I think many of you still remember the “Million Dollar Homepage“, where some clever guy made a webpage, consisting basically and of a graphic, consisting of one million pixels. He sold the whole thing on a pixel-based basis and made a million bucks in total.

Well, history is repeating. Sort of – in other form. Some other guy now started the same concept, but for ASCII characters. It’s just the same principle, but with ASCII/ASCII-art (not ANSI!)… The site is still fresh, but it seems to work well until now. Wu Zhe, running the site, says, that he wants to finance his startup with the million he made with this site. It went online only 5 days ago, but he already has some sales. He writes in his blog:

I can’t believe I got my first sale only 6 hours after this site went online, though it’s only one character. Guess which char it is, it’s an “@”!

Go to the ASCII Million Dollar page.

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Fig.8 is an unusual browser-game, with poetry at places, you wouldn’t expect. In Fig.8 you play a bike, that drives around in some sort of classical book, filled up with “figures”. That sort of technical drawings, books used to have in the pen and pencil era. Well, there is basically nothing more to say here. Best you experience the game by yourself, because all words are wasted here, trying to describe this experience. Only one click away! So play Fig. 8. The game was made by Intuitiongames.

At Intuitiongames we also find some interesting background about the game:

At first Fig. 8 was actually called US and it was an art installation. In my junior year of college I was walking in the snow one night and I noticed some bike tracks running through the snow; an unusual scene in the middle of winter. While I walked along I noticed the two paths diverging then returning to a single unified track, it made me think about how relationships change over time how we grow distant then return.

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The Cologne Game Lab has opened. Really fresh news, send to me by Krystian Majewski (he twitters as well), who is co-writer of the great Game Design Scrapbook-blog and also part of this lab. The site design is somehow fresh (and unlucky me I am just right at the moment working on a new site with almost the same colors).

The direction of the lab is interdisciplinary research on a bigger scale, as well as practice-near research, also for single companies. They also offer a “Master in Game Development & Research”. In addition they are planning workshops and seminars for creative talents already working in that field. The lab is attached to the KISD and the FH Köln. In other words… this sounds massive and like perfect timing. I am curious of things to come.

Tea-off was a design competition for tea-kettles. The winning entry One from design studio Vessel Ideation is a poetic combination of traditional style and a classic retro gaming thing. Just without being too clever or having too much surprises. You boils the tea / water directly on the stove. The vessel is white and when the blue pattern emerges, the tea is really. Lovely indeed.

One of the four vessels features a pattern with Space Invaders. The design looks not suited for hardcore-retro-gamers, but more for green-tea fans. What does this mean for our culture? Did the gamers grew older and decent? Or are the Space Invaders meanwhile a fit for classical designs, that will be here for ages?

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Can you find yourself in the picture?

At Indie-digest I found an interesting figure, that tries to map “The Long Tail” theory into a producer – customer relationship. It’s primarily aimed at musicians, but works for other areas of creative stuff as well. Just look at it. It’s really interesting to find yourself in the figure in relation to some of your favorite artists.

More about pricing…

Not the same, but close connected to it is a research-study from the Max-Planck-Institute about optional pricing. Their result is short: people online not only buy at the lowest price they can get. They are willing to pay much more – if the setting is right and they got the feeling, that they made a deal that is “fair” to them as well as the artists and other people involved.

The researchers inspected Magnatune between 2003 and 2005. This online-music-shop got a special pricing system, where the customer chooses the final price. Magnatune only sets the range of the price between 5 and 18 dollar and they suggest to pay 8 dollar. By surprise the average price was about 8,20 dollar. That’s 64 percent over the minimum price and even 20 cent more than the suggested price.

Key successes for the optional higher prices were the following:

• Transparent revenue share: 50 percent for Magnatune – 50 percent for the artist at every buy.
• Buyers convenience: Consumers could stream all content and were not limited to short audio-snippets. This heightened the feeling of having a “fair deal” for the customer.
• Good paying customers were having the feeling of supporting a “good thing”.
• Anonymous buyers almost always just payed the minimum price.
• Experimentation of the preselected price-range should have a huge effect on the customers price-choice.

So, can buying stuff be rewarding for the customer? At really seems so. The unlike the theory of the “sell more for less” having a higher price can be a good fit under certain circumstances.

PS: I also wrote more about it at Gulli.com.

Ahwww. Time F**k is an upcoming game, that will be released on the 1st September and I’ve never seen a game, so sad and happy at the same time.

The main character of this game is so adorable, despite (or just because) being so much of an unhappy creature. The poor existence is only made of some pixels with almost no colors, but is good at communicating the emotion. Well done.

“Time Fkuc is a game about perspective, growth and self reflection.”

More about the team at Edmunds blog. I think that power of three development teams can really work out good things.

Extra-paranoids will draw a line between this game and the works of Boris Hoppek.

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A clever and sometimes really confusing concept has the game “Boxgame“. The playfield is a three-dimensional box. If you jump over the “cliff”, than you fall on the other side of the cube. Imagine it a little bit like a mix of a platformer, a puzzle game and a Rubik’s-cube. The game was made by Sophie Houlden and is extremely playable. For me as a player I sometimes do not understand the 3d-dimensional connections with all this twisting and turning, but I can just go out and play. But the level-designer was having a real hard time, to test things our correctly, I guess.

You need the Unity-3D-player installed to play the game, but the installation is far away from being a pain, so just try it out. The other games from Sophie look also very interesting.

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