Agency Zen has launched its second facebook application. Stick Aliens lets you use the Oracle to determine your alien tendencies. To use the Oracle just drag the eye or any of its icons around and then the Oracle will provide a Stick Alien vision on your profile page.
Stick Aliens on facebook: http://apps.facebook.com/stickaliens/
The plan is also to launch Stick Aliens through Open Social and one day enhance the feature to solve mystical puzzles based on which aliens your friends have. Enjoy!
Group Games is a new concept that in a sense hacks the facebook groups to create games where the leaders are those with the most group members or pictures or wall posts of a certain type, etc. Here is a link to the Group Game group on facebook. Note, that anybody can make a group game and it does not require coding. If you are interested, please consider adding it to the group game page and be part of the collective.
Nano Race! Is the first group game where you join one of the groups that are working towards being shrunk to nano size to gain great speed, strength and riches. How exactly that works is up to the players to role play. The group with the most explorers is winning the race!
The game hearkens back to early Dan Zen social networking games of Blimp Race and Shrink Ray. Please see the post on Social Networking, Social Media and Social Gaming.
The groups are pictured below but do not link through to the game. It is best if you join the overall game group for nano race by clicking the Join Group link at right. Then pick one of the groups by clicking the link to the group and then JOINING the colony group. Then invite friends and write on walls to role play the game.
Have fun!
Here is the Dan Zen board interface from 1998 (Read about it on this Blog). All this talk of Social Networks reminded me of my Social link up to left. This was really my blog announcing the latest things on Dan Zen through one of my “barnacles” Eg Orna. The barnacles were all anagrams of their colors.
More to the point is that just this corner of the site shows five social networks and games – they are still active and some started in 1996. To date there are a couple dozen social games on Dan Zen averaging about two per year over twelve years. They can be seen thought the Social Category at the right of the blog – please note there are two pages with the second page being accessible from the top.
The five social games shown in the corner are (Moustache Mysteries is a game for individuals):
Another thing I noticed recently was the Loves You tag on the top of the flickr logo (replacing the alpha or beta that once was there helping bring in the age of Web 2.0 gizmos). Dan Zen used to put We Love You at the bottom of a number of pages often after introduction and help pages. Examples are below. You can still find them on Hip Cats and other pages. Of course we are all welcome to love! It was really nice of flickr 
Tapoll is the site where you get to predict a poll as you vote. Now, you can decide on which polls go on the front page. That is, until someone else decides on a different poll.
Visit Tapoll the Predict-a-poll site
To view polls you can choose a poll topic at left, choose the latest 20 polls, or see all topics. Once you choose a poll, you can predict and vote on the poll. Just above the poll is a link that says front. Click this link and confirm that you want the poll on the front and it will be placed on the front page of Tapoll.
See the YouTube video showing a brief demonstration of Tapoll
Have fun!
Pccchooooooo! What speed! What Serenity! The two do not usually go together but then again it is not every day that you get to fly a jet pack through peaceful puffy clouds.
There are a million clouds on which you can sit and look up or down, drink tea, read a book and of course think deep thoughts.
But like anything, there are environmental concerns. Will the clouds last forever? How do we fill our jet pack? A bit of a twisted take on non-renewable resources. We will let you discover the answer if you have not already.
Thanks go to Steve Mazza whose jet men on clouds was overwhelmingly inspirational! As soon as I got home from his exhibit (see the picture below), I had to seek therapy in constructing this feature in time for the upcoming Iron Man boom and of course building on our fascination from early James Bond, Rocket Robin Hood, etc.
Steve Mazza work from Future Tense show at Transit Gallery, Hamilton Canada
-08-
Finally made the top Google page for Hip Cat and Hip Cats. I spent years fuming over being ousted by the likes of Cat Hip Displasia Injuries . Try out the link and please click on Hip Cats!
Hip Cats was and is a social networking site that was started in 2000. It allowed you to create a persona, make a friends list of people you wanted to hang out with, rate other hip cats, date them, see their favorite music, movies, and books – all connected to Amazon affiliate. You could message other hip cats and view them in different Hip Cat genres like beatnik psychedelia, goth, urban, surf and their words would get translated – good would become groovy, etc. There is a buzz section where users can post reviews, events and creative writing as well as custom moods to view Hip Cats through.
