Rock Exchange, my new RockMonkey WikiGame, has been launched. Go play!
Tag: fun
Rock Exchange
This weekend I hope to release Rock Exchange, my latest WikiGame on the RockMonkey wiki. I’m just finishing performing some tests and fine-tuning on it now. Here’s a screenshot:
In Rock Exchange, players will be able to invest their hard-earned Rocks (a unit of currency) in shares in the various pages on the RockMonkey wiki. The value of these shares will fluctuate based on several characteristics, and players will have to play the odds in order to know when to buy and when to sell to gain a return on their investment. A page’s shares fluctuate based on:
- Popularity: so if a new page seems likely to attract the attention of a lot of passing Googlers, it’s worth investing in, whereas an “in joke” that’s died out is not. Similarly, players can manipulate wiki page links in order to attract interest. The most valuable indicator of popularity is how many people come to the site for the first time, entering on a given page.
- Investment: investment in pages will put positive pressure on their value, but selling shares damages this value by flooding the market – who’ll be first to pull out of a high-flying page, thereby forcing other shareholders to suffer?
- Interference: there will be several methods for people to drastically interfere with the value of their shares and the shares of the other traders, but these won’t necessarily be immediately apparent.
- Random factors: the rock market, like the stock market, is an unpredictable animal, and there’ll be a small amount of luck in any investment.
The game’s pretty much “ready-to-play” in it’s most basic form right now, but I want to run it alone awhile longer and see if I can improve the balancing factors in it.
Client Of The Day
Oh, some of our clients are funny. A client of ours, who hosts her web site and e-mail with us, calls me up because she has difficulty getting access to her webmail:
Her: “My e-mail doesn’t work.”
Me: (not knowing much about her configuration) “Are you using a web browser to check your e-mail, over the web? Or are you using some other program, like Outlook or Outlook Express?”
Her: “What?”
Me: “Are you using Internet Explorer?”
Her: “Yeah. [my co-worker] sent me a link and I went to the page and it worked. So to make it easier in future I saved it to my desktop. But now when I click on it I get the
user name and password thing and then it doesn’t work.”
Me: “So… you’re clicking a shortcut on the desktop, and you see the user name and password boxes. You put in your user name and password… what do you get?”
Her: “Page Not Found.”
Me: “Could you tell me the address your web browser says it’s at?”
Her: “The what?”
Me: “The thing written in the white bar at the top of the screen.”
Her: “Okay, it’s C:\Documents and Settings\Meriel\Desktop\login.html.”
Me: “Umm. When you made this link on your desktop, how did you do that?”
Her: “I clicked File, then Save. Why?”
Me: “Right. What you’ve done is you’ve saved a copy of the login page onto your computer, isn’t it? But your webmail is online, so that’s not working.”
Her: “But I wanted to be able to read my webmail offline, because I’m only on dial-up and it’s a lot faster to open things from my desktop.”
Me: (bangs head on desk)
Dan And Alex
Lord Fear’s Copy Of ZoneAlarm
Dan And Alex
The Official God FAQ
The Official God FAQ. This made me laugh.
Peekaboom!
This game is so much fun: Peekaboom!
You are paired up with a random other player. For each round, one of you is a “peeker” and the other is “booming”. The boomer has a photograph in front of them and a word that associates with it (e.g. “balls”, “men”, “cooking”, “elephant”). They can click on parts of the picture to expose them to the peeker. The peeker has to guess what the thing depicted is. If the peeker gets it right, both players get points. The less of the picture was exposed, the more points the two get.
As the peeker makes guesses, the boomer can rate them as “hot” or “cold”, giving feedback to the peeker. The boomer can also pass limited clues in the form of “noun”, “related noun”, “verb”, etc. to the peeker. The players are against the clock to score as many points as possible before time runs out.
The really clever thing about this fun little online game is that it is being used as artificial intelligence research to teach computer algorithms how to spot the “important” parts of a picture: the bits that can be used to determine what the picture is of.
Give it a go, and contribute towards some AI research while you’re at it…
Notting Hill’s Passenger Warning
This photograph taken using a camera phone in Notting Hill station, London.
Legend Of The… Blue Dragon
Following up my thoughts earlier about old-school online games, I did some investigation into what became of fab old games like Legend Of The Red Dragon. It turns out that there was an effort to revive this particular one as a web-based game called “Legend Of The Green Dragon”. Well; as it was open-source I took a copy and adapted it with heaps of suitable “Aberisms”. It’s Abniberific.
Click here to play Dan’s “Legend Of The Blue Dragon”
Feedback appreciated. Usual address.
Another Meme!
Don’t you hate those tried-and-tested “quiz” memes and things. Well, here’s a variation on the theme.
1. Post this meme to your weblog or journal.
2. Stick a nail bomb in a rucksack.
3. Blow yourself up on a London bus two weeks after I do.
Wild Haggis
"According to a survey released on 26 November 2003, one-third of US visitors to Scotland believed the haggis to be a real creature."
Edit; 5th July 2007: Thanks, Wikipedia. Thwikipedia.
Next Week’s Terrorist Attacks
Here’s our predictions:
- Terrorists detonated a pollen bomb this morning in Birmingham City Centre, spreading chaos amongst hayfever sufferers throughout the area. Four people have been treated with antihistamines, one of also has asthma. “I was scared for my life,” she said in an interview with our correspondent.
- Simultaneously, two suicide bombers from different terrorist factions attacked one another in a field in Cornwall. A cow was injured in the resulting explosion, and police have sealed off the area.
- In an unexpected attack this afternoon, a terrorist group has let all of the air out of the tires of the buses in Daventry bus station. This is believed to be the a follow up attack to the brutal assault on Daventry police station last week, in which seven police officers found their shoelaces tied together. Chaos has ensued in Daventry: at least one guinea pig went hungry as his owner, who was due to bring home some broccoli on the bus, was delayed by four hours.
- And we’re just receiving word that the missing garden gnomes from Mrs. Evan’s garden in Hampshire is being treated as a kidnapping. A tape delivered this evening stated that the group responsible was going to execute the gnomes and send recordings to news agencies.
Penguins
Funny picture. Just needs a caption.
The Scat Men
Don’t usually go in for these memes, but this one was too funny not to publish.
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