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A couple of OT thoughts... 1) It was very odd seeing something go from the HN "new" page, to the front page, to seeing people talk about it on twitter, to hear

A couple of OT thoughts... 1) It was very odd seeing something go from the HN "new" page, to the front page, to seeing people talk about it on twitter, to hearing about it from friends who have no idea what a "github" is, to my mom asking me to help her download this new game all her friends are playing. I still don't know how I feel about it. And yes, for some reason I feel like I have some sort of ownership simply because I found it early. An interesting case study of the human psyche all around. 2) At the very least I think it's a great example that while we very often find ourselves lost within the HN bubble, we need to remember that (hubris aside) what we do everyday, even if it's just a side project we did for fun one evening, has the potential to change the world in an instant. Exciting and scary at the same time (and depressing when you realize you haven't tapped into this potential yet). 3) It definitely pissed me off to hear of friends paying for the game when I could have just sent them the link to Gabriele's github. (Note that I haven't found any versions where you have to pay to download, I'm assuming these people made some kind of in-app purchase) 4) While definitely in the extreme minority, I now have a couple curious friends who upon inspecting the original github link found the repository, and now are very interested in learning to code. I think we underestimate the power of showing people the "behind the curtain" stuff so to speak. 5) My absolute favorite observation is the amount of people who "hate math" or "just aren't good at math" who love this game. I think there's great potential to use 2048 or a derivative as an educational tool.

