Under The Bridge

So you left as baffled as us by this whole Farmville thing? Here is an excellent article for you:

How Social Games Ate Our Lunch

… It’s unintuitive to think that games where you actually do not ever directly interact with another person could have a community, but what social games do is generate an asynchronous cloud of persistent community formed by the constant exchange of gifts, tools, and requests sent by other players. It’s generosity-driven, but transactional – if I send you a gift, I’m feeling happy because I helped you out (especially if I’m responding to a request you’ve put out), but I’m also hoping you’ll send me something back. And the more I send and receive, the more I plant, the more I return every day (or more than once a day) – the more hardcore my play becomes. Watch a hardcore FarmVille player. They move fluidly and attentively around the tiniest change in mechanics, and play not for some whimsical dollhouse experience but for tight, fast, controlled optimizations, seeking the fastest path to a clear goal, and putting in as much time as it takes to get there…

Okay, but we’re still not seeing, like, the point here.

… What World of Warcraft did to Everquest’s mechanics – making them smoother, faster, and more elegant, and so earning unprecedented millions of players – FarmVille, though we don’t like to admit it, did to World of Warcraft. FarmVille distills the active components of a game down to a handful of clicks, and massively leverages social and viral communication channels to create the feelings of shared mission and victory, all while carving out a player-expressed space in the online world. And while it’s doubtful that even its creators would call FarmVille “elegant,” it is the first step in a new evolution of games, new (and resented) the way World of Warcraft was in the beginning – and its mechanics are so powerful that it has compelled a head-popping number of new gamers even without being polished the way WoW was…

Yikes. We’re not completely sure whether to be flabbergasted or horrified at this evolution of gaming, because we sorta have the apparently old school idea that a game ought to be, you know, fun, and these seem a lot more like work, but hey, the argument does hold together well, so if you’re interested in game design it’s definitely worth a read!

h/t: @gaminghorror!

So, since apparently it’s the thing to do these days to throw out wild guesses about what’s coming down the pike next week from Apple, we’ll toss in our almost completely baseless prognostications to join the crowd. Specifically, we’re going to predict that there’s going to be a new development environment released to support the creation of print content for The Mystery Device, and it’s going to be based on HTML5.

Furthermore, whilst there’s certainly no shortage of JavaScript frameworks from Apple that could be used for this, we’ll bet that it’s going to be based on PastryKit.

Oh, you’ve missed that PastryKit thingy? Well, it’s not officially acknowledged, and the first mention of it anywhere appears to be this StackOverflow thread. It came to general attention when the esteemed John Gruber waxed poetic on Daring Fireball about it; that set off a minor feeding frenzy of digging deeper into it all over teh intertubes, like here, and here, and here.

The thing that really gets our spidey sense tingling is that PastryKit is fairly self-evidently the basis for TuneKit, the official method for creating iTunes LP and iTunes Extras for the desktop and for Apple TV. It just kinda seems to follow to us that the technology they’d pick for that is one that they’ve got bigger plans for. Like, doing to the mobile visual content marketplace what they’ve done to the mobile audio and application content marketplaces — that is, pwned them completely,

Apple responsible for 99.4% of mobile app sales in 2009

iTunes Beats All with 69% Digital [Music] Market Share

in case you’ve been in a coma or something.

So really, even without the various leaks from content providers pointing that way, it does follow that Apple would be working on assimilating magazine and book publishers … because, when you think about it, who else is there left for them to go after? But you’re not going to have each content provider write their own application like on the iPhone’s App Store, you’re going to have a content framework for them to design to. And it just seems like a pretty darn good bet that the above-referenced TuneKit is the first step in that direction; and it also fits with the kind of application that the PastryKit sightings in the wild have been in connection with.

On the other hand, we could be completely wrong. You’ll be able to check next week!