Mastodawn

Ategon Jul 16, 2024

Suggestions for Canvas and future events!

https://programming.dev/post/16920926

Suggestions for Canvas and future events! - programming.dev

Hey everyone! Thanks for participating in Canvas. I wanted to make a thread to collect together suggestions people have that can be worked on before the next Canvas. Feel free to also throw in suggestions for future Events we can build and run for the fediverse. Ill be collecting suggestions together and making issues for them in the repository for myself or some other contributors to work on (the projects open source so anyones free to contribute! https://git.sc07.company/sc07/canvas [https://git.sc07.company/sc07/canvas] Feel free to reach out to me and I can help get you set up with the codebase)

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mindbleach Jul 16, 2024

Escalating timers are an antipattern. It punishes anyone who looks away for more than thirty seconds - and thirty seconds per click is not exactly a brisk pace for maintaining attention.

Other than that, good shit, well done. Undo was a welcome surprise. Ditto the repetition prevention.

No wait, one other thing. (Complaint sandwich!) Scaling should be in integer powers. Everything but fully-zoomed-out and extremely-blown-up looked lumpy and distracting. Especially with all the pixel art going on.

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Deebster Jul 16, 2024

One effect of this is that someone steadily editing got more pixels than someone editing in batches, which felt like a feature when defending against trolls.

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mindbleach Jul 16, 2024

Encouraging anyone to stare at a screen for two actions per second is brutal. Especially when those actions, to be optimal, have to happen the moment the timer rolls over.

This is an addiction mechanic.

This is some free-to-play mobile-game nonsense.

No matter how good the motivations are, no matter what narratives we can build around casual versus attentive use, this is a bad decision for software. It is deliberate manipulation of the user’s motives and habits for destructive patterns of behavior.

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Deebster

I didn’t love it tbh. I had the canvas up in half of the screen and was doing something else but would look over too early then just be waiting for x seconds for my next pixel.

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mindbleach Jul 16, 2024

Same. Watched some streams and found myself listening distractedly while staring at a window with nothing happening. It is, perhaps unfortunately, plenty of time to reflect on why, and to ask whether this is desirable.

The worst example of this accidental mistreatment (in my personal experience) was the idle game The Idle Class. From the genre and the title, you’d figure you can just leave it running, and come back whenever. But the dev added e-mail events that give a huge bonus if you catch them within thirty seconds. I cannot overstate - that is a Skinner box. That is operant conditioning on a random schedule. It’s how brains develop obsessive habits, and eventually, superstitions.

Now that everyone’s been exposed to real-money video games and at least acknowledges some of their tactics are criminal, we should all be mindful of how software influences people. Problems don’t need to be malicious or complex. Reliable incentives over time are profoundly influential.