tannerc 12y ago
I feel that your second point is vitally important for creators (particularly new developers) to spend time thinking about. For a long while I was caught in the trap of believing that I wasn't any good because none of my work had "taken off" as much as the work I would hear about on HN or TechCrunch, etc. It's a dangerous place to be, particularly because it can lead to a lack of motivation and ultimately debilitating depression. But it's also a myth, to believe you're not producing the same caliber of work as others (though you may not be, that's a discussion for a whole new thread). I think it's important for us to acknowledge just how much _luck_ plays into the success of creations like 2048. Granted, the game is stellar and beautifully crafted, but there was a lot of luck involved in the wave it got to ride, from the timing of release, to the time it was posted to HN, to the people who tweeted about it, and so on.
- sillysaurus3 12y ago
  I think it's important for us to acknowledge just how much _luck_ plays into the success of creations like 2048. Granted, the game is stellar and beautifully crafted, but there was a lot of luck involved in the wave it got to ride, from the timing of release, to the time it was posted to HN, to the people who tweeted about it, and so on. Hype (marketing) plays a role, but I think a game's popularity is generally a function of its addictiveness multiplied by its quality. There are exceptions, such as Goat Simulator (which was almost entirely a fad) but it seems like the inherent nature of 2048 would let it succeed in any era. It's viscerally addictive for many people, so as long as you can get some number of people playing it, it'll do fine. It seems like another reason 2048 was successful is because it was open source from the start. There were about a dozen remixed versions of 2048, and few of those would have happened without the source code being available from the beginning. People would have made their own versions, but it would have taken a lot more time than "let's just use this code that already exists."
- kolodny 12y ago
  As a developer submitting to Show HN, there are some projects that I expected to take off and some that were mere novelties. Two of my biggest projects were things I didn't expect to make a bleep, yet the project that I considered most useful [0] never went anywhere [0] https://github.com/kolodny/nip https://github.com/kolodny/nip
  - vidarh 12y ago
    For "nip", I suspect that is because it quite literally is "plumbing" of a sort that people have their favourite tools for from before, whether it's awk, sed, perl, or any other language interpreter that can easily take an expression on the command line (e.g. ruby can pretend to be both awk and sed of sorts with the right command line options). It looks neat, but it'd appeal to people who spend most of their time doing stuff with node anyway, and doesn't have other scripting alternatives they prefer for one-liners. There's a ton of inertia for those kind of tools. E.g. even though I prefer Ruby, I tend to use awk for one-liners because I can expect it to be available "everywhere", and because I have "muscle memory" for dozens of common patterns because I started using it so long ago. That's not a criticism of your tool - just some thoughts on reasons why it might be harder to get attention for that kind of tool.
stevesearer 12y ago
Re: #5 - the game is incredibly popular at the local high schools in my area. I was pretty surprised how ubiquitous the game was and that all, and I mean all, of the students knew what it was and had most likely played it. The most interesting thing was how many different algorithms the students developed to try and solve getting 2048. Unfortunately they didn't know about the web version on Github which made trying them out much faster and fun than swiping a phone for hours.
pithymaxim 12y ago
I think #5 is wrong. 2048 is based on numbers but has very little to do with math--you can play the game just as easily using only colors. At best students are learning the powers of two, and at worst they're wasting time they should've spent on chess or checkers, or basketball.
- k__ 12y ago
  >implying math is about numbers (but yes, learning the powers of two is only a tiny fraction of math)
- judk 12y ago
  It's more than that if you take moment to think about strategy and how many tiles and turns you need to make progress. It can be a very nice case-study in exponentiation/logarithm, big-O, etc
- jiggy2011 12y ago
  The numbers make it easier to play, it's obvious that 2 4s will combine into an 8. Not so obvious what 2 colours or doges will combine into.
- jonny_eh 12y ago
  Why is time better spent on chess? Because it's somewhat social?
  - pithymaxim 12y ago
    Didn't mean to make that claim, but I'd guess that chess is better for cognitive development because its demands on working memory are limitless. This is speculative, but it's also speculative to claim that 2048 is any better for learning than Candy Crush.
- dwd 12y ago
  Try solving it algorithmically and you'll find plenty of ways to apply mathematical theorem. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22342854/what-is-the-optimal-algorithm-for-the-game-2048 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22342854/what-is-the-opti...
atmosx 12y ago
> [...]we need to remember that (hubris aside) what we do everyday, even if it's just a side project we did for fun one evening, has the potential to change the world in an instant[...] Really? So '2048' changed the world. I have this feeling that developers change the world more often than Cartoon/TV-heros save thew world these days. How many apps away from world peace?! ps. Developers are the only group of people who are so disillusioned to collectively think that their products change the world. That Steve Jobs destroyed 3 generations with 1 phrase. NOTE: nothing wrong with the app-creator. I'm really happy for him, it's just that every time I read about a developer who changed the world (writing an application) I wanna burn my eyes on a brazier.
- L_Rahman 12y ago
  This is slightly unfair. Not everything that qualifies for the phrase "changed the world" needs to solve a significant problem like poverty, health or hunger. Sometimes just being present in the minds of a lot of people is sufficient to qualify. 2048 first took over HN for a entire month. I'd open HN every day anticipating a different port. Then it went mainstream and has since been played potentially many thousands even millions of minutes. I think that qualifies as changing the world in a tiny way. Don't you?
  - watwut 12y ago
    What exactly is the changed thing? World before and world after seem exactly the same to me. Instead of talking and cloning flappy bird, people talk about and clone 2048. Even before, people played angry birds and before other game, but I admit they did not cloned them that much - but that change came with flappy jam.
    - shrikrishna 12y ago
      I can't speak for others, but for me, this is how 20148 changed my world I realized, when I played 2048, that I could have built it too. This was enlightening because I realized we were confined by the limitations we place on ourselves. It changed my view of the world, at least, and hopefully of some more developers like me.
baddox 12y ago
Regarding point 1, to add to that weirdness, all of this closely followed the massive App Store success of Threes, which 2048 is nearly a clone of (and I understand that Threes is nearly a clone of another earlier game).
- grrrando 12y ago
  Threes! was the original, not "nearly a clone".
  - jamiltron 12y ago
    2048 is most definitely a clone.
  - baddox 12y ago
    I wasn't sure, but I thought that there was an even older game that was extremely similar to 2048 and Threes. I remember people got upset when the Threes developers accused 2048 of cloning them [0], because they thought Threes was itself a clone of something earlier. [0] http://asherv.com/threes/threemails/#letter http://asherv.com/threes/threemails/#letter
    - epo 12y ago
      You thought? Just not very hard, clearly.
      - dang 12y ago
        Please don't be rude in Hacker News comments.
roryhughes 12y ago
Regarding #3: I'm actually annoyed seeing my friends who all play 2048 on their phones. Not even the one Gabriele made, some clone by 'Ketchapp'. I often tell people about Threes but they've never heard of it. I show them Threes and then say that "it only costs $1.99" and straight away they basically tell me to get lost because it costs money.
ericcumbee 12y ago
5) I hate math because I am not good at it. But It's not so much math in this game as it is logic. Also having gone through Cisco Networking in highschool the pattern 2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512,1024,2048 was drilled into my head.
rubiquity 12y ago
The proliferation of 2048 culminated for me when I was sitting on an airplane and the kid next to me was playing it.
userbinator 12y ago
5: While there may not be that much use for memorising and recognising powers of 2, it's still something that, oddly enough, a lot of CS students seem to struggle with. 2048 could be perfect for that purpose. Now if there was only a game, similarly simple and addictive, that implicitly taught how logic gates work, maybe we wouldn't be so far from having everyone have a basic idea of how computers work... I believe that the best type of learning is implicit, so there's certainly a lot of potential here. Your observation also shows this characteristic that some people just hate being explicitly taught and can't seem to learn that way, but get them to do something they enjoy and is also designed to teach, and they learn surprisingly quickly without realising it.