It was a very early dynamic html (DHTML) site that featured updates to certain parts of the page without loading the hole page – which is what AJAX is used for and all this Web 2.0. It was cross platform and still works today which is pretty amazing considering it is a thousand lines of JavaScript, and another five thousand lines of Perl.
The site is self modifying where hip cats that are rated poorly drop off the scene – their data is mailed to the creator.
In the first few months, thousands of Hip Cats were created, top ten Hip Cats messages were sent out to people, and friendships were made. I tried to get other companies or groups to take Hip Cat scenes. There is a SHIFT magazine scene but it went out of business. There is a Beatnik Museum scene but I do not think they added the link. I almost got Austin Powers to take it but it turned out that they thought I wanted to pay for advertising. So it was all very frustrating not to be able to get people to take a free scene and populate it with their fans. It had so much potential.
Flat Chess is a chess application that lets you play with your friends on a nice board in a no-fuss manner.
In striving for programming simplicity, it has a few quirks. Please read the Flat Chess Tips found behind the link on the bottom. It will help you sign up and invite friends. And it will help you with operation. It only takes five minutes to read and you will find everything will work smoothly thereafter.
You can play at the same time or you can play whenever you want. That is usually how it is with me. Where I make a move and close the application and come back later to make another move. But you are welcome to schedule a time with a friend and play without closing the browser. You will be notified in the application as soon as a move is made.
If you feel compelled, please let me know what you think!
Dan Zen
For many content creators, like Bloggers, money means nothing – all it takes is a few nice comments and they get all charged up to make another post or feature, etc. I know that when I wonder if it is all worth it, I take a look at the thousands of comments on the Dan Zen garden and they tell me, I’ve made a difference. On the blogs however, I seldom get a comment – and if I do, it is spam. This has prompted the making of a tool that will let visitors know that their comments are greatly appreciated. So please, if you have a blog, consider using CommentRight.
CommentRight lets you select from a series of image prompts that you would like to tell your visitors with respect to leaving comments. Once you have selected, you can get the image code to paste into your blog post. Because it is just an image tag, it can be used anywhere such as in WordPress, Blogger or MySpace. The image tag will show a different one of your selected images each time.
CommentRight is free and easy – please let others know and please click on any CommentRight banner in this post to leave a comment as to what you think about CommentRight. It would be a helpful indication that CommentRight works. The C in a box to the right of the banner links through to the CommentRight site.
Chatnap is the Instant Messenger chat game where you challenge friends who have left their instant messenger on but are gone!
You use Chatnap to create a URL that you paste into a friend’s instant messenger window. If the friend clicks the URL within five minutes they win a point and you lose a point. If they do not click within five minutes then they have been caught chat napping and they lose a point and you win a point.
Sign in under START then under CHALLENGE you can create a friends list and challenge your friends. Under SCORE you can see your score and your friends’ scores. Even sign up for an RSS feed to keep track of whenever they score or lose a point.
Have fun!
Predict-A-Poll is a poll portal and tool where you can predict polls as you vote in them. You can create your own polls that will show on the portal. If you want, you can post the polls on your Blog or Website. You can also make private polls.
The results show the predictions and the actuals so you can see if you are predictable and if you are good at predicting! Results are also graphed and analyzed.
Polls are organized by keywords and display context sensitive merchandise using a cool little mini mall from Chitika. Click the link under the mall if you are interested in putting a mini-mall on your site. Send the link to a friend if you think they would be interested.
WannaGet is the collecting game for a collection of collectors . And it is designed specifically for content creators – like site owners and Bloggers – to offer their viewers something fun.
You can collect items in a number of topics (like Harry Potter, Narnia, James Bond) and as more providers create sites, there will be more items to collect. You get points for collecting – click to read the rules and play!
Quite an interesting game, Spy-mail lets you send messages to people and if you do not protect the message or forget to protect the message, then other players can spy on it.
