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Comment by IIAOPSW | Hacker News Reader

Games follow a trendline like te^-rt where t is time and r dependent on the game. The reason is simple. When a person learns of some piece of content (game, meme, whatever) there is some probability they share it with one or more people. If on average each person exposed shares with more than one person then you get an exponential explosion (aka virality). But sharing content with people who have already seen it is redundant. Eventually the average new people shared with per person exposed becomes less than one and the exponential growth becomes exponential decay. Content where r is large explode quickly and die quickly (blue/black dress). Content where r is just barely greater than 0 have a slow rise and slow decline.

The only game to ever become a lasting cultural phenomena via internet virality is Minecraft. The reason is that the r value is small enough that population growth during the games lifetime is non-negligible.

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Minecraft is Lego-style self-directed play, completely unlike most video games.

If you watch, say the Direwolf20 series on Age Of Engineering, he ends up building this huge space station to win. But, that space station was his idea, not a requirement, my play of AoE has a tiny airless platform with a warp drive in it for space exploration and my main base was in the open air in a parallel universe where it never rains. He spends lots of time building structures in low gravity wearing a jetpack, I spent more fencing off wildlife. This wasn't a choice explicitly offered in the game, just a consequence of different people with the same infinite box of Lego bricks building a different layout. The very different experiences mean essentially infinite replay value.

"Random" sandbox elements became very popular in video games, but QA teams militate against building anything like Minecraft where you just can't test because there's a combinatorial explosion of interactions. Instead most games have a handful of set pieces with inconsequential random elements.

But that means even if nobody else's game of Shadow of Mordor is exactly the same, they're so similar as to preclude most interest in replaying. Which makes good economic sense, sell the player a new one every year. But you don't become a phenomenon like Minecraft that way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidem...

I like curves but I don't know that one.

Can you clarify?

Is the following an example of an instance of that curve?

    y = x2^(-1x)

Almost. Instead of being a variable that can be replaced by 2, e refers to the mathematical constant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_(mathematical_constant)

This curve is a variant of the natural exponential function, where the dependent variable is time. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_function

What do you mean "almost"? f(t) = t·2^(-t) is precisely an instance of the family of curves f(t) = t·e^(-rt) with r = ln 2.

Power law applies everywhere and can be applied arbitrarily .

"So you think you have a power law... well isn't that special?"

http://bactra.org/weblog/491.html

This ignores franchises. Fortnite 2 is surely on the horizon.

EDIT: To phrase it more bluntly:

"The only game to ever become a lasting cultural phenomena via internet virality is Minecraft."

... is mistaken. Mario is the most obvious counterexample, but there are dozens of others.

Hmm, I don't think Mario grew to fame through the internet.

Super Mario Maker did. It would be a shadow of its current self without Twitch + Reddit.

Dota became a cultural phenomenon, and has stayed a cultural phenomenon, solely through the internet. No internet, no dota.

It's simply mistaken.

Or do I need to prove Dota is a cultural phenomenon? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OzWIFX8M-Y

These are fair points. Mario maker IMO wouldn't be a phenomena without the original Mario so I don't consider it a counter example. But DOTA is fair enough. I forgot that one.

I would say that franchising/sequels reflect the fact that if you have content which is just barely sub-viral you can pump money into marketing to get virality to get more money. Basically a controlled fission reaction instead of an explosion.

Counter-strike might be a better example since it requires the internet

You haven't heard of the game called religion?

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