tannerc 12y ago

I feel that your second point is vitally important for creators (particularly new developers) to spend time thinking about. For a long while I was caught in the trap of believing that I wasn't any good because none of my work had "taken off" as much as the work I would hear about on HN or TechCrunch, etc. It's a dangerous place to be, particularly because it can lead to a lack of motivation and ultimately debilitating depression. But it's also a myth, to believe you're not producing the same caliber of work as others (though you may not be, that's a discussion for a whole new thread). I think it's important for us to acknowledge just how much _luck_ plays into the success of creations like 2048. Granted, the game is stellar and beautifully crafted, but there was a lot of luck involved in the wave it got to ride, from the timing of release, to the time it was posted to HN, to the people who tweeted about it, and so on.

sillysaurus3 12y ago
I think it's important for us to acknowledge just how much _luck_ plays into the success of creations like 2048. Granted, the game is stellar and beautifully crafted, but there was a lot of luck involved in the wave it got to ride, from the timing of release, to the time it was posted to HN, to the people who tweeted about it, and so on. Hype (marketing) plays a role, but I think a game's popularity is generally a function of its addictiveness multiplied by its quality. There are exceptions, such as Goat Simulator (which was almost entirely a fad) but it seems like the inherent nature of 2048 would let it succeed in any era. It's viscerally addictive for many people, so as long as you can get some number of people playing it, it'll do fine. It seems like another reason 2048 was successful is because it was open source from the start. There were about a dozen remixed versions of 2048, and few of those would have happened without the source code being available from the beginning. People would have made their own versions, but it would have taken a lot more time than "let's just use this code that already exists."
kolodny 12y ago
As a developer submitting to Show HN, there are some projects that I expected to take off and some that were mere novelties. Two of my biggest projects were things I didn't expect to make a bleep, yet the project that I considered most useful [0] never went anywhere [0] https://github.com/kolodny/nip https://github.com/kolodny/nip
- vidarh 12y ago
  For "nip", I suspect that is because it quite literally is "plumbing" of a sort that people have their favourite tools for from before, whether it's awk, sed, perl, or any other language interpreter that can easily take an expression on the command line (e.g. ruby can pretend to be both awk and sed of sorts with the right command line options). It looks neat, but it'd appeal to people who spend most of their time doing stuff with node anyway, and doesn't have other scripting alternatives they prefer for one-liners. There's a ton of inertia for those kind of tools. E.g. even though I prefer Ruby, I tend to use awk for one-liners because I can expect it to be available "everywhere", and because I have "muscle memory" for dozens of common patterns because I started using it so long ago. That's not a criticism of your tool - just some thoughts on reasons why it might be harder to get attention for that kind of tool.

stevesearer 12y ago

Re: #5 - the game is incredibly popular at the local high schools in my area. I was pretty surprised how ubiquitous the game was and that all, and I mean all, of the students knew what it was and had most likely played it. The most interesting thing was how many different algorithms the students developed to try and solve getting 2048. Unfortunately they didn't know about the web version on Github which made trying them out much faster and fun than swiping a phone for hours.

pithymaxim 12y ago

I think #5 is wrong. 2048 is based on numbers but has very little to do with math--you can play the game just as easily using only colors. At best students are learning the powers of two, and at worst they're wasting time they should've spent on chess or checkers, or basketball.

