You know how I love real world applications of game principles and applying game principles to real world analysis. Today’s news provides a good one: healthcare.gov enrollment numbers were reported. While I fear mentioning politics, visible cartoon exclamation points appeared over my head when I saw the US government copying an F2P game press releases in announcing how many people signed up at the website but refusing to mention how many of them are actually paying customers.
: Zubon
The comments are not a forum for arguing for or against policies, but feel free to discuss PR, the presentation of data, game business models, or the prospect of time-traveling pandas.
Thing with PR is that most of it works though. Very few people have the critical insight required to not take numbers at face value and dig deeper in the true meaning behind the “facts” that are stated.
Just the presentation of data is prevalent even in more “intellectual” fields like science and peer-reviewed articles. So whenever people express outrage over get insulted by PR, I just shrug.
Now the failures of the website itself (The website, not health care itself) is quite appalling, and something that enrages me greatly.
-Ursan
Hadn’t thought of if that way. That part I noticed was the unique visits that were mentioned. So only 106ish thousand signed up. We had more then 22 million unique visits!!
I view it as something like releasing numbers on beta participation but not saying how many people have pre-ordered. There’s the gaming industry strategy they should have used: call the entire thing a beta release and use that to become magically impervious to criticism.