Tag: zombiesrun

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How to Read The New Yorker, my new TV, and the Playdate

Issue 3 of my newsletter – subscribe here

The New Yorker is the most consistently well-written longform magazine I’ve read, and it’s been the source of so many of my ideas over the years. It’s also the one of the most unread magazines out there, gracing coffee tables across the world in artistic tsundokus.

For the first few years I was a subscriber, I read it from cover to cover (OK, not the NY city-specific bits, come on!) – even the bits I initially found confusing. Since I decided to spend more time reading books recently, I needed to be more judicious about my New Yorker reading habits lest I stop reading it completely. So here’s my tips on how to read The New Yorker!

  1. Start with the longform articles in the middle of the magazine – just the ones you’re interested in. Don’t try to slog through something you’re not into. If you read two or three of these articles, pat yourself on the back because you have conquered this issue!
  2. Next, tackle the arts and culture reviews at the back. Feel free to skip the ones entirely out of your wheelhouse, but it can be rewarding to broaden your horizons. Also, don’t read the movie reviews for anything you plan to see: Anthony Lane doesn’t understand the meaning of “spoiler”.
  3. Scan through The Talk of the Town at the front. The first article is usually political and ages poorly, and the rest are exceedingly twee and frequently parochial. My patience has grown thin for this section, lately.
  4. Don’t read Shouts and Murmurs, it’s dumb.
  5. Do you like short stories? Then read the short story. If not, continue with your life.

Lots of writers will introduce ideas in New Yorker articles which they later unnecessarily pad out into books (I’m looking at you, Malcolm Gladwell). Reading the longform articles are great way to get the core of the idea earlier, for extra dinner party conversation points. Some good articles from the most recent issues include The Art of Building Artificial Glaciers by Elizabeth Kolbert:

and If God Is Dead, Your Time Is Everything by James Wood, on Martin Hägglund’s new book This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom:

The great merit of Hägglund’s book is that he releases atheism from its ancient curse: its sticky intimacy with theism. Hägglund has no need for a parasitical relationship to the host (which, for instance, contaminates the so-called New Atheism), because he’s not interested in disproving the host’s existence. So, instead of being forced into, say, rationalist triumphalism (there is no God, and science is His prophet), he can expand the definition of the secular life so that it incorporates many of the elements traditionally thought of as religious. Hägglund’s argument here is aided by Hegel’s thinking about religion. For Hegel, as Hägglund reads him, a religious institution is really just a community that has come together to ennoble “a governing set of norms—a shared understanding of what counts as good and just.” The object of devotion is thus really the community itself. “God” is just the name we give “the self-legislated communal norms (the principles to which the congregation holds itself),” and “Christ” the name we give the beloved agent who animates these norms.

—

Last week, I got a new LG C8 55″ 4K OLED TV*. It has more glorious deep blacks than I could have possibly imagined and its WebOS interface is surprisingly fast and well-designed, especially coupled with its Nintendo Wii-like motion controller. My old Sony TV was powered by Android and its so-called apps were abysmally slow, so I hadn’t realised things could be better. The LG is so fast, in fact, that I’ve stopped using my Apple TV for anything but iTunes, Airplay, and the new Steam Link app.

Steam Link was also released just last week and it allows you to stream a game from your PC or Mac to your TV. It previously required the Steam Link box that would plug into your TV, which I bought and immediately regretted since it was barely beta-quality, but now the same functionality is available as an Android or iOS/Apple TV app. And you know what? It works pretty well – once you figure out the workarounds. When I first used it, it didn’t work with my equally-terrible Steam Controller, so I ended up pairing a spare PS4 controller with my Mac; it turns out the Bluetooth connection is strong enough to reach across the entire house.

The next problem was that a mouse cursor stubbornly remained in the centre of the TV, no matter what game I played. Even moving the mouse on my Mac didn’t budge it. Eventually I discovered I could manually move it with the PS4 controller while the Steam overlay was active. This required a tedious process of experimentation and I was on the brink of giving up several times, but the prospect of playing Steam games on the sofa gave me strength through those dark hours minutes.

Sure enough, playing Kentucky Route Zero on an OLED TV is a delight and worth all the nonsense. I’m looking forward to working my way through a fraction of the 1000 games in my library, collected largely thanks to being on the BAFTA games jury for several years.

