26.04.2018: The game's "soft launch" has started. Between now and the 15th of May, we will invite around 100 journalists and friends to "seed" the game and explore it before the full public launch. Anyone who has already played the Color Game has received a message disouraging them from playing this version. 27.04 Thomas Mueller & James Winters promote the game at a games conference in Berlin, allowing visitors to test the app. 27.04 A press release was sent to around 50 journalists (English and French-speaking mostly). It included an invitation to access the app before its launch. 04.05. The "soft launch" has brought around 80 players to download the app. I (OM) have been regularly tuning the game's parameters. Threshold of successful trials necessary to win a puzzle set has been changed from 4 to 3; the cost of puzzles has been changed several times, as well as the points gained by players after playing them. The current settings for the game are uploaded as "settings-2018-05-04.jpg" in the OSF repository. The current settings for the Levels is also uploaded: "levels-2018-05-04.csv". 15.05 The game's public launch took place during the night, the embargo for our press release expiring at midnight CET. Last Sunday I fine-tuned the points system one last time (number of points players get at the outset). The levels system is unchanged. I upload the current settings as settings-2018-05-15.jpg. 21.05 The affluence of players this week proved taxing for our system. Smartphones need to refresh regularly a set of several hundred profiles, which occasions delays. To avoid this, as a temporary fix, we decided to split the two Halves, Half A and Half B, into two sub-halves (A1, A2 from A, B1, B2 from B). The two splits took place at 9:12 AM CET (recorded as 7:12 in the data, which gives time as GMT). This is intended as a temporary fix: the sub-groups will be merged back as soon as this is doable without running into our current problems. The developpers have been instructed to erase all the profiles of users that have not completed the tutorial, to lighten the load. More long-term solutons are being studied. 22.05. The app has now been installed over 2000 times. A little less than 600 players have reached level 2 (Level 1 is reached automatically upon completing the tutorial). Approximately 1000 puzzles (=10 000 trials) have been played each day. Players are rather diverse and come from more than 60 different countries. 29.05. To fix the issue that was identified on 22.05 (see above), the developers released a new version of the app, where each player only sees other players if they (a) — have puzzles available for that player, and/or (b) have interacted with that player, and/or (c) are live. This restriction avoids the proliferation of players that plagued the app and caused bugs. The updated version was released on the 28th for Android (morning) and iOS (evening). Android versions of the Color Game were automatically updated, while iOS versions had to be redownloaded to get the update. Today at 13:13 CET (11:13 GMT), the 2x2 groups that had been split were re-merged into the moieties that they came from. Groups A1 and A2 were re-merged into Half A, and the same happened to B1 and B2. The file users-before-merge-2018-05-29 gives the list of users as it was before the merge, recording the sub-groups as they were at that point. 20.08, a player made us aware that he was able to solve the same puzzle multiple times, which is not supposed to be possible at all. We have been investigating this issue with the developers since then, but the issue, which affects only a small minority of users, proves difficult to replicate on the developers' machines. On the 30th of August, this issue concerned 51 players. We are waiting for the developers to solve this issue. We decided we would not use this data for any analysis. [written 21/09] 05.09, we completed our first analysis of the app's data, concerning the TREES project. We found that the proper conditions to carry on the project, split the two halves into sub-groups, and provoke the growth of distinct dialects, were not met. The project has been aborted. [written 21/09] 15.09. We rolled out version 1.10 of the app for iOS and Google Play. It includes Portuguese (Brazil), Japanese, and Russian language versions of the game. 09.04.2019. We decided last week to retire the app slighlty earlier than planned (the planned date was May 15th). The reasons are (a) traffic on the app has slowed down a lot, we still have several visits per day but the trend is downwards (b) the projects that required a one-year data collection period were refashioned to accommodate other scales (based on the progress of individual pairs not the group as a whole, like FRIENDS) or abandonned (like TREES). The website colorgame.net does not feature the links to the app stores since last week, and on Thursday the app will be discontinued. 10.04.2019. We consider that the data collection period is over since today 1 PM. We will be playing with the app with a group of students this afternoon but this data won't be kept.