So for this post I wanted to write about a mobile game I have been addicted to for quite a while, Animal Crossing Pocket Camp.  Animal Crossing has always been good at keeping players playing by creating various new events through out the year and including new clothes and furniture.  I feel like the Mobile game, perhaps thanks to it being more accessible on phone as opposed to on a console, is far more addicting.  So, to get more items in the game the player must talk to villagers and give them various items they can acquire at different items.  Each villager has three requests and every 3 hours the 4 villagers at the 4 different islands are resetted.  Thus, the game has significant amount of replayability as there is always a new request to accomplish.  There are some mobile game trappings in this game. For one, the leaf tickets on the top middle of the screen can be awarded if the player achieves enough goals, but to get a substantial amount of those tickets one must buy them through the store.  The game has numerous limited time events such as the one being stated in the top left corner about a rose festival that has items that can only be acquired during that time period.  For completionists, having such limited time events causes players to continuosly be playing to make sure they get all the items.  If they are running out of time though for certain events they could just buy the items instead with leaf tickets, with the rose festival that is not the case though.  Another time aspect is that many items take a lot of time to build, such as the amenity in the second picture.  To speed up time one can also use leaf tickets.  And though for the rose festival a player can’t buy the awards, they can buy the means to the awards buy paying a character in leaf tickets to make sure they capture the items needed.  Overall though I like how often the game is updated and that the notice board constantly updates players on future events and known issues.  And though the game does have the pay-to-win aspect to it, it has enough resets throughout the day that so long as you are playing enough you can reasonably expect to be able to finish the event and get all the items.

For this project I wanted to focus on playing with text and deletion of ads on sites to see how the mood of a site could change, below is google, youtube, reddit and discord.  For Google, I had deleted everything other than the search bar and the text asking for voice.  This I believe throws users for a loop as anyone who searches is so used to seeing “Google” at the top that seeing nothing being promoted as a search engine is rather odd.  For Youtube I had deleted the top ad that tends to take up a lot of space but also changed colors of text like the subscribe button to blue to see how a more facebooky color could change the mood of youtube.  For Reddit I had deleted the side ads and top and and changed the upvotes on the top 3 posts to be incredibly large numbers.  I also deleted any images that didn’t have an actual picture attached (so like blog posts or questions on the top page).  For discord I had deleted all user names and channels images except for one username.  In discord’s case it’s interesting to be able to play with the idea of anonymity, while the space is technically anonymous it could be made even more so.

I am someone who subscribes to a lot of newsletters but rarely ever reads any of them.  When starting this project, I had over 10,000 unread emails, the majority of which I can guarantee were either spam or unwanted news letters.

    I decided to take a 3 day input of my emails.  So in three days I had received 279 emails.  22 of those I had read while the rest I either wanted to unsubscribe from the newsletter or wasn’t interested in the article sent to me.  So, I clicked the spam and unsubscribe bubble on google for 207 emails.  My project thus was to determine how many of these e-mails would actually get unsubscribed and which one’s would continue sending me newsletters.

Overall, I thought the project went better as expected.  And by better, I mean far more of my e-mails have stayed in the spam folder than not.  There are some persistent e-mails though.  For example above the second to last reported e-mail was from Groupon which I have in the past unsubscribed to multiple times and still receive emails from them.  Of course, this time was no different as I still got an e-mail from Groupon after unsubscribing.

I read up on Groupon’s e-mail practices and I am not the only one with such an issue.

In fact, Groupon’s e-mail marketing is such a problem that the Australian Communications and Media Authority issued a warning to the company about its’ unsubscribe process.  Apparently when signing up one signs up for multiple different types of Groupon newsletters thus to unsubscribe one has to unsubscribe to each and every kind of newsletter instead of just one of them.  Unfortunately, this seems like an ordeal that I’ll have to contact customer support over.  I am happy I learned about interesting laws such as the Spam Act in Australia which regulates commercial marketing and necessitates the need for a functional unsubscribe button, informed consent, and proper identification.

Despite hangups with groupons unsubscribe process most unsubscribing and sending to the spam box worked out well, with even a couple of lists I was subscribed to sending me a confirmation e-mail that I was removed from the list.  It is possible though that I will have other groupon like e-mail problems though as many newsletters I receive only come once a week or are somewhat infrequent.  Thus it is possible by Friday I could still be receiving e-mails from sources I shouldn’t be.

For this week I was most interested in the interface of Discord and how it keeps the user addicted to the discussion going on between users.  Discord does this by indicating people are currently talking on a channel by having a white semi circle next to channels you have not read up on.  For channels that have consistent discussion this can be rather addicting as the white semi circle will constantly reappear reminding you that there is new chat to be read.  Also, while typing in a channel it will state which users are currently typing.  This is to help keep discussion going as the user knows someone is reading and conducting a response.  Sometimes if multiple people are typing at the same time the dialogue will read as Several people are typing.  For channels with a lot of discussion going on it can get quite addicting due to the constant updating, however if there are not a lot of users on a channel or not a lot of discussion then the channel is mostly dead till someone starts a discussion.