and the crazy Polish driver? Actually it’s not a joke but a funny real-life news story that shows up a funny mistake.

Basically the Irish police thought there was a crazy Polish driver called Prawo Jazdy running wild who was getting loads of speeding tickets and parking fines, and who was evading justice by giving a different address every time. Then some eagle eyed officer worked out that Prawo Jazdy just means “Driving Licence” in Polish! The arresting officers had obviously been reading that at the top of the licences of numerous different Polish drivers and thinking it was the offender’s name then entering it into their computer system (over 50 times), like duh. Pretty funny. Classic “data entry”/”human error” scenario.

I saw an interesting thing on the way home from work last night (actually I see quite a lot of interesting things in Vancouver, I guess because I’m just a country lad in a big city). Anyway, two young people were sitting at the back of the bus opposite each other and were playing ping pong! There was no net of course but they were using ping pong paddles to bounce the ball back and forth to each other. They were pretty good at it and it was raising a smile on many people’s faces.

What probably made it more challenging than normal was the motion of the bus because as the bus braked and slowed down the ping pong players’ bodies slowed down with the bus, but if the ball was in the air it carried on moving forward at the same pace! This meant that they had to react quickly and lean to the side to hit it. Interesting demonstration of physics and relative motion. Wonder if there’s a game idea in there? At least a flash game…

I just read a really interesting interview with a guy at Facebook who helps developers get their games onto Facebook.

I remember when there weren’t many games on facebook but since then it’s really exploded. Now it’s very cluttered like iPhone, but the top games get HUGE numbers of players (3-8 million monthly players) due to the fact that Facebook now has 150 million members!

Also a while back the revenue model wasn’t clear but now it seems that people are monetising their games mainly via a) advertising and b) micro-transactions. I’m wondering if the ad-driven model will see a slump due to the economic situation. Certainly if you make a good game there is evidence that players can spend a considerable amount of money on micro-transactions, so that seems a more sensible model to me.

Like Casual games Facebook games are becoming bigger and more complex and are costing more to make. Many big players (please excuse pun) are entering the arena so it seems like the days of one-man bands having big successes could be nearing an end (the same may happen on iPhone soon too). Any time there is a new platform it seems that Indies can get in there quickly and make good money at the beginning but soon it fills up with too much crap and then the biggest and best (and most expensive) titles win. But I guess that’s natural in an emerging market – it’s just business.