James Blake/Falklands Marine Heritage Trust
Advertisement from hell
Feedback is often confused or intrigued by the tricks advertisers use to try to sell things, but recent strategies have been tricking people in the wrong direction, such as intentionally weird capitalization or bad grammar. It seems that it is designed to.
While we were fiddling with our smartphones, Feedback repeatedly saw ads for mobile games that promised “the most difficult levels ever.” We spent several days trying to figure out why it looks that way.
The game in question is called “Go Climb!” This is a puzzle game in which a group of climbers climbs to the top of a mountain, tangles safety lines, and the player must untangle them. So it’s essentially the flip side of Feedback TV, except it’s gamified and at least somewhat solvable.
Feedback initially wondered if this was a non-English speaking developer skimping on translation costs. There is precedent for this. Dating back to 1991, it’s a Japanese space shooter. zero wing It was released in Europe with a notorious translation. As a result, the introductory cutscene had an alien invader proclaiming, “All your bases are ours.” After it was rediscovered in the late 1990s, it became one of the most widely shared internet memes of the time.
However, if you look closely, Climb! It suggests something else is going on. It’s made by a company called FOMO Games. Although the company is based in Turkey, its staff clearly have good English skills, as evidenced by the information provided for all of the company’s other games. Not to mention, it’s explained in the nice corporate text on the website. “FOMO stands for Fear Of Missing Out” This defines our product vision and culture. ”
Rather, the feedback makes me suspect that the poor English is intentionally designed to get our attention. In line with this, the ad also has other strange features that add to its incongruity. What’s notable is that the game’s title makes no sense at all, as the game’s mountaineers have been replaced by spacesuit-clad astronauts floating against a starry sky. It wasn’t until I saw the game in the app store that the mountaineering theme was revealed and things became clear.
This seems like a new and devilish way to promote products online. They intentionally create a perfect hash of their ad, hoping that this will pique people’s interest enough to make them click through.
And on some level it worked. Because we are here. But the feedback is not downloading the game. As a general rule, we do not believe in rewarding intentionally incorrect spellings.
monkey in politics
At the time of this writing, the US presidential election is imminent, and the feedback has fallen into an endless cycle of news articles reporting polls, experts endlessly reinterpreting that poll, and then doing more polls. I am. This is a very long-winded way of saying, “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Now, our colleague Alexandra Thompson highlighted an important new contribution to the field of pseudo-predictions, a paper titled “Monkeys predict US elections.”
Unfortunately, this doesn’t require having countless monkeys in voting booths. Instead, the researchers showed the monkeys pairs of photos of candidates for the Senate and gubernatorial races.
Monkeys spent more time looking at the losers than the winners. This seems like a unique form of torture for politicians. It says that not only did you lose, but the monkey looked at you with critical eyes.
This study extended previous research showing that children can identify election winners and losers purely based on pictures of candidates. Both children and monkeys made choices based on face shape, and a square jawline was a key indicator of increased chances of victory.
Who would do such research? Three of the researchers are affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania, while the fourth is based at an institution in Portugal called the Champalimaud Center for the Undiscovered. I don’t really know what to make of the feedback.
Unconscious factors seem to influence our voting decisions. It’s often said that taller candidates tend to win in American elections, and there appears to be some truth to this.
A 2013 study collected data on every U.S. presidential election to date and found that taller candidates received more popular votes, which was less likely to actually get elected. It didn’t mean that it was high. It can only be described as double subject determinism, and one of the authors is a social psychologist named Abraham Bunck.
Readers interested in the outcome of the US election are advised: Whatever you do, don’t look up the respective heights of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
One more for the road
In these stressful times, like many people, your feedback is directed towards comforting alternative realities such as: great british bake off (great british baking showif you live in North America).
There are all kinds of fascinating and delicious things to learn about the ingredient science of bread, cakes and biscuits, but to meet the technical challenges all the sample biscuits, tarts and desserts are produced at home. The economist is Hattie Baker.
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