One bonus from this experimentation is that I realised I could take a Bluetooth mouse downstairs so I could wake up my Mac when I wanted to stream from Plex simply by moving it around (“Wake on LAN” basically doesn’t work on Macs), thus saving me from having to walk upstairs. Small pleasures.

*I was considering waiting for this year’s LG C9 OLED model, which includes Airplay and full support for HDMI 2.1 features like variable refresh rate (VRR). But VRR isn’t going to be supported on anything until the next Xbox and PS5, and even then I probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. There’s always going to be something better (and much more expensive) around the corner, and the upgrade from my old 1080p Sony TV was big enough.

—

Panic, makers of fine Mac apps and publisher of Firewatch and Untitled Goose Game, announced their adorable new Playdate handheld console yesterday.

It costs $149, which many Professional Internet Commenters have declared is a “ripoff” when you can buy a Nintendo 2DS for much less, or indeed, just use the smartphone you already possess. Which is both true and also completely missing the point.

The Playdate is a fun toy. It is clearly not meant to compete with anything on price or raw specs, whether that’s Nintendo or Sony or Apple or Samsung. It’s not intended to sell millions of units, any more than a £400 Lego Death Star set is intended to sell millions. It’s meant to appeal to some people, but it turns out a lot of people have a problem distinguishing these two beliefs:

  1. This product is overpriced and few will buy it
  2. This product costs more than I am willing to pay

This conversation reminds me of people’s criticisms of Zombies, Run!’s price, which is now $35/year. Not a day goes by without me seeing some complaint about how subscriptions are terrible and it would be better if people could just buy our game outright.

But this is bogus. If Zombies, Run! cost $1/year, no-one would be complaining. The problem is not the subscription: it’s the price. And that’s OK! There are some things I would like to buy but cost more than I’m willing to spend. That doesn’t make their creators greedy or foolish, it just means it’s not for me – but it might be for people who want it more, or have more money to spend.

Speaking of Zombies, Run!, here’s an interview I did with Caroline Crampton on Hotpod, the podcast industry’s newsletter of note. I have wanted to get onto Hotpod for years and I’m very pleased with the result!

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The Mapping Problem

Issue 2 of my newsletter – subscribe here

There’s the book I’d like to write. And there’s the book I ought to write.

Last year, someone from Samsung’s strategy team asked to talk to me about whether “gamification” could be a possible use (if not a killer app) for a hypothetical augmented reality heads-up display.

I admitted, yes, Zombies, Run! was an example of gamification in action, although I quickly explained that I detested the term. Gamification “experts” will tell you that merely applying a coating of points, achievements, levels, and progress bars to otherwise-boring activities is not the way to turn it into a fun or engaging game – but promptly ignore their own advice when designing games for big companies that want to improve productivity, games that invariably are only about points andz achievements and leaderboards. So no, I didn’t think that gamification – as commonly understood and practiced – was a killer app for anything.

“But isn’t Zombies, Run! popular? Couldn’t you do that for other things?”

I sighed inwardly, wondering if I would save all the time I spent talking about why gamification sucked by writing an article or book instead. I wasn’t that simple, I explained, because of the Mapping Problem.

The Mapping Problem came to me at a games conference when I was asked if I could make mopping the floor more fun. Now, I don’t mind doing chores, but mopping is hard. It makes a mess, it requires more effort than vacuuming, and you don’t have the satisfaction of seeing bits of dirt disappear. It’s also something you know you ought to do more often, so it’s really a very good candidate for gamification because you’re intrinsically motivated to get it done.

The standard playbook of gamifying mopping would be an app that gave you points for each time you mopped the floor, and to give extra points and badges if you mopped regularly. Maybe you’d even give more points for mopping different parts of the house!

But this is a shit game design. Getting points and badges after your first session of mopping might make you feel slightly better, but after the third or fourth or eighth or ninth time you tap the “I’ve mopped, yo!” button, you realise that it’s meaningless. You’re just doing this for points. Meaningless points. The app doesn’t really care whether whether you did a good job; for all it knows, you’re just jabbing the button without doing any mopping at all.

So here’s what I would do. I would try to make the act of mopping more fun. I don’t want to reward you after you’ve finished mopping, I want you to be excited while you’re mopping. Ideally, I want you to be excited to start mopping because you know it’s going to be fun. This cannot be achieved through points and badges alone. It requires real-time motivation, either through gameplay or storytelling, or both.

