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An easter egg for one user: Luke Skywalker
- comice 9y agoMust admit that this seems a bit creepy to me! I guess he's just amused but I wonder if it starts him thinking, is this game monitoring me personally? How else can I be targeted?
- spiderfarmer 9y agoWell if he wanted to play privately why would he post it publicly on Twitter?
- userbinator 9y agoGiven what other far more invasive targeting exists which most people don't notice at all, I doubt it.
- einaregilsson 9y agoWell, given that he retweeted a tweet that had the explanation of how it worked, and he added the #BestFansInTheGalaxy hashtag I think he's OK. But really, I probably wouldn't have done anything like this for another celebrity, if Bruce Willis had tweeted I wouldn't try to make a Hans Gruber avatar or anything :D
- LordKano 9y agoIf Bruce Willis Tweets, you should totally make a chubby black cop named "Al" for his opponent. If he rolls a Yahtzee, you could make it pop up a message that says "Yippee Ki Yay, Roy!" Because of my near-encyclopedia knowledge of 80s pop culture, I just had a bunch of ideas. Then again, who knows how many 80s celebrities are playing your game.
- admax88q 9y agoHe pretty much has to respond positively. Otherwise people would shit all over him for not being a "good sport."
- ljcrabs 9y agoAre you seriously so cynical that you can't even imagine that someone else could enjoy something? That's sad.
- takeda 9y agoWell... Hans Gruber is not John McClane's father though...
- yitchelle 9y agoNot targeting my reply to you, @cornice, directly. But how did the world end up being so paranoid?
- comice 9y agoI meant more specifically people like Mark Hamill. I'm sure celebrities feel under constant surveillance from fans. Feels like this might be taking it to another level. But obviously he chose to tweet about it in the first place, so it presumably doesn't bother him much.
- Bartweiss 9y agoI guess on the 'constant surveillance' bit, it seems relevant that someone who knows Mark personally reached out to the site maker and suggested that he'd like this. That (plus the fact that the site doesn't actually have accounts or user data) really lowers the level of "strangers watching me" in play here.
- nikcub 9y agoProbably because the next person will take this well intentioned and well executed idea and take it a step too far.
- cat199 9y agoTotally! Because no one has ever thought to combine public information with their access to privileged information to target a specific individual ... until now!
- ryandrake 9y agoI felt the same way reading the article. At the places I've worked there's a (sometimes informal) "personal information firewall" between production data and engineering, where employees could not correlate user accounts with actual people's personal info. Plenty of anonymized data to help make product decisions but no ability for rank-and-file employees to figure out "user 14339 is Mark Hamill". Scary!
- irishsultan 9y agoExcept that he also doesn't have that information. All he has is the picture that the user posted himself, that isn't linked to a user account since there aren't any.
- einaregilsson 9y agoThere are no user accounts on the site, and there is no tracking of any users. I simply saw the avatar image that he posted and targeted that, so probably a few random users got Darth Vader as well. Also, even if there were user accounts, this is a one man shop, so it would be hard for me to build a firewall between myself and myself :)
- eeks 9y agoThat's just too cool. I have not read such a faith-in-humanity-inspriring moment in a long time.
- takeda 9y agoWhat exactly this did to restore your faith in humanity and since you're saying it did, what made you lose it in the first place?
- bojo 9y agoI suppose the more interesting question here is what the author did to actually detect the avatar.
- saltedmd5 9y ago"Using that information I created a trigger that only activated Darth Vader when someone with that avatar was playing (well, almost, anyone with that hair, glasses and smile, couldn't be sure about skin tone or hair color from the screenshot)." Presumably the avatars are built by combining pre-made features.
- komali2 9y agoYea so like simple as if this hair + this glasses + crown, show the Easter egg.
- einaregilsson 9y agoExactly. Each avatar is made up of 6 features, hair, hair color, skin color, eyes and mouth. No nose, because who needs them! So each part has a code, and I can store a face as a simple 6 character string. Then I just compared against the ids of the eyes, hair and smile. I actually allowed any glasses and any smile because I wasn't absolutely sure which one he'd used :)
- erikb 9y agoAnd this is how you do marketing the right way.
- chrisan 9y agoThe get lucky with a celebrity who likes to play your game part?
- einaregilsson 9y agoYeah, this was not so much marketing as luck and wanting to make a cool easter egg.
