Some of the best innovations occur when people take something generally considered to be creatively exhausted, and then re-invent it.
A good example is Zynga’s casual mobile game, Words With Friends, which is similar to Scrabble. You might think that after 60 years under the focused attention of some highly competitive players, the rules and design of Scrabble were pretty much locked down, but as Mark Anderson describes in an article in IEEE Spectrum, that’s not the case.
Zynga applied some heavy duty analysis to Scrabble, then tweaked arrangement of bonus squares on the board, and adjusted the values of some of letter tiles: the result is a game where players are much more likely to be able to lay down high-scoring words, making the run of play more unpredictable.
via technology review
January 20, 2012
