"who on earth would play the game 200 times and still remain in the “zone of colossal failure”?
Me. I suck at games.
The Flappy Bird phenomenon is showing little sign of hitting one last, fatal, pipe as the game has now spawned at least two Bitcoin clones and a big data analysis of gamers' performance. On the cryptocurrency front, Flappycoin Pool, and the still-to-launch Flappycoin.org are battling it out for supremacy, with the latter …
Looking at he graph I was surprised some people were able to nail the game in a couple of attempts, the distribution doesn't look right.
However reading the guys blog linked in the article it seems that the graph is generated from data over about 4hours of play. Thus the points in the "zone of skill" may have been playing for many hours beforehand in order to achieve the good scores at the time the data was taken, and conversely those in the "zone of colossal failure" may improve later.
Another graph labelled "Increasing Score With Practice" probably gives a better indication of how people progress.
Not played the game myself though.
I can't imagine anyone saying look a crappy game that is getting loads of press lets base a currency on it.
Really? I find that perfectly plausible. I think you need to adjust your estimate of the likelihood people will expend effort on pointless diversions - of which creating a new cryptocurrency is surely one.
Creating cryptocurrencies branded with the latest Internet fad is itself an Internet fad of the moment.1 It's the lolcat of 2014. I dare say there are plenty of people with templates ready to go; they just plug in some trending meme and see how many miners they can attract for their 15 minutes of fame. It's little different, in terms of cost or reward, to trying to attract Twitter followers or Facebook likes.
1This means that we should shortly see various meta-currencies, like "Bitcoincoin" or "Create-a-coin-coin", if they aren't out there already.
Is there an obvious reason why the scores are clustered the way they are? The scores themselves are obviously not as granular as the number of 'ridges' in score prevalence would suggest, since the distributions appear to cover a range, but by what mechanism would scores tend to - but not necessarily - cluster around regular points?
Are the levels randomly generated in a way that they're easy for a little while and then get harder, or the other way around?
Never played it, so I'm a bit curious.
This gives me hope for the success of my new game "Flippy Bird", where the user plays a driver stuck in heavily-congested traffic. Tapping the screen causes your character to make rude gestures at other drivers, which has no effect whatsoever. If you quit the game, you lose. If you continue to play, you lose.
Coming soon1 to an iOS and Android near you.
1For infinite values of "soon".