on how the average height of top men's tennis players has been creeping up. Patrick McEnroe discusses how he believes the sweet spot is from 6' 1" to 6' 4" just given the importance of agility and balance and footspeed and the difficulty of reaching low balls for someone of John Isner's height (6' 10").
A few years back a few of us from Hulu got tickets from one of our advertisers to go to the ESPY's in Los Angeles. At the event, Isner received an ESPY for Best Record Breaking Performance for his 11 hour 5 minute match against Nicolas Mahut at Wimbledon earlier that year. As Isner walked past us after he left the stage, I couldn't believe he was a tennis player, he was one of the tallest people I'd ever seen, as if Jeff Goldblum in The Fly had instead been mistakenly fused with a praying mantis or a giraffe. To serve from that height must be glorious, like hitting an overhead into a swimming pool.
In his great book The Sports Gene, David Epstein notes the gradual shift in each sport towards the optimal body type for that sport and away from a single ideal for the best human configuration. Sports scientists Kevin Norton and Tim Olds call it the "Big Bang of body types."
But, as Norton and Olds saw, as winner-take-all markets emerged, the early-twentieth-century paradigm of the singular, perfect athletic body faded in favor of more rare and highly specialized bodies that fit like finches' beaks into their athletic niches. When Norton and Olds plotted the heights and weights of modern world-class high jumpers and shot putters, they saw that the athletes had become stunningly dissimilar. The average elite shot putter is now 2.5 inches taller and 130 pounds heavier than the average international high jumper.
When they connected the dots from 1925 to the present for each sport, a distinct pattern appeared. Early in the twentieth century, the top athletes from every sport clustered around that "average" physique that coaches once favored and were grouped in a relatively tight nucleus on the graph, but they had since blasted apart in all directions. The graph looked like the charts that astronomers constructed to show the movement of galaxies away from one another in our expanding universe. Hence, Norton and Olds called it the Big Bang of body types.
It's not just body shapes but individual body parts that matter in particular sports. For some sports, it's better to have long legs and short torsos (basketball and volleyball). For other sports, it's good to have long arms and short legs (boxing).
Body type can affect performance in different temperatures. Paula Radcliffe defies the generally accepted optimal body type for endurance runners. Most world class long distance runners are small and thin, giving them a larger skin surface area versus their body volume, helping them dissipate heat more efficiently. Radcliffe was a great runner in cool temperatures, but in her two highest profile races in heat, the 2004 and 2008 Olympic marathons in Athens and Beijing, held in 95 and 80 degree heat and humidity, Radcliffe was never in contention.
If you want your child to be world class in a sport, it really matters what type of body they have. You can read Epstein's book for a richer documentation of what some of those might be, but here's one hint: if your child is over 7 feet tall and reasonably coordinated, put a basketball hoop in your driveway.
In 2004 and '05, Finch hosted a regular segment on Fox's This Week in Baseball in which she traveled to major league training camps and transformed the world's best baseball hitters into clumsy hacks. "Girls hit this stuff?" asked an incredulous Mike Cameron, the Mariners' outfielder, after he missed a pitch by half a foot.
When seven-time National League MVP Barry Bonds saw Finch at the Major League All-Star Game, he walked through a throng of reporters to talk trash to her. "So, Barry, when do I get to face the best?" Finch asked.
"Whenever you want to," Bonds replied confidently. "You faced all them little chumps.... You gotta face the best.
"You can't be pretty and good and not face another handsome guy who's good," Bonds added, spreading his peacock feathers. He then told Finch to bring a protective net because, he said, "you're going to need it with me.... I'll hit you."
"There's only been one guy who touched it," Finch replied.
"Touch it?" Bonds said, laughing. "If it comes across that plate, believe me, I'ma touch it. I'ma touch it hard."
"I'll have my people call your people, and we'll set it up," Finch said.
"Oh, it's on!" Bonds said. "You can call me direct, girl. I take my challenges direct.... We'll televise it too, on national television. I want the world to see."
