Strategy

Would any of you be surprised that I do Wordle every morning? Probably not since I did an entire blog post raving about how much I love Spelling Bee.

Anyway, months ago, while I was searching YouTube for videos to learn Excel, one of the Excel guys did a Wordle video where he discussed strategy for the game. Cool, I thought, let me see this.

The advice was mostly forgettable, but the one piece I do remember is the word he always begins with. Adieu.

Hmm, I thought, that does provide a nice mix of vowels. I'm going to try that instead of my strategy. It only took one time for me to know his method has some serious flaws.

While adieu might give me a nice mix of vowels, there's only one consonant. That's a problem for me.

I like my method. I start out with the word Share. That gives me two vowels and two major consonants--S and R. My next word is Poult. This gives me O and U and another major consonant--T. L and P are also surprisingly common. Sometimes just from these two words, I have enough to solve the puzzle, but if I don't, my next word is Nifty. This gives me I and Y as well as an N. The T is repeated and I would love to come up with a word with I and Y that doesn't repeat an already used letter, but I haven't done that yet.

I also have two secondary words that I use if I'm super stuck and can't come up with any words. Badge and Wreck. (Sometimes instead of Badge, I'll use Midge, depending on what vowels I have.)

This strategy has worked well for me. The only day I broke my Wordle streak was the day I wasn't finished with it, had to do something else, and forgot I wasn't done. I'm still irritated by that, but I was writing deep for Wicked Persuasion and just spaced out on the game.

Game Ads or WTF?

I play games. Usually on the elliptical at the gym to make the time go faster. Most of these games have in-app purchases, but a player can sometimes watch an ad instead.

I've noticed something. Nearly every ad features our heroine of the game being cruelly cheated on by her husband/SO/boyfriend. Frequently, she has a child or she's pregnant with the cad's baby, but his new side piece is pregnant too and he's all gooey eyed over her. Our heroine then leaves town and starts a new life wherever the game takes place.

The first couple of times, I figured it was just how the game was set up, but as months went by and ad after ad after ad featured the same setup, it made me go huh?

There's one app--I hesitate to call it a game--where it's like an online coloring book. I have this game and I played it at the start of the pandemic because it was calming. They had an ad where the heroine's SO has his eyes straying to a new woman.

Only I have this game. I still login to it regularly to get the daily bonus. My version of the game still has these two together and there's no sign there's ever been an other woman drama.

Then another game shows our heroine pregnant, she tells the father, and he puts her on a raft and pushes her out to sea. The name of the game? Family Island. That's right, this is a couple with two other children and the previous ads for this game featured the entire family fleeing an exploding volcano, the father doing what he could to protect his wife and children.

This makes me ask what changed the advertising strategy for these games? Did one game have an abandoned woman setup, advertise it, and do really well? Is that why all these other games are following the same ad strategy even though their games do not have an abandoned woman?

I'd love to discover why this is a trend and what other casual game players think of it. I'm invested with my coloring book couple and it pissed me off when the ad broke them up. And Family Island? Isn't the whole point of the game that they're a family?

The strategy makes me wonder what sort of demographics and market research they have. Or if one person posted on a forum somewhere and all these other game companies went, Eureka!

Economics of Game Apps

I've been mulling over economics lately. I know, weird thing for me to fixate on--and I am fixated--but I've been trying to puzzle through a couple of things. Today, let's talk about game apps for your phone or tablet and the pricing model in the latest one I've been playing.

My latest app that's kept me interested is a coloring book/color by number game that has in-app purchases. There is no chance that I'll overplay this game because it only charges to 100 energy points and it takes 40-50 energy points to color a picture. Lower levels were less energy points and I'm assuming that as I advance, it will have higher costs. So if my game energy is fully charged, I can color two pictures.

I find this endlessly frustrating. I want to color more than two pictures, especially when I'm stressed because it's oddly relaxing.

I didn't need to look up the pricing model because it was in my face every single time I used the app. It might be every picture, but I can't remember for sure. Anyway, I would have been interested in signing up for the extended features, except for the price. $7.99 A WEEK!

That's more than $415 dollars a year! For real!

And that's when I started contemplating WTH the app developers were thinking. The game is slick, it's pretty, it's relaxing and I'm sure they have to pay artists to make the coloring pictures, but there is literally zero chance I'm paying what they're asking.

When I had economics classes in college, pricing was one of the elements we covered. How many people are willing to pay $415 a year or $7.99 a week? Wouldn't the developers make more money if they charged $29.99 a year (which is the max I'd be willing to pay for this game) and entice more people to pay? In Econ, the answer was volume more than makes up for the lower price, IIRC.

Then I wondered if there was a fixed audience that was willing to pay at all? Maybe they wouldn't make up the income in additional subscribers. What if pricing was inelastic for coloring games? If there are X number of people who are willing to pay $7.99 a week and not very many more beyond X who would pay at a lower price, then perhaps they're priced correctly?

