Hit or Not is a social network game on Facebook. It works like this: You listen to a clip of music from a band, and rate it. You lose or score points by how close your rating is to the average rating of other users. If you like, you can "sign" the band (the fantasy being that you're running a label), and if the band "does well" (rises in ranking) you gain additional game money. You can also "sell" acts you have "bought" for a one-time gain, a "predictions market" effect.
The developers allow basically any artist willing to upload a song to feature their music on the site. The game offers players the opportunity to purchase a full mp3 of any song they listen to, sharing some of that income with the artist. In addition, the game has the usual SN game limits on energy ("battery power") and game money, and you can pay actual money to get more. So the business model here is obvious.
It's an interesting and novel approach to social network gaming; it is, however, flawed in at least two regards.
First, you aren't actually rating the music as to how well you like it; instead, you're attempting to predict how the average user, that is, the tasteless monkeys who constitute the vast bulk of the public, will respond. Thus, your score is not based on your taste, but on your ability to predict the taste of the hoi polloi. Actually, that's not even true; your score is based on your ability to predict what the hoi polloi will predict is the taste of the masses; it's two levels of indirection removed from actual taste.
Second, while the service may be of use to artists, both through direct sales to players, and through the promotion effect of being rated highly in the game (leaderboards that show the most popular songs are available on the top menu), it is not useful to players as a song discovery mechanism. That is, the service does not pipe music to me on a "recommendations system" basis, serving music that others who rate things the way I do like -- in the fashion of Amazon recommendations. If it did, it would help me find music I like. Instead, it seems to pipe music at me randomly. It's not intended to benefit me; it's intended to benefit artists. (Well, and the developer, which retails the artists' work.)
Consequently, unless you find it enjoyable to try to predict what kind of music stupid people will like (or rather, what kind of music stupid people will predict other stupid people will like), you will probably not enjoy it for long.
And yet -- it is an interesting and novel use of social network gameplay, and even if the basis of the game is not well thought through, at least it displays more creativity than yet-another-snorepeg.
A pity, in a way; if they'd tied a recommendations system to it, it would actually be useful, and along with modest gameplay dynamics, would help sustain repeated engagement.
Efficient Markets
"Thus, your score is not based on your taste, but on your ability to predict the taste of the hoi polloi. Actually, that's not even true; your score is based on your ability to predict what the hoi polloi will predict is the taste of the masses; it's two levels of indirection removed from actual taste."
This reminded me of trading financial markets, but then again, what doesn't?
The shift in this global transformation from financial oligarchy to distributed capitalism involves a de-emphasis of the mean for the median, and other more localized metrics. Something like you describe would not only serve more people better, it would serve more bands better by connecting them with people more likely to like them, and it would serve the game/app operators by increasing user retention. Maybe they'll fix it, if they dare.
By the way, the design mentality illustrated here exists in the majority of social games currently making money and will be the crux of the bloodbath to ensue later this year.
Wasn't there a math anecdote
Wasn't there a math anecdote in which a social psychologist, at her birthday, asks the guests to write in a piece of paper a number between 0 and 100? The winner is the one that is closest to the middle of what everyone answered. So if people guess randomly, writing 50 makes you win. The mathematician friend of the hostess wins the game, writing 0; it turned out that if everyone writes 50, 25 makes oyu win; then 12, and on an on.
Something like that. Anyway, probably the game should ask you for two numbers, how much you like the song and how much you guess everyone does.
I would have thought this is
I would have thought this is like working the auction house in WOW or practically any mmorpg. Ie, your trying to make a buck now, but also raise the overall market price on stuff you sell.
You sign the band then rate it slightly higher than you think the general populace will. This will hurt you slightly, but it'll move the average up and hurt anyone who rates it lower. People rate it higher and so your signed property becomes hotter. Then sell it when it's really hot.
Screw with the zeitgeist for fun and profit.
~~~
Philosopher Gamer Blog
& also my web comic!
the sixty one
Ahh, this reminds me a little bit of how thesixtyone.com started out, where buying into a song was more a matter of trying to predict the popularity than it was about actually liking the song. I wonder if they'll follow the same path that site took, or just let it stagnate as is.
For the record:
1. A Keynesian beauty contest (which this is) is n degrees of indirection from taste, where n is roughly correlated with the mutual knowledge of mathematical skill of the participants. (Your value of 2 suggests a somewhat-higher-than-average mathiness, perhaps +1 standard deviation or so.)
2. Amazon-style recommendation systems specifically for music do exist, notably Pandora and Last.fm.
You also have to remember
You also have to remember this is a perverse market - everyone on the market owns a record label??? In a real market, people who own record labels are the extreme minority and the majority simply consume (probably not the most complimentry way to describe it, but from a buisiness standpoint it's accurate). Here, that majority doesn't even exist.
Well, there are netlabels
Well, there are netlabels that release albums under a Creative Common's license, which is in line with the game's "upload your own song!" ethos.
Yeah but are the uploaded
Yeah but are the uploaded songs under Creative Commons or property of the people who run the game?
Depressing
Hmm pretty depressing view of humanity on display in the authors logic here. Using words like Hoi Polloi and tasteless monkey about other people, sounds almost fascist in its arrogance. to Quote Monty Python "and his mother won the Derby "
Objective
Some of us prefer objective critique to PC-ness and naive optimism.
Fascism
Elitist, not fascist. Is there anything so dreadfully bourgeois as fascism?