

Review My App: An iPhone game about "Knowledge and Enlightenment" (Upcoming) - ivanzhao
http://www.threewiki.com/

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ivanzhao
Hi HN,

This is my upcoming game/app. It's based on an existing Wiki game, and
modified to reinforced the cognitive process of "learning through
connections". So far, I have personally learned a lot while developing this
game (e.g. "pines" are "coniferous trees", and "coniferous trees" lives in
"northern hemisphere".).

It would be nice to have some early feedback and suggestions. The app should
be out in couple weeks. By then I will put out some free copies for fellow
Hacker Newers.

Thanks,

Ivan

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pvg
Little nit, are you sure this 'available on the iphone app store' modified
button is legit? I seem to recall having to sign/checkbox to use it, besides,
isn't 'available' supposed to mean something's available.

~~~
ivanzhao
ah good call. I am going to change it now.

thanks for noticing it.

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po
The "vote for the price you think is fair" thing is brilliant. I'm assuming
that you're using this data to inform the decision on the actual price.

I think though, that having a limited set of choices will influence the votes.
People will pick the middle one. You should have a fill-in box.

I see this problem all the time with people trying to implement the "wisdom of
the crowds" or market concepts. It is important that people make their
decision in isolation of other people's opinion. Otherwise social pressure and
other factors distorts the outcome.

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kyro
Yeah, this is that "anchoring effect." If you tell someone that you think a
pair of jeans costs $400 and ask them to guess a price, chances are they'll
quote one around $400 even when the actual price is something like $40.

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Mongoose
I love going on explorative journeys through Wikipedia, so the app really
appeals to me. Definitely a task I wish I did more often. I'd throw down a
dollar or two for an app like this, but my platform of choice is Android.

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mthoms
Excellent concept. I know I've personally lost many, many hours following
random links on Wikipedia. If this app can suck in the user in the same way,
I'll be hooked.

Any reason you decided to do this as an iOS App instead of a as a Web App?

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ivanzhao
Need to earn some cash to bootstrap for my startup (vittyo.com). iOS is much
easier to make some food money in my opinion.

Behind the scene, the logistics is actually mostly server-based, using Cocoa
just for the eye candies. So it is really easy to convert it into a web app or
onto Android.

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peregrine
Seems perfect for a web app. Your viewing a page about frued, google/amazon
puts some links up for psychology books. Heck you modify the wiki article such
that if the person has books written or authored about them or the subject you
could Amazon link it easy. Seems more profitable..

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einarvollset
Yeano. Because a 6% affiliate revenue from Amazon will not provide an eCPM of
> $6. Really. Better of with iAds.

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neilk
I'm not sure if you know, but a similar game exists already:
<http://thewikigame.com/>

Try to take this fact as validation of your concept. TheWikiGame's interface
is a bit clunky. So if you do it better, more power to you.

It's hard to tell how you think your game is going to work... it's not obvious
to me how "enlightenment" motivates players, but you never know. I rather like
TheWikiGame's beat-the-clock dramatic tension, and that one plays against
others. TheWikiGame can be addictive especially if you play it with other
friends in the room suggesting strategies.

~~~
ivanzhao
Thanks for the link. I found it as a good way to learn, and to remember what
you just learned. So I think it could be more like an app, instead of a game.

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michael_dorfman
Congratulations! Nicely done.

I actually built a very similar system about two years ago, when I was
screwing around with the Wikipedia dataset as a playground for some graph
theory experiments, but it never occurred to me to make it into an iPhone app.
Brilliant move.

If you're looking to make an "advanced" version, I coded a variation where
each page was weighted by the number of in-bound links from other pages, and
the goal was to minimize the weighted path. I found that led to some
interesting lateral thinking to find more obscure connections between topics.

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kyro
That's something I'd definitely be interested in. Just make sure that the
connections are well-related and that I'll end up walking away with a set of
nicely integrated facts. I said I'd pay $0.99 for it because it'd be a nice
addition to my Reference folder and also because I can't stand iPhone app ads
-- they're obtrusive and there's not much screen real estate to spare.

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ivanzhao
That's where the social curating aspect of the game kicks in. Good,
educational connections stays on top (on weekly basis), bad ones got flushed
away. It's much like Hacker News in a sense.

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MaysonL
Yes: the social aspects, as well as a little bit of competition (perhaps
contests/judging of answers/maybe even prizes) will be the selling points.
Building the community will be your biggest post-launch task (and starting it
pre-launch is definitely a good step).

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pohl
Your website is funky in my Mobile Safari on my iPhone. It's wider than the
screen and the pinch-to-scale isn't letting me fix that.

Looking forward to your game.