I tend to think that is not correct, though. The game is enough fun that I would pay $29.99 a year for it, but I wouldn't pay more than that. So I play the two games I get with my free energy points and let it recharge so I can play again later.

I have to believe there are a lot of other people like me out there and that the game developers have priced themselves out of income.

Pay to Play

When I'm at the gym, I like to play games on my phone while I'm on some of the equipment. It makes the time go much faster. I have a peeve, though. In-App purchases. Grrr.

There is a Match 3 game that I particularly like to play, but now that I'm up around level 100, it's super difficult, and with only 5 lives, I don't get enough time to finish my workout before I'm done. If they offered me a flat-rate to buy the game and be able to play it indefinitely, I'd be all over that, but they don't. Instead, they want me to continually buy things to keep playing. This I will not do.

A one-time purchase. Yes. A $5 a year subscription to eliminate In-App purchases. Yes. But no, I will not buy lives and I will not buy money in order to keep playing.

Some of these games are very generous and fair, giving you the ability to play free for real. One that comes immediately to mind is Big Fish Games Fairway Solitaire. To show my appreciation for this fairness, I spent about $10 in their game shop. I think that's a more than fair price and now I don't buy things.

My current Match 3 addiction isn't as fair with its players. Only five lives; daily rewards are minuscule; levels are layered deep and require many matches, but the number of moves the player is allowed does not correspond to the difficulty (in other words you either need a lot of luck or you have to buy stuff); and they constantly are asking for game coins which the player receives very few of. Because I'm so irritated by their stinginess, I am determined not to spend any money on the game, and if I didn't smile every time I saw the dancing gingerbread man, I would delete the game.

I do believe that game designers should be compensated for their work. If I could find a great Match 3 game that I could buy outright, I would be all over that. I've yet to find this game. I've done some searches online, I've searched in the app store and have had zero luck. I know it's because they're all chasing that Candy Crush money--In-App purchases can be really lucrative--but it's a PITA.

Your Life as a Game

***Again, I received no compensation of any kind for this post.***

I heard about an app called Habitica that was supposed to make your tasks into games and help you develop good habits by rewarding you as if your life were a game. This sounded like it might be worth trying, so I downloaded the app (it's free, but I believe there are in-app purchases) and gave it a shot.

First, it asked me questions about what I wanted to focus on and then it created habits for me. This might work for some people, maybe even most people, but I didn't like it and it didn't work for me. The tasks they gave me were not the ones I wanted to work on. It was by accident that I figured out I could change them by typing over what they offered me, but it would have been nice if they'd told me I could do this.

However, even after realizing I could change what was offered, I only did a couple of them because I hate typing on my phone and avoid it whenever possible. What I would have liked is if I'd been offered a broad selection of options and I was allowed to pick the ones I wanted. I wasn't looking for anything bizarre or out there.

Second, there were two different habit areas and I only knew about the one it opened up to when the app installed. I found the other one (again) by accident. Um, really?

In fairness to the app, I'm horrible about reading instructions and tend to clear text bubbles off my screen without much hesitation, so it's possible they offered explanations and I blew past them, but I honestly don't remember seeing anything like that, so I was in the dark.

Third, I realize the 8-bit graphics were a stylistic choice, but I didn't like them. 8-bit is just so ugly.

I think I made it a few hours before I decided gamifying my life wasn't for me and that this app was not going to work with my brain. I wanted it to work, I thought it might possibly be something that I could use to be better about doing things every day, but I ended up deleting it from my phone in less than a day. YMMV.

***Again, I received no compensation of any kind for this post.***

Are We Sims?

When I was a kid, I read a short Science Fiction story that was part of a collection. I don't remember the author or the title, but the story itself had a twist at the end that was so cool. The world was a video game and in the last bit of story, we see the boy who's controlling the world and the people in it leave the game to go do something else.

Wow, I thought. That was a surprise. My understanding is that this isn't the only story that's pulled this twist, but at twelve or thirteen, I'd never seen it before.

In the past few years, I've started hearing about physicists discussing whether or not our universe is a simulation. A game. Apparently they have the math to make this a viable hypothesis. The first few dozen times I heard this idea, it left me disturbed. I'm not a Sim, damn it.

But after hearing it enough times, I've starting going hmmm. What if we are part of a video game? Characters in a universe filled with bits and pixels.

I enjoy Sims 3 a lot, and I wonder what if they became sentient in some future release? Sims 149 where they become aware. Here these characters are, trying to live their lives and out of the blue they find themselves playing chess to increase their logic level even though they've never played chess before.

It's an interesting idea, a great what if for a writer. In case you're wondering, the physicists have come up with an experiment that should provide evidence to whether or not we're a simulation game. It will be very interesting to see what the results are to that.