 |
||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| The Last Four Colors by Tansin A. Darcos 08/24/2022, 12:53am PDT | ||||
 |
 |
|||
| I have an Android phone, so, seeing how they're free, I sometimes look through the various games available from the Google Play Store. Well, they're not giving these apps away for free. While you may not pay in money, you usually have to pay in attention. They're using the model started by television: produce an entertaining program, then sell advertisements that interrupt the program at certain points. (Usually there is also a means to purchase the program without ads, typically US$2.99.) What are most, if not almost all - that is, over 90% - of the ads about? Other games, of course, that they themselves are also ad supported. In short, it's like a giant circle-jerk where ad-supported programs run ads to get you to install and run other ad-supported programs, which they themselves run ads to get you to install and run more ad-supported programs, except when occasionally one of the programs runs an ad for one of the prior ones you installed, or in some cases, it's an ad for itself, i.e. the very game you are playing.
But, I'm not really here to talk about the economic landscape of Android apps, but about the use of one specific type of game in particular: paint by number. If you happened to be in arts and crafts stores, at least in the 1960s and 1970s - I do not know if they still sell them* - you could purchase a kit which consisted of a bunch of paint jars, about the size of restaurant coffee creamer buckets, about 1/2" tall, each containing a color of paint, and a number on the container. Along with this was a picture with very faint lines to mark off the form of a picture, say a bowl of fruit, and each marked region had a small number on it, corresponding to one of the paint colors. You're supposed to carefully paint between the lines of that numbered color. If you followed the instructions, you get a nice, painting you made. If not, you get anything from a partially completed reminder that you have no patience, all the way to a badly painted mess that says you have no talent and/or no ability to follow instructions. Well, paint by number programs change this dynamic. The colors are numbered and the segments of the painting are numbered, when you touch a numbered color, the sections carrying that number are highlighted, in this program, by a checkerboard pattern instead of the original white background. Touch a highlighted segment, the highlight and the number disappear, and that segment is filled with that color. When the last segment containing a specific number is touched, it fills with color, then that color selection drops off. What happens if you touch a different numbered square than the color you have selected? Nothing, it will not paint the wrong color. So you can't make a mistake. However, you can sometimes be unable to find a color you missed. Typically, I think I've painted everything, only to have four colors left on the board. The last four colors, that take so long to find because you're looking for very tiny spots you missed, like the sky color between two feathers of a bird's wing, or a tiny triangle on a stained-glass window. Well, they often have a way out. You can get a hint, in which it will show you one of the spots remaining unpainted with that color. You either pay something - say, 99c for 5 or 10 hints, or get one hint for watching another commercial. I mean, you have a paint-by-number puzzle that had 70, 80, sometimes 110 different colors, and it will seem like you spend as much time looking for the last four unfinished colors than you do with all of the others. * I just checked, yes, Amazon sells paint by number kits in anywhere from $2.99 - I have no idea how the seller can make a profit - all the way to high-end kits costing $119.00. |
||||
 |
 |
|||
|
The Last Four Colors by 08/24/2022, 12:53am PDT  |
