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| Remember Alf? He's back! In pog form! |
My very first video board game ever,
Stock Ticker Classic, is finally in a
near-finished state (from which it may never emerge). Stock Ticker, for those who don't know, is an old board game many people say they love, but for which their affection was never strong enough to motivate them to actually go to the store and buy a copy. The original Copp-Clark version hasn't been in print since at least the mid '80s, and the latest version, by the
Canada Games Company, has a copyright date circa 1992. Incidentally, Canada Games is no more... bankrupted by a tepid Stock Ticker fan-base and the fleeting appeal of
Pogs. And,
Copp-Clark now publishes calendars, or something... I'm not actually sure.
Rest assured, I won't repeat the failures of past Stock Ticker publishers. No sir, not me! Why? Because we've got this
"new" thing called
social gaming, all courtesy of that nerd in
The Social Network. Now, thanks to social gaming, the same people who professed such deep love for the original Stock Ticker board game can now post their game earnings on their Facebook news feeds. This, in turn, will attract the attention of other Stock Ticker fans who want to
reminisce over fond childhood memories of family game night and to demonstrate their superior game technique to their snotty Facebook friends. This process will repeat itself until every one of Facebook's 6 trillion users has installed Stock Ticker Classic, clicked on some Google ads, and made me rich enough to finance my own nerdy movie...
Freddy Got Fingered II.
And that, in a nutshell, is the extent to which Stock Ticker Classic has been
socialized (and really, I haven't yet been able to determine if there's any more to it than that). Stock Ticker Classic is still, at its core, a solitary game, but now it's plugged into this wondrous self-promoting feedback loop, which will inevitably spread it across the globe until the lives of every man, woman, and child have been touched by its magic. So, let's see... it was released yesterday, where it quickly gained two new Facebook users (myself and my wife). Today there are six users in total (my mother-in-law, brother, and a couple cousins). That means there are three times as many users today as there were yesterday. At this rate,
Stock Ticker Classic will have 137,260,754,729,766 users in one month's time, which is pretty good.
