Your Game, Your Goos

Scott Hardie | March 26, 2017
Celebrity Goo Game now has a much improved system for creating your own goos. It's been in the works for a while now, and I'm pleased to announce that it's finally done. It streamlines the process to happen quickly:

1) Type in a celebrity's name.
2) Click on one of the thumbnails to use that image.
3) Drag the frame over the celebrity's face.
4) Click "Go" to generate a random gooed image, and maybe click "Regenerate" a few times if you're picky about how it turns out.
5) Type in a clue, and pick a few more details (category, difficulty, etc).
6) Submit.

That's it! I'll take it from there. No more generating your own images offline in Photoshop and uploading them. No more receiving a rejection notice and having to rewrite your clue or replace your images. I'll make whatever adjustments are needed myself in order to make the goo ready for publication. You just sit back and collect the points.

Did I mention that you automatically get 200 points per creation now, too? No more partial points depending on what info you provide. It's so easy that you can now create and submit an entire goo in less than a minute, and rack up an easy 200 points each time. If the lucky cat Shiro granted you a per-goo bonus, you'll get that bonus on your creations when they publish.

I have also added some suggestions to the top of the page for making better goos and for getting your goos to publish more often. I expect them to be read once (if at all) and forgotten, but they're there if they're helpful.

I realize that I'm being dictatorial about what qualifies a goo to be "ready for publication" and that's not fair. Sometimes I alter a goo so that it loses some of its original appeal for you in creating it, and I'm sorry for that. Sometimes players perceive me going "easier" on some creators than others, which, if I really do it, is never intentionally or consciously done. But over the years, I've received more than enough feedback from players to convince me that player-created goos need to be edited before publication, to meet minimum standards of solvability. The rejection-and-resubmission system was a good idea but was simply taking too long per goo; having me edit goos directly (with annotation about what I changed) is the time-saving solution.

For players who like generating and uploading their own images, that's the one feature that I didn't have time to