The Still of the Night Causes a Storm in the Mind

Disco Pool is live on the App Store! This was the last game my mother played and I hope that people like it.

Here’s an early YouTube video:

I’ve blogged about The Singularity is Near and the not so warm fuzzy feeling it left me with months ago. Two weeks ago I watched the new Star Trek and loved it. This week I caught a YouTube video called 2008 Latest Edition Did You Know 3.0. What does it all add up to? Basically, I think there’s something fundamentally wrong with this equation. As much as I love computers, information, progress, and buzz this stuff scares the hell out of me. By 2049 a $1,000 computer will exceed the computational power of the entire human race. What does that even mean?

It means to me that there’ll be a day like Star Trek all right but that the ships will be computers with thrusters attached and no crew. When amoebas evolved did the next iteration really care or include amoebas in their processes? Sure amoebas still survive today but let’s face it they still do what amoebas do. If we create computers with more computational capabilities than the entire human race then I don’t see a place for us to be exploring the universe at the speed of light. Sure the machines will probably need us for a while to repair them and such but eventually we’ll be obsolete as evolution keeps moving on. Terminator here we come.

Of course Terminator is really bleak and that’s not my style. I don’t really see the future like that. I don’t think that a machine with more computational capability than the entire human race combined would really pay attention to us. The machine would definitely just leave Earth. In Terminator the machines view us as a threat. When was the last time you perceived an amoeba as a threat?

Intelligence is nothing more than the evolution algorithm but quicker. Our brains can run the evolution algorithm abstractly and predict the future to a degree. Computers can already out predict human beings, the catch though is that the algorithms they run are created by people. At some point in the near future computers will not only run the numbers but they’ll create the algorithms as well. Once we cross that threshold intelligence will be as outdated as evolution. If intelligence is evolution squared then what comes next will be expolution or expotelligence. The speed at which our successors think will blow our heads off our shoulders and we’ll be left here to surf the web, social network, and play casual games all day … and I was soooo looking forward to space travel. Maybe they’ll take us with them like pet chimps.

I guess my wife summed it up the best by calling Wall-E out as the most realistic movie portrayal of the future. Take 1 part Star Trek, 1 part Terminator, 1 part pet chimps, and voila … it’s our future! I need to go eat something and do some Skynet programming in preparation, good night!

I try not to complain but the App Store’s review upon delete feature is really ticking me off. This past weekend I released Cosmosis for free with AdMob in-game advertising as its new revenue stream. Now Cosmosis had a pretty solid rating of 3 and 1/2 Stars for the paid version. Over the weekend it was download several thousand times. The first day though was the best. Unfortunately, after the first day 1% of the players who downloaded the game used the old “delete and 1-star review” on the title. The game’s leaderboards have been jumping with players having a good time and the AdMob revenue stream is netting more money than selling the game so those are 2 big pluses. However, in order to take full advantage of AdMob the game needs lots of players. The 3.5 star review the game had attracted many people the first day (nearly 2,000). After the first day 12 people deleted and gave it 1-star. This very vocal minority dragged the review score down to 2 stars which pulled the downloads to less than 500 the next day. After the first day the game jumped into the ~Top 50 free puzzle games so I know it had plenty of visibility and the written reviews that people left have been good.

So what’s the problem? Naturally, people are 80% more likely to complain about something they don’t like than they are to compliment something they do like. Apple only makes this easier by allowing users to rate Apps upon deletion. This is by far the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard of. If someone’s deleting an App that means they don’t like it so the reviews skew way negative, this of course is on top of the fact that people are already statistically proven to be 80% more likely to bitch about something than they are to rave about something. The bottomline is that I’ve put out a fun game according to the leaderboards but that super vocal minority is dragging the game down and stopping other people (99% of which would have fun with it) from downloading. I don’t like it.

Now for the positive, Cosmosis is actually getting played a lot and people are grooving with it, the game made $10 in ad revenue over the weekend which means it would have had to sell 15 copies at $0.99 to match the ads. This is by far my poorest performing game but still I’ll take $10 over $1 - $2 any day of the week. Furthermore the sales of my strongest performing title SkylineBlade went up 30% which means that free Cosmosis actually made well over $100 for me this weekend. As a small iPhone developer who’s just scooting by that’s great news.

This past Friday a good friend and I flew up to Boston to attend the MIT BIG conference. There were a variety of high profile industry guys there including Ken Levine and Curt Schilling. Overall this was probably the best conference I’ve been too. I enjoyed GDC and of course IGC was also fantastic back in the day but MIT BIG seemed to cover more ground in far less time. The panel discussions were almost all interesting with the only downfall being the QA sessions, which were far too limited. Overall, I’m looking forward to attending again next year and hopefully there’ll be some more iPhone discussion.

On a side note, Boston is a great city. This was my first time visiting and I’m already excited at the prospect of a return visit. This particular trip was a whirlwind. We woke up at 4AM on Friday to catch a 7AM flight. We arrived in Boston at 8:30 and hot footed it over to the conference (the T helped). The conference lasted until 6 including the reception and then we made our way over to Fenway Park for a Red Sox game. We scalped some decent seats and drank beer until our hearts were content. Finally, we made our way back to a relative’s house to spend the night. The coolest part about that was waiting on Commonwealth Ave. for our ride. I decided to see what would happen if I let out a little scream of joy (a whooooOOOH if you will). The response my scream elicited was pretty cool. Two blocks down someone screamed back, then another from 2 blocks in the other direction, before long people in their cars were honking and screaming into a crescendo of joy over the Red Sox victory. It was all in good fun, and good fun it was!