I’m not sure storytelling quite fits mopping, so I’ll go with gameplay. And what I’m looking for is a kind of gameplay that maps onto mopping in a natural way, in a way that will help you achieve your ultimate goal: a thoroughly-cleaned floor. This will require the game to ‘know’ the cleanliness of the floor, which is probably most easily done with computer vision. Likewise, we need a feedback mechanism so the game can respond to what you’re doing, ideally using some flavour of augmented reality, as you are manipulating the real world. And this is the point where we get into the limitations and opportunities of technology, in the sense that this game isn’t possible unless a large number of potential players have either:

a) Multiple static home cameras that can see a majority of your floor

b) Body or head-mounted cameras

c) Periodically waving your phone’s camera at the floor No! This is a terrible idea.

Basically we need to wait for an affordable augmented reality heads-up display, which is a few years out. I honestly don’t think it’s possible to make an effective mopping game without this technology, any more than it’d be possible to make Zombies, Run! without GPS-enabled smartphones. Without it, the game has no idea whether you have mopped a particular part of the floor. Maybe you can use accelerometers to sense a back-and-forth motion (yes, haha) but that doesn’t tell you about the position of the mop. So cameras it must be.

It’s unusual for technology to so overtly be the limiting factor in game design. Most designers sensibly, and unconsciously, filter out game designs that are plainly not possible with current technology. Sure, you might have games that push graphical or processing boundaries, but few games push beyond existing interface technologies. Whenever they do – like Nintendo Labo or Guitar Hero or Pokémon Go or Beat Saber – we all get tremendously excited.

I’d argue that any gamification that extends to the physical world (as opposed to entirely digital activities like, say, gamifying online language learning) falls into this category where practically every solution requires some kind of custom interface technology. That’s just one of the reasons why gamification is hard. If you’re creating the next Fortnite or Mario or Grand Theft Auto, you don’t need to invent or harness an entirely new interface; but if you want to make the best game to teach you the violin, you have some very basic interface questions to answer.

(Incidentally, this is why touchscreens are so central to the success of smartphones: the technology is so versatile, it can solve entire swathes of interface problems. The same screen used for a first-person shooter like Fortnite can also be used for a match-three puzzler like Candy Crush. And that’s why effective AR heads-up displays have the potential to solve an order of magnitude more interface problems: you can use the technology for helping people to mop, or translating street signs, or making learning the violin more fun. So the Samsung guy wasn’t wrong, per se.)

OK, enough about technology. What’s the gameplay for our mopping game? Take your pick! Maybe it’s wiping away bugs crawling around the floor; or it’s a colouring game; or a game of Snake; or you’re sculpting a 3D landscape. There are lots of possibilities, the important thing is for the game to organically encourage you to cover the entire floor in a way that isn’t too rote or tiring. The point is, the game doesn’t just reward you for having mopped, rather, the act of mopping is the game.

But here’s the sting in the tail: the Mapping Problem means that even if we’ve solved the Mopping Problem, we haven’t solved the Violin Problem, or the Ironing Problem, or the Bin-Emptying Problem. These are all completely different kinds of activities that need to be made entertaining in different ways. So my objection to “gamification” is not that I hate the idea of making ironing more fun. I would love for such a game to exist. It’s that the term has come to mean the application not merely of a standard process, but a standard set of game mechanics, to wildly different problems – and any so-called “gamification expert” who claims otherwise is being wilfully blind to the reality of the shitty industry they have helped build.

Unsurprisingly, I have a whole lot more to say about gamification. An entire book outline and proposal, in fact. It’s a book I’m uniquely qualified to write, with a background in experimental psychology and neuroscience, plus the badge of creating one of the most successful examples of gamification ever. I even know it would sell decently well, since gamification never seems to die (“What is dead…” indeed).

It’s just… I want to write a novel! Or a short story collection. Something beautiful and creative. But my book outline is for something completely different.

I ought to write about gamification. And yet.

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Are Subscriptions Fair?

Subscription pricing, once the domain of newspapers, magazines, and cable bundles, is lately becoming much more common in everything from online video and movie tickets to razors and meal kits. One newish area that has been causing a lot of anguish has been subscription pricing for apps, as summarised on Metafilter. I was inspired to write this comment in defence:

A couple of years ago, we switched Zombies, Run! from being a paid app with IAPs for new seasons, to a subscription-based service costing (now) $25 a year. The subscription allows us to pay not just for the cost of developing new content and features, but also the very significant costs of just keeping the app running on the latest versions of iOS and Android; not to mention working properly on new phone sizes and supporting basic new OS functions.

