[_wwz4]

1. It wasn't lucky that he made a good game that people like, it was hard work. 2. Doing something cool when he saw an opportunity with Hamill was also not luck. It took creativity and initiative.

Maybe he didn't do the fun little easter egg for marketing, but for whatever reason he did it, he created the opportunities through hard work and cleverness.

[chrisan]

Look, its a great story. I shared it with everyone who is a fan of SW or codes as it made me smile.

This is nothing to do with einaregilsson as it is a _very cool_ easter egg, more just the comments on marketing.

Lots of people put lots of hard work into games people like. How many of them get a celebrity to play their game, let alone post on social media? There are plenty of games out there with thousands of users and 0 celebrities.

On top of that someone reached out to him and request they prank Mr Skywalker. Where is the initiative in that?

He was lucky to have a celeb play his game. He was lucky the celeb tweets about his game. He was lucky a friend of the celeb requested they prank him. He clearly capitalized on the opportunity and every nerd like myself loved this story because Star Wars + coding fun and now we are all checking out cardgames.io.

But to claim "this is how you do marketing" is a stretch for me.

[einaregilsson]

I agree :) This was definitely luck, most people never get celebrities tweeting about their games. And I guess now I am getting some marketing value out of it, but honestly I just wanted to share this with an audience that I knew would appreciate it. When you program cool stuff you want to share it!

In any case, I guess I'll get some extra traffic today, but at the end of the day it's a Yahtzee game, nothing exactly groundbreaking, so I don't think all the people that saw this post are going to start playing Yahtzee all the time ;)

[crusso]

This was a great blog posted the other day in a totally different context.

http://www.righto.com/2011/07/cells-are-very-fast-and-crowde...

You could look at cellular activity as luck. Or you could realize that creating the circumstances for "lucky" things to happen is very directed.

Sure, the very specific circumstances of the easter egg for Hamill were unique like rolling a specific sequence of yahtzee dice. But if a different celebrity had expressed joy of the game and the author had decided on a different easter egg for slightly different reasons, that would have been unique too. But the very creation of all of these opportunities to do unique things was not luck.

If you don't roll the yahtzee dice very often, you won't see many unique rolls. Roll them a lot and you'll see many "lucky" rolls.

[TillE]

99% of great games will have zero celebrity fans tweeting about them, no matter how hard you worked. Necessary but not sufficient.

[crusso]

I'm not saying that this exact situation was all hard work. I'm saying that he created the opportunity for interactions and to be noticed through hard work and creativity. There are many notable ways he could have done something with the work he did that would gain some kind of 15 minutes of fame - maybe having nothing to do with acting on a celebrity tweet.

Taken as an exact specific outcome, sure, it's improbable. But across all of the interesting outcomes it's far less improbable.

This reminds me of the argument from Creationists about how we couldn't have been exactly created as we are because the odds of our turning out exactly as we have are insurmountable.

They ignore the success bias of our current outcome and the possibility that many viable evolutionary paths could have led to stable life and even intelligent beings like ourselves.