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Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how he got all those users in the first place. http://www.torn.com/ is poorly designed and doesn't elaborate on what the game is. I'm going to sign up anyway because it must be a pretty good game to keep all those users, but I wonder how he marketed it in the first place - that strikes me as the harder part.

(Update: I signed up and played for several minutes so far. It's a handful of PHP scripts with little to actually "do" - at least at the intro level - training is merely clicking on some JavaScript buttons. This guy must be a Derren Brown-like master of persuasion if he really has 40k regular players - wow, hats off to him.)

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I wonder how he got all those users in the first place. http://www.torn.com/ is poorly designed and doesn't elaborate on what the game is.

It is ability to gain a community rather than design that matters for this type of web-service.

It's a handful of PHP scripts with little to actually "do" - at least at the intro level - training is merely clicking on some JavaScript buttons.

What difference for the player does it make what technology was used for scripting and buttons? An average guy from these 40k users might not even know such words as JavaScript/PHP/Flash.

<em>It is ability to gain a community rather than design that matters for this type of web-service.</em>

Yeah, I get that, but the front page is just a signup form. If I set up a page like that, it wouldn't magically get signups. There must be some marketing involved someplace.

I hope you are not serious. People are not only in touch with each other through the internet. There are lots of different ways for people to hear about a game (friends, school, work, etc.)

You make a good point. I first heard about Hacker News from a giant magenta squirrel who was fighting a toad with chopsticks.

I used to make these types of games all the time when I was younger, and they're still pretty popular. I guess it all started with A3 http://alienaa.com and some space trading game I forget the name of. They were probably just a natural evolution of BBS games. Making text-based browser games was why I even started programming to begin with when I was 14 or 15, and for a while there were a bunch of games derived from code that I wrote and handed out long before I really knew how to do open source. Seems stupid of me now to have never thought of trying to make money off of them.

I started programming for the exact reason as well. Created Medieval Battles [http://medievalbattles.com] while I was in high school, quickly realized that creating a BBMMORPG isn't profitable and turned this into a career.

Planetarion? I was well into that.

Yup, if what you describe is true (and I suspect it to be true), I will be really interesting in knowing what keeps people coming back to the game and actually paying real money for extra points.

Because if it were just handful of PHP scripts, hey, I can code them in a weekend :)

I guess it's just the drive of being the strongest, or the richest, or whatever the goal of the game is. It's pretty satisfying to see your name on some sort of leaderboard. The text based nature doesn't bother a lot of people even now. The real problem is making a game that's fun, and that's the hard part.

I just realized, we're all on a text-only site and getting onto the "leaders" page was a big motivator for me for a short while. Perhaps I should quit throwing stones in my glass house.. :)

maybe the kid has somehow hit on the right level of random feedback - just enough to make the game addictive?

and then the leaderboard as you point out would be a strong motivator as well.

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