I’m not sure whether people realise quite how much work it is to just keep *exactly the same app* working over time. There is always something in new iOS and Android versions that breaks our app (and other devs’ apps); and particularly on Android, new phones will often also break things.

The simple fact is that most indie app developers are not swimming in cash, and that if thy decide to switch to subscriptions, usually it’s not out of a desire to squeeze every last penny out of users, but just to keep the lights on and not be continually terrified that tomorrow may bring zero sales.

Our switch to subscriptions was also driven by industry-wide shift towards freemium pricing for smartphone apps and games. Yes, there are old-schoolers who refuse to download freemium games, but they’re far outnumbered by people who – not unreasonably – prefer the much less risky option of downloading a game for free and seeing whether they like it before paying anything.

Some of that shift is also down to startups that were unnaturally juiced by venture capital firms. This is less common nowadays, but it was not unusual for investors to pump a few million in to an app development company in the hopes of making the new Runkeeper or Instagram. That investment is made with the goal of making a 10x or 100x return in a few years time, which in turn requires hyper-growth – and you don’t get hyper-growth by asking your users for anything terminally embarrassing like actual money.

I think the economics of this strategy have been more or less ruined by the fact that the most popular and generic non-gaming apps have now either been subsumed into the Google/Apple/Facebook nexus of free utilities; or into much larger lifestyle brands like Nike and Adidas, who effectively use them as marketing. That leaves more niche utilities apps like Ulysses (a writing tool) and Zombies, Run! which are small enough to fly under the radar of most VC firms; or professional apps like Adobe Creative Cloud, which are extremely expensive to develop.

I spotted some familiar themes among comments on the Metafilter and Hacker News posts, and I thought it’d be interesting to run through them here:

“Digital subscriptions are more like renting, not subscribing”

If you subscribe to the paper edition of The New Yorker, you get to keep all your magazines forever, whereas when your digital subscription ends, your access to the content completely ceases (just as Netflix does). This is a fair point although it ignores the fact that:

  • Digital subscriptions are often cheaper than print subscriptions
  • Most customers don’t place a high value on continued access to the content they had while they were subscribed…
  • …and in any case, this is balanced out by most digital subscriptions offering you access to the complete back catalog of magazines and issues, unlike print subscriptions

So I don’t buy this as a strong argument against digital subscriptions, although it varies an awful lot for each app – not just due to the type of features or content you get, but also due to the individual pricing.

“What about people with no money?”

It’s ahistorical to think that quality journalism – or quality software – was ever cheap, let alone free. Yes, there was a short period from, say, 1995 to 2015, where investors didn’t care about making money, but we’ve now returned to the norm where good, established stuff mostly costs money and bad or unreliable stuff is mostly free.

And I don’t see how subscriptions are necessarily any more expensive than paying up front for software. If you think $10 a month for Adobe Creative Cloud makes it unfair and inaccessible to poor people, I don’t see how paying $200 upfront was somehow far more accessible. You could equally argue that by lowering the initial signup cost, subscriptions are more accessible.

I, too, would prefer to live in a world where most people earned more and software was more affordable. I just don’t think that subscription pricing is at all related.

“Micropayments are the answer for journalism”

Only if you want your journalism to be entirely click-driven. I’m sure Blendle would take exception to that argument, but if your goal is to fund quality journalism, then I don’t think that paying only for the articles you read is the best way to go.

“Subscriptions contribute to the centralisation of data…”

This is a new one to me. Insofar as any monetary engagement with Google and Apple will reinforce their dominant position as platform owners, I can’t argue against this, although it would also require that you don’t pay for anything on these platforms. And I don’t think that’s a practical suggestion if you want to participate in modern society.

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Five Years of Zombies, Run!

Five years ago today, we launched Zombies, Run! on the iTunes App Store, only six months after our Kickstarter.

When Naomi Alderman and I came up with the idea behind Zombies, Run! back in the summer of 2011, neither of us had any notion that it’d be this popular and last this long. I thought Six to Start would work on it for one, two, maybe even three years, and then move on to something else.

