Moby Dick

The Uncomfortable Truth at the Heart of Mobile Gaming:

Most people outside the game industry don’t realize that free-to-play games, by far the most successful mobile game category, are often supported financially by a very small number of users who pay extravagantly for power-ups, extra lives, and in-game currency. The whole point of many successful free-to-play games is to identify these “whales” and extract as much money as possible from them. 

The discussion of this process at mobile conferences is sometimes uncomfortable. Non-paying players (the great majority of a game’s users) are often dismissed as meat to be fed to the whales. An intense amount of thought goes into not just identifying the whales, but determining their individual psychology and the best techniques to pull more money from that particular type of person. Players are tracked in as much detail as possible, including exactly which promotion they responded to, what their purchasing pattern is, and any other details the developer can glean from them. Every aspect of the game is crafted to maximize revenue extraction, including minute changes in graphics, button designs, and subtle changes in game play. Anything that creates even a small fraction of one percent change in a conversion rate can mean the difference between a successful and unsuccessful game, so the pressure to constantly refine everything is immense.
 

Among the many ways free to play mobile games are like gambling, this most uncomfortable may be how scientifically one can engineer a game to part a whale from his money.

Recommended reading: Addiction by Design

Secret to the perfect burger

How to make a great hamburger is a question that has bedeviled the nation for generations, for as long as Americans have had griddles and broilers, for as long as summertime shorts-wearing cooks have gone into the yard to grill.

But the answer is simple, according to many of those who make and sell the nation’s best hamburgers: Cook on heavy, cast-iron pans and griddles. Cook outside if you like, heating the pan over the fire of a grill, but never on the grill itself. The point is to allow rendering beef fat to gather around the patties as they cook, like a primitive high-heat confit.
 

More here from the NYTimes. Not sure it's practical to serve a big group with burgers cooked on cast iron pans unless you happen to have a ton of them, but if you're a regular host of big barbeques, it's not that expensive to get a cast iron griddle for your grill.

The other tip in this article that I've always found to be critical is to use meat that is 20 to 25% fat. In the demonization of fat, too many cooks resort to purchasing the leanest burger meat from stores. If you want to eat healthy, eat a carrot stick. If you're going to eat a burger, eat a burger.

Line

Creator David Milch was notorious for working on scripts until the last minute, which meant "it was a foregone conclusion we wouldn't be able to learn our lines," the character actor Stephen Tobolowsky wrote in an essay for Backstage magazine earlier this year. "Ian McShane told me to keep looking at him, stay in character and just call out 'Line.'" The scene became a "standoff of two actors saying, 'Line'" — with the prompts edited out of the final product.
 

Hilarious. I'd love to see some of these outtakes. From an article documenting all the various ways actors memorize their lines.

Not surprisingly, there's an app for that. Rehearsal is an app for the iPhone, and Rehearser is a free app for Android, both of which help you to memorize a script.

Tech tidbits

  1. Researchers have developed a type of chemical iris that could enable photographers to select apertures on really tiny cameras (think camera phones) in the future. Maybe someday we'll get to shoot wider open on camera phones, enabling us to get the type of shallow depth of field which is the one piece of a photographer's toolbox that's most noticeably absent on the most popular camera now, the smartphone.
  2. Netflix signs Chelsea Handler for a new talk show. They're going to keep re-investing their profits in original programming. Imagine if HBO didn't have one particular house style for original programming but instead tried to target programs even more segments of viewers. What number of subscribers could they sign up? That's what Netflix is setting out to do.
  3. Viacom and about 60 small cable operators representing about 900,000 households went to war over carriage fees. In what is a notable first, the two sides decided to part ways rather than settle. Supposedly most households didn't care and the cable operators lost less than 2% of subscribers, much lower than the 10% churn they were bracing for. Not entirely surprising consider Viacom's target viewership is less represented in the flyover states, and most of the generation that watches Viacom programming can likely find that stuff online. This next generation of kids have never paid for cable and probably never will. There remains just one channel that every cable operator in the country would have to suck it up and pay for just about any price, and that's ESPN, which not surprisingly demands the highest carriage fee (by a wide wide margin) in your cable channel lineup.
  4. The Oxford Mail is experimenting with letting WhatsApp users follow them to get occasional news alerts tailored to their interests. This is a small test but an important one as it may signal WhatsApp is finally moving to become a platform like its Asian peers LINE, WeChat, and KakaoTalk. Those chat services have corporate or celebrity accounts you can follow to receive broadcast text messages, much like following a celebrity or corporate account on Twitter.