Sony Companies on Google Play

This is just an interesting exercise to look at what products are made by Sony, but are listed under different children.

• Sony Corporation
  
  • Seems to mostly be legacy apps and device-specific apps
• Sony Mobile Communication
• PlayStation Mobile Inc.
• Sony Insider
  
  • Has only one app: Sony Insider
• Sony Music Entertainment
  
  • Apps for fans of bands
• Sony Entertainment Network
  
  • Used to have Music Unlimited, but that’s been gutted in favour of Spotify on Sony devices. Now just holds Video Unlimited and Account Manager.
• Sony Digital Entertainment Services Inc.
  
  • Seems to be dedicated to the east-asian market
• Sony Digital Network Applications, Inc.
  
  • Picture and video editing apps that seem to all use the same UI - an application suite, in essence.

After seeing so many weird Google Play listings, this began to make me wonder whether they had additional companies without Sony in their name. This would require some research on Wikipedia for subsidiaries.
Surprisingly, their major non-branded subsidiaries are just various movie and music companies. The only relevant app is a pretty huge streaming service, listed as being developed by itself.

• Crackle
  
  • Stream movies and TV at the price of watching ads.

Ultimately I suppose all I could request would be a feature to allow developers on Google Play to list themselves as subsidiaries. It would allow some interesting transparency, but in all fairness, none of this data is really being hidden. This took me only a little time, and I discovered a couple cool apps in the process.
Perhaps I shall investigate other megacorporations soon.

Stumbleupon and a Wasteful Internet

While attempting to browse Stumbleupon last night, I found it frustrating how completely inept it was at delivering meaningful content. And that's when it hit me that I should probably check how badly this problem was. So I decided to analyze my home page and see how much of what it recommended was worthless. Below is an annotated screenshot.

As you can see, there's a lot of garbage. Most annoyingly, lists. Internet lists are a horrible thing for a multitude of reasons, most of all that they're basically sensory popcorn. Their entire purpose is to give you a trivia-like knowledge of things that seem immediately interesting; upon closer inspection most of them are pointless or boring, though.

I really wish there was a way to filter for lists, so perhaps I'll make a userscript for doing so. Lists are really a huge waste of space, and in general just make the internet a worse place. Maybe it's about time one of us did something to eradicate them.

Further Classification: Casual Genres

Launcher

A game in which you start in one position and move linearly in a direction (or towards a goal) while some amount of stats consistently drain. (e.g. Fuel for a rocket.)
Examples: Burrito Bison, Learn to Fly, Kitty Cannon
Easily Paired With: Incremental, Platformer, Racing
Favorite Example: Burrito Bison Revenge

Incremental

A game which focuses on increasing a value via extremely simple activity. (Clicking, waiting, moving the mouse.)

Examples: Cookie Clicker, Clicker Heroes, Swarm Simulator

Easily Paired With: Launcher, Sim

Favorite Example: Clicker Heroes

Further Classification: Roguelites?

And once again, we come to my examination of game genres and classification. This time, I have a brief opinion on the term "roguelite".

Roguelite is a weird term. It seems to be taking "roguelike" meaning "like the game Rogue" but then appending "lite" onto it, like "lite butter", meaning "barely even butter". I don't really get the point in doing this, however.

Further Classification: My Steam organization

Further classification seems to be an ongoing series about how I mentally, digitally, and physically organize games. In this installment, I talk about Steam.


This is my Steam games list. You can't see the games, because it's minimized. When expanded, you can't fit it all on one screen. This is because I have, quite simply, far too many games. Many of the games are currently hidden, because I didn't like them or care about them. At the bottom are "Games" which is shorthand for "Haven't Even Touched Yet."

Further Classification: Thematic vs Mechanical Genre

Further classification seems to be an ongoing series about how I mentally, digitally, and physically organize games. In this installment, I talk the differences between themes and mechanics when talking about game genres.

I'm gonna try to quickly summarize something that I think we all understand, but maybe never really consider. The difference between a game's dynamics and its themes. A game's mechanical genre is what we generally talk about: Shooter, Platformer, Puzzle, etc. A game's thematic genre is a little more rare/undiscussed. Things like horror, science fiction, and fantasy are all pulp genres of fiction, and they can apply to games too.

Further Classification: Game difficulty levels

Further classification seems to be an ongoing series about how I mentally, digitally, and physically organize games. In this installment, I just list some game difficulties.