I have been playing Zombies, Run! on and off for the past three years. I have recommitted myself to running beginning in the last summer. I cannot begin to tell you how this has helped me as far as my health and fitness. The stories pull me in each time I go out for a run. If it weren’t for Sam, Archie, Dr. Myers and all the other wonderful characters, I would not have stayed with running as long as I have. I pour myself into the story and the role of Runner Five. Thank you for the imagination and ingenuity it took to make this app. Hopefully it will continue for years to come.
 — Olivia

We hoped for success, and we got it: almost 4 million downloads and a quarter of a million active users. What we hadn’t anticipated was just how just how much our players would come to love our game and story — and how much their lives would be changed by it.

So for our 5th birthday, we asked our players for their stories of Zombies, Run! We’re also revealing some of our internal stats… Continue reading “Five Years of Zombies, Run!”

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How we made an App Store subscription success

Apple just announced they’re giving developers a 85/15 revenue split (instead of 70/30) for subscriptions lasting over a year — and Google will be offering even better terms.

As the co-creator of Zombies, Run!, a fitness app that transitioned to a subscription model just over one year ago, I couldn’t be more delighted. 🍾 + 🎉 all round, folks.

Before all that 🍾 + 🎉 though, I want to share the lessons we learned in the past year — a terrifying, exciting, and ultimately very successful year.

The Decline and Fall of Paid Apps

Once upon a time, my company, Six to Start, teamed up with lead writer Naomi Alderman to create Zombies, Run! It’s a running game and audio adventure where you actually run outside, in the real world.

We’re kind of a big deal, you know — we have hundreds of thousands of players and 3 million downloads. @wilw loves us!

We put Zombies, Run! on Kickstarter in September 2011, and we released it on time and on budget in February 2012. Would you believe that we charged $7.99 for the app? I know for a fact that other developers thought we were insane. But it worked out because we had a great app with zero competition and a fantastic concept.

One year later, we dropped the price to $3.99; the App Store was getting filled up with cheap or free apps, and users were increasingly reluctant to pay anything upfront. By 2015, things were looking ugly. We were still making a decent amount of money but we had fears for the long-term future of our paid app.

Something had to change. Continue reading “How we made an App Store subscription success”

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Two Million Runners Five

Zombies, Run! just passed the two million sales-and-downloads mark. It’s the fifth-most popular running app in the US, and the most successful smartphone fitness game of all time — a phenomenon on par with Soulcycle, Crossfit, or Tough Mudder.

Four years ago, we began as an fun, amusing app idea on Kickstarter. Today, we’ve become a massive community with mountains of fanfic, incredibly supportive players, meetups across the world, and this month, one of the world’s biggest virtual races.

This is the story of how we got there — told through a lot of graphs and data.

It’s also the story about how we achieved our goal to make running more exciting, by putting you into a world where running really matters.

In Zombies, Run!, you aren’t running just to get a faster split time or to lose a couple of pounds — you’re doing it because a young child has been abandoned in the zombie-infested wilderness, or because a horde is headed right for the neighboring town and their radio is out, or because a traitor has stolen vital supplies and people will die unless you track them down.

Role-play for running

In 2011, I sat down with our co-creator and lead writer, Naomi Alderman, to sketch out the game’s design and story. As ‘Runner Five’, it would be your mission to collect supplies, rescue survivors, avoid zombies, and rebuild your base from a few shivering survivors into a fortified beacon of civilization. And you do this by walking, jogging, or running in the real world.

You’d automatically collect supplies (like ammo, water, food, and electronics) so you’d never have to look at your phone or press any buttons while running. Instead, the game would use your speed as input and your headphones as output.

In other words, Zombies, Run! was born as an app. It needs GPS or accelerometer sensors so we can adapt to how fast and far you’re running, and it needs headphones to deliver the audio story and notifications.

Our reliance on technology isn’t necessarily a virtue — it can make everything more expensive and complicated — but it’s the only way of delivering the immersive, reactive experience we wanted.

We decided that experience would include 23 story missions and 7 procedurally-generated supply missions in Season 1. And if it went well, maybe we’d make a second season!

Yep, it went pretty well!

We didn’t need to worry about that, as Zombies, Run! became the most successful videogame on Kickstarter in 2011. Even better, it was released precisely on time six months later. Since then, we’ve released four seasons spanning over 200 missions and 40 hours of audio story.

Our guest writers include Margaret Atwood, Joanne Harris, and Elizabeth Bear. Our voice cast and production — led by Audio Director Matt Wieteska — is second to none. As Naomi often says, Zombies, Run! is far better than it needs to be. Continue reading “Two Million Runners Five”