- crusso 9y ago1. It wasn't lucky that he made a good game that people like, it was hard work. 2. Doing something cool when he saw an opportunity with Hamill was also not luck. It took creativity and initiative. Maybe he didn't do the fun little easter egg for marketing, but for whatever reason he did it, he created the opportunities through hard work and cleverness.
- TillE 9y ago99% of great games will have zero celebrity fans tweeting about them, no matter how hard you worked. Necessary but not sufficient.
- crusso 9y agoI'm not saying that this exact situation was all hard work. I'm saying that he created the opportunity for interactions and to be noticed through hard work and creativity. There are many notable ways he could have done something with the work he did that would gain some kind of 15 minutes of fame - maybe having nothing to do with acting on a celebrity tweet. Taken as an exact specific outcome, sure, it's improbable. But across all of the interesting outcomes it's far less improbable. This reminds me of the argument from Creationists about how we couldn't have been exactly created as we are because the odds of our turning out exactly as we have are insurmountable. They ignore the success bias of our current outcome and the possibility that many viable evolutionary paths could have led to stable life and even intelligent beings like ourselves.
- mysterydip 9y agoThat's great! I haven't put any real easter eggs into one of my games yet, but I definitely will with my next one. You never know who will play your game (well I guess you do if they tweet about it, but you get what I mean).
- msimpson 9y agoThis is why we love Mark Hamill.
- bcg1 9y agoTried it out to see the easter egg... not only does it work, but the game is pretty awesome too
- simonhamp 9y agoTotally worth it!
- dmitripopov 9y agoIt should be noticed that there were the times when Mark Hamill was incredibly pissed off that people only see Luke in him and his acting career was actually ruined by this role. But now he is older and it looks like he is just fine with it. Or may be it's just prozac that makes it look this way.
- johan_larson 9y agoI suspect he has simply bowed to the inevitable. Leonard Nimoy did something similar with the character of Spock; he wrote an early autobiography titled "I Am Not Spock" and a later one titled "I Am Spock". You just can't fight the tide. (Unless you're Dutch. Which he isn't.) A whole lot of actors would envy Mark Hamill's career as an actor, particularly now that he is making bank off the Star Wars sequels.
- gwbas1c 9y agoI think the perspective is different when one's typecast prevents work; verses enables work. I think we also forget that for the longest time, Star Wars was just another hit movie and Star Trek was just another popular show. When they ended, the actors needed to move on to other jobs to pay their bills.
- simonh 9y agoRight, people forget there were 10 lean years between the end of the TV series and The Motion Picture. For the original cast of SW it was a whole career before the Disney movies came along, but to be fair to Mark he's been a stalwart of the fan conventions for many years.
- Gargoyle 9y agoI bet Nimoy would never have been the voice of In Search Of... without having been Spock.
- dspillett 9y ago
- kbutler 9y agoWonder how many people got "Dad" and wondered why in the world I'm playing against Darth Vader?!?
- zitterbewegung 9y agoSo the probability of picking the correct configuration is 1/72 and the probability of picking the right game is 1/27 so it would be 1/1944 or 0.00051 which is better than navigating an asteroid field of 3720 to 1 .
- chris_wot 9y agoNever tell me the odds.
- Beltiras 9y agoDroids are apparently bad at estimating outside odds since the two instances we see in the movie end with an unlikely outcome given the estimate.
- devrandomguy 9y agoAnd humans see patterns in a sample size of two ;)
- devgutt 9y agoI wish they could have allowed Mark to change the third set by passing his hand over
- dankohn1 9y agoThis is similar to the story of the guy who pranked his roommate by buying Facebook targeted ads that only targeted him [0]. Perhaps in the future, the AIs will know us all so well that every interaction will be filled with little in-jokes. http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roommate-with-targeted-facebook-ads/ http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-...
- Systemic33 9y agoUnfortunately this is no longer possible :( Facebook has removed the ability to make such narrow target groups.
- takeda 9y agoThere is an update. He mentions that they restricted to minimum of 20 people, but there is a loophole, because you can select criteria on that group. He gives example that if your want to target a guy friend, you can create a group of 1 male and 19 female friends and then create ad targeting just males to get around it.
- amenghra 9y ago... or create 19 fake accounts (or pick 19 random people you don't care about) and then target'em all.