So Finch traveled to Arizona to face Bonds in spring training, and after he watched several of her pitches fly by, the raillery stopped. He insisted that the cameras not film him batting against her. Finch shot pitch after pitch past Bonds as his Giants teammates pronounced them strikes. "That's a ball!" Bonds pleaded, to which one of his teammates replied, "Barry, you've got 12 umpires back here."
Bonds watched dozens of strikes go by without so much as swinging. Not until Finch began to tell Bonds what pitches were coming did he tap a meek foul ball a few feet. He taunted her, "Go on, throw the cheese!" She did, and blew it right past him.
Finch visited Alex Rodriguez, who was then starring for the Rangers, at another spring-training park, in 2003, and Rodriguez watched over her shoulder as she threw warmup pitches to a Texas bullpen catcher. The catcher missed three of the first five throws. Before Rodriguez stepped into the batter's box, he made it clear he wouldn't dare swing at any of Finch's pitches. He leaned forward and told her, "No one's going to make a fool out of me."
An excerpt from David Epstein's new book The Sports Gene, which I'm about a third of the way through and enjoying quite a bit.
One of the first mysteries he tackles is this one: why did MLB's best hitters, who have to hit baseballs that travel to home plate in about 400 milliseconds from just under 60 feet 6 inches away, struggle to even make contact with a much larger softball traveling to home plate in the same amount of time (thrown slower at 68mph, but from a shorter distance).
Epstein notes that the average time for a major league hitter to initiate muscular action is about 200 milliseconds, meaning baseball players must decide to swing at a baseball before it's even halfway to home plate. To make that decision, baseball players try to anticipate the pitch being thrown by looking at the pitcher's delivery motion.
This explains why certain pitches and pitchers are so effective. Take Mariano Rivera, for example. For much of his career, he threw just one pitch, the cutter. How can a pitcher survive throwing one pitch such a high percentage of the time? In fact, this season he's thrown the cutter 89% of the time.
The key is late movement. The batter has to decide to swing at the ball and where to swing before the pitch is halfway to home plate, but the pitch tends to move laterally and downwards, away from the arm side, very late in its path to the plate. By then it's too late for a hitter to adjust his swing path. The same principle applies to the slider which may be the single pitch most responsible for the rise in strikeouts in the modern era. It comes in looking like a fastball, and the best sliders move both sideways and away from the arm side very late, too late for a hitter to do anything about his swing path.
Why is Yu Darvish such a tough pitcher to hit? Part of it is his filthy and broad repertoire of pitches, but another is the fact that he manages to deliver every pitch to multiple locations with the same exact motion, leaving the hitter with fewer cues to try to guess which pitch is coming. This animated GIF that circulated earlier this year illustrates this deception beautifully.
Even skills that appear to be purely instinctive, such as jumping to rebound a basketball after a missed shot, are grounded in learned perceptual expertise and a database of knowledge about how subtle shifts in a shooter's body alter the trajectory of the ball. Without that database, which can be built only through rigorous practice, every athlete is a chess master facing a random board, or Albert Pujols facing Jennie Finch: He is stripped of the information that allows him to predict the future.
Since Pujols had no mental database of Finch's body movements, her pitch tendencies or even the spin of a softball, he could not predict what was coming, and he was left reacting at the last moment. And Pujols's simple reaction speed is downright quotidian. When scientists at Washington University in St. Louis tested him, perhaps the greatest hitter of his era was in the 66th percentile for simple reaction time compared with a random sample of college students.
It's true, some hitters will guess that a certain pitch is coming, and if they guess incorrectly they can look silly, letting a fastball right down the middle go by without lifting the bat off their shoulders. Being labeled a "guess hitter" was a stigma.
From Epstein's summary of how hitters operate at a neurological level, however, it turns out almost every hitter is guessing in some ways, from the moment the pitcher starts his motion to just after the baseball is released.