k__ 12y ago
>implying math is about numbers (but yes, learning the powers of two is only a tiny fraction of math)
judk 12y ago
It's more than that if you take moment to think about strategy and how many tiles and turns you need to make progress. It can be a very nice case-study in exponentiation/logarithm, big-O, etc
jiggy2011 12y ago
The numbers make it easier to play, it's obvious that 2 4s will combine into an 8. Not so obvious what 2 colours or doges will combine into.
jonny_eh 12y ago
Why is time better spent on chess? Because it's somewhat social?
- pithymaxim 12y ago
  Didn't mean to make that claim, but I'd guess that chess is better for cognitive development because its demands on working memory are limitless. This is speculative, but it's also speculative to claim that 2048 is any better for learning than Candy Crush.
dwd 12y ago
Try solving it algorithmically and you'll find plenty of ways to apply mathematical theorem. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22342854/what-is-the-optimal-algorithm-for-the-game-2048 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22342854/what-is-the-opti...

atmosx 12y ago

> [...]we need to remember that (hubris aside) what we do everyday, even if it's just a side project we did for fun one evening, has the potential to change the world in an instant[...] Really? So '2048' changed the world. I have this feeling that developers change the world more often than Cartoon/TV-heros save thew world these days. How many apps away from world peace?! ps. Developers are the only group of people who are so disillusioned to collectively think that their products change the world. That Steve Jobs destroyed 3 generations with 1 phrase. NOTE: nothing wrong with the app-creator. I'm really happy for him, it's just that every time I read about a developer who changed the world (writing an application) I wanna burn my eyes on a brazier.

L_Rahman 12y ago
This is slightly unfair. Not everything that qualifies for the phrase "changed the world" needs to solve a significant problem like poverty, health or hunger. Sometimes just being present in the minds of a lot of people is sufficient to qualify. 2048 first took over HN for a entire month. I'd open HN every day anticipating a different port. Then it went mainstream and has since been played potentially many thousands even millions of minutes. I think that qualifies as changing the world in a tiny way. Don't you?
- watwut 12y ago
  What exactly is the changed thing? World before and world after seem exactly the same to me. Instead of talking and cloning flappy bird, people talk about and clone 2048. Even before, people played angry birds and before other game, but I admit they did not cloned them that much - but that change came with flappy jam.
  - shrikrishna 12y ago
    I can't speak for others, but for me, this is how 20148 changed my world I realized, when I played 2048, that I could have built it too. This was enlightening because I realized we were confined by the limitations we place on ourselves. It changed my view of the world, at least, and hopefully of some more developers like me.

baddox 12y ago

Regarding point 1, to add to that weirdness, all of this closely followed the massive App Store success of Threes, which 2048 is nearly a clone of (and I understand that Threes is nearly a clone of another earlier game).

grrrando 12y ago
Threes! was the original, not "nearly a clone".
- jamiltron 12y ago
  2048 is most definitely a clone.
- baddox 12y ago
  I wasn't sure, but I thought that there was an even older game that was extremely similar to 2048 and Threes. I remember people got upset when the Threes developers accused 2048 of cloning them [0], because they thought Threes was itself a clone of something earlier. [0] http://asherv.com/threes/threemails/#letter http://asherv.com/threes/threemails/#letter
  - epo 12y ago
    You thought? Just not very hard, clearly.
    - dang 12y ago
      Please don't be rude in Hacker News comments.

roryhughes 12y ago

Regarding #3: I'm actually annoyed seeing my friends who all play 2048 on their phones. Not even the one Gabriele made, some clone by 'Ketchapp'. I often tell people about Threes but they've never heard of it. I show them Threes and then say that "it only costs $1.99" and straight away they basically tell me to get lost because it costs money.

ericcumbee 12y ago

5) I hate math because I am not good at it. But It's not so much math in this game as it is logic. Also having gone through Cisco Networking in highschool the pattern 2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512,1024,2048 was drilled into my head.

rubiquity 12y ago

The proliferation of 2048 culminated for me when I was sitting on an airplane and the kid next to me was playing it.

userbinator 12y ago

5: While there may not be that much use for memorising and recognising powers of 2, it's still something that, oddly enough, a lot of CS students seem to struggle with. 2048 could be perfect for that purpose. Now if there was only a game, similarly simple and addictive, that implicitly taught how logic gates work, maybe we wouldn't be so far from having everyone have a basic idea of how computers work... I believe that the best type of learning is implicit, so there's certainly a lot of potential here. Your observation also shows this characteristic that some people just hate being explicitly taught and can't seem to learn that way, but get them to do something they enjoy and is also designed to teach, and they learn surprisingly quickly without realising it.