- nojvek 9y agoThe fact that you can do this make me very paranoid. I am so glad I don't use facebook. I'm pretty sure with the rise of face recognition, object recognition and NLP you can create insanely targeted ads that are almost ransomware by crawling people's social profiles and correlating them with hacked datasets.
- saurik 9y agoHow is this different from the ability to send someone an email? I just don't understand the concern of being able to send ads to one person other than "random non-technical people will not expect that and think it is a ghost".
- scandox 9y agoWell Hamill is a better man than I. I would hate this. If I imagine being him, this is like having to turn up to the office at 7am on a Saturday for a meeting. It's work. In analogy we're watching Mark Hamill get out of bed on a weekend, groan, drink some Pepto-Bismol and get his best shit-eating grin on his face.
- ClassyJacket 9y agoYeah, I feel sorry for the guy. He still is expected to do work for free promoting a movie he was in forty years ago. He must be incredibly sick of Star Wars by now.
- sp332 9y agoYou realize he was in a Star Wars movie last year, right? And he's made another one and will be shooting yet another later this year?
- smhenderson 9y agoWhat? He's the lead role in the next Star Wars film. I can't tell if your being sarcastic or not...
- ceejayoz 9y agoEven ignoring the new trilogy he's definitely being paid for, stuff like convention appearances can pay quite well for someone like Hamill.
- dankohn1 9y agoHe'll be at New York ComicCon, where I'll be taking my kids in October. http://www.newyorkcomiccon.com/Guests/Entertainment-Guests/ http://www.newyorkcomiccon.com/Guests/Entertainment-Guests/
- the_watcher 9y agoHe's clearly not sick of it. Harrison Ford is a bigger star than Hamill, Han Solo is at least as iconic a character as Luke, yet Ford did far, far less PR around TFA than Hamill's done for TLJ. Ford is fairly well-known for being sick of Star Wars (he wanted to die in Empire), so Hamill clearly had the option of being less involved in the PR yet chose not to.
- _e 9y agoIf only the easter egg showcased one of his other roles such as cocknocker from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back [0]. [0] http://m.imdb.com/name/nm0000434/filmotype/actor http://m.imdb.com/name/nm0000434/filmotype/actor
- cwbrandsma 9y agoNext time he need to put in Batman.
- smhenderson 9y agoWouldn't The Flash be more appropriate?
- cwbrandsma 9y agoHe played Joker for longer. And his character's voice in The Flash is reusing his Joker voice (at least that is what my ear tells me)
- smhenderson 9y agoFair enough, was just thinking Trickster was more recent, therefore more relevant.
- mikeash 9y agoWow, this place sure is filled with curmudgeons.
- gcb0 9y agoand why, in your vast non curmudgeon experience, should a game with an engine much simpler than chess talk to a web server for single player games?
- fenomas 9y agoIt's a web game that you play in a web page. It'd be mighty impressive if it functioned without talking to a web server. Further, it doesn't even have user accounts. What exactly is there to be curmudgeony about?
- gcb0 9y agofrom the screenshots I assumed it was an app. my bad
- mikeash 9y agoHow is that in any way related to anything here?
- kstenerud 9y agoIt saddens me to see all the comments ascribing victimization where none has occurred. This is how SJWs operate. Don't do that.
- jessaustin 9y agoThe game under discussion doesn't collect PII, and all personal information was freely published by Hamill himself, so there's really no problem here. However, the same would not be true of most similar circumstances, and I'm encouraged that at least some people are aware of the issue.
- kstenerud 9y agoIn other words, think of the children! We need to think about this non-issue and warn people about this non-issue and dissuade people or possibly even implement policies for this non issue just in case it ever becomes an actual issue! No. I call bullshit.
- jessaustin 9y agoYou can't think of any examples of unscrupulous sites/apps/whatever misusing users' personal information? Wow. Do you perchance work for Facebook?
- carrier_lost 9y agoThis is clever! Also worth praising: This site is free, loads quickly, doesn't require a user account, and has an easy-to-understand privacy policy.
- einaregilsson 9y agoThanks :)
- lpgauth 9y agoHopefully, this doesn't get shutdown by Hasbro.
- the_common_man 9y agoOn similar lines - https://thehustle.co/the-linkedin-hack-that-made-me-120000 https://thehustle.co/the-linkedin-hack-that-made-me-120000