Even before we launched Spy-mail, we sent a Spy-mail message to the president of GameSpy, the very large multi-user gaming site who happened to have the URL spymail.com. We made them a branded site and asked if they would be interested in using it. After a while, we spied on the topic and sure enough, there was a message from another employee back to the president that was unprotected. We got to read the initial message from the president saying “what do you think about this…” then “well, we already have our upcoming gaming network mail…”
Do a spy on Agent Dan Zen and you will find a number of interesting uses of Spy-mail.
Given the right codes, Spy-mail also acts as a full fledged Web-mail account – not bad for a few months of partial programming.
Rich Deck is the Dan Zen card game where you buy and sell zany companies and make millions of Deck Dollars.
Rich Deck is a full Web application equivalent in complexity to large sites like e-bay. If you own a company, you make money from people buying franchises. If you have a franchise, you make money by e-mailing friends and having them accept the card. Different bonuses are given to different franchise owners for logging in, for players accepting the card logging in, for every 100 players logging in, for every week you own the franchise, etc. The technology is Flash – PHP – MySQL
Rich Deck was the prototype for Zen Deck. So with small modifications, Zen Deck was built. Zen Deck is a “card viewer” and works well as a portfolio tool or site interface.
Several other games along these lines are being considered – Spy Deck is one of them where you use agents to get at people’s secrets. In this case a group of people would start a Spy Deck game and play it amongst themselves.
Zen Motto is an attempt to pierce the physical world. One of the most viewed yet empty spaces in our society is the border around the computer monitor. Zen Motto is set up so that you can print a motivational motto and tape it on your monitor.
You can use an existing motto or submit your own. The mottos are two words which often leads to multiple interpretations in a Zen sense. Almost 3% of the views have led to a printing. Perhaps you should try it!
Zen Motto also showcases the Flash grid component for sortable tabular data. It makes use of a full e-mail publishing system where people’s mottos are submitted, an e-mail is sent to the editor who can accept, modify or decline at which point the motto is processed and may show up on the site.
One of Dan Zen’s most successful game was Blimp Races. In the first race, people created their own blimps and then e-mailed friends to join their blimps. The blimp with the most people is winning the race. The first race had about 700 people all having fun and cursing other blimps in the forums.
Six degrees of separation were explored as who people invited and where they came from were displayed. In the second race, two years later, it really exploded when invites went into silicon valley and reached out to India, Hawaii, the Netherlands, etc.
The third race two years later was more difficult as distrust in e-mail had grown to a maximum. People were being overwhelmed by spam and just not in the mood to click links in e-mail. This situation may have gotten better with spam filters and it might be worth a try to hold race four.
The race was almost sold and set to run on the large Bell/Sympatico portal but a change in management and a reduction of original content resulted in a no go.
Save Earth is a massively complex game with a simple pattern matching skill game at its core. The story and the data tracking however are quite extensive.
The site is set in 2020 and features some loosely projected technologies. We probably will not have screens or perhaps even text by then so the predictions are not particularly serious.
There is a part 2 of the game for when the over one million patterns are mapped and the invisible sphere surrounding Earth is shattered. It looks like we are about 11% of the way there but there certainly have been some dedicated pilots with several flying hundreds of times and tagging thousands of patterns!
Shrink Ray came at the dawn of Web mail and was a very interesting viral marketing game.
You arrived at the first screen asking you to fill in some information to play. If you did, you got shrunk! As you were shrinking you had time to e-mail your friends and tell them how to avoid the trap in which you were caught – in this case, your message would tell them to not fill anything in – only press submit.
Soon, people started passing the first test, and they were taken to a barnacle registry page with six panels. The panels were set up to register barnacles – barnacles are Dan Zen’s helpers. Each step of the way, if the player did things out of order or chose the wrong option, they would be shrunk and would have the last minute opportunity to send a message to friends telling them not to do what they had just done.
All the shrunken people got to talk in a bottle which ended up with over 3,000 posts. Click the link for more of the story and some screen shots although the site is no longer active.
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