

Show HN: We turned the Google Shopping API into a game - nate
http://cityposh.com/contests/apple-tv-25-for-itunes/price_pickers/new

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nate
It's not perfect yet, but it is fun if you like price is right style games :)
I'll probably be deploying a bug fix right after this comment, but thought you
guys would dig seeing an alternative use of the Google Shopping API. Made by a
few HNers. Hat tip to bcroesch for a lion's share of the work.

EDIT: Oh, you guys might dig this too. I would think there's some Sodoku fans
on there. We made an image based Sodoku all in html/css/jquery.
[http://cityposh.com/contests/apple-tv-25-for-
itunes/poshokus...](http://cityposh.com/contests/apple-tv-25-for-
itunes/poshokus/new)

~~~
vyrotek
Loved it. Of course I'm biased since I'm in the 'gamification' space. I'm
definitely horrible at this game, but every time I was about to quit I just
had to click try again to prove that I could actually get one right.

I finally got up to about 800 points :)

~~~
nate
Awesome thanks! Oh IActionable.com is very interesting. Gamifying Salesforce
sounds like a great idea! I'll check this out too.

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dpcan
Could be fun, but needs titles of the products with the pictures or half the
time you don't even know what you're looking at and touching "hint" goes to
the website.

~~~
nate
Right, understood. But that is also a big point of what we are doing with
Cityposh. It's a promotional tool for businesses after all. So traffic back to
their website is very much desired by companies who want to use Cityposh to
promote them.

~~~
sid6376
What can possibly be done is to open a in browser popup which shows the
details of the product with an option of viewing them later. If i am playing
the game with the intention of playing its not very likely that i would pause
to buy before returning to the game. You can add whatever items were clicked
for in a list below and when the game ends show the items that the player
showed interest in.

~~~
nate
Yeah, that's a very interesting idea. Thanks for that. We'll chew on something
like that for sure.

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tempura
Nice work. This taps straight into a game mechanic most people already have
ingrained into them. Really addictive for a marketing game.

Two suggestions:

\- Size up the images to be a greater percentage of the containing space. With
a high resolution people are going to be squinting to figure out the products.

\- After the user loses, show them what they got wrong - it's pretty
unsatisfying not to see where you went wrong, and it's the behaviour people
expect from the "price is right" mechanic. From your point of view, it's also
an addition time to plug links.

~~~
nate
Awesome suggestions. Thank you so much for these.

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neilk
It's clever, and you can make at least as many variations on this as the Price
is Right. Separate games for electronics, homewares, etc...

The ranking game is annoying me though. Some suggestions:

\- if I fail to put them in the right order it should tell me how many are in
the wrong position.

\- if I ultimately fail after n tries it should reveal the prices. Right now I
just sit there frustrated and unenlightened as to what I did wrong.

\- audio cues for winning / losing. Really important for a game like this.

~~~
nate
We hear you for sure on these points. Audio is the top of the priority list
for polish we need to add to all of Cityposh. Thanks for checking it out, and
helping us with this.

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brandnewlow
Sweet and addictive.

Complaint! When I click correctly on something, a red box shows up around the
object for a second and then a little alert says "1 out of 2 tries" above the
items. Below it tells me if I got it right.

This is confusing. The red box and the 1 out of 2 tries makes me think I
picked wrong. But then the text below says I chose correctly. It's not
immediately clear if I did well or not as I'm playing.

~~~
nate
Agreed. I had the same kind of thing happen, and felt the same way. Thanks for
bringing that up.

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misuse-permit
Nice creative idea here. I think its pretty fun.

A few things:

1\. Sometimes I have no idea what an image is showing. Text would be really
helpful.

2\. What is the purpose of hints? I know people could just google search, but
why make it so easy?

~~~
nate
Thanks misuse! We are debating text over here. Text would make it easier to
bot I think. Please don't bot this fellow HNers just because I mentioned this!
:) Please! So a way to fix the bot problem here, is to force the optical
character recognition to be the way to have to crack it. And Text descriptions
would thwart that. So the purpose of hints is basically so you don't have to
have text descriptions but still have a way of going over to the site to see
prices. It's not perfect of course. Maybe the hint could be made a bit harder,
like we send you to a search for "Macbook Pro" instead of the exact item.
Thanks for the feedback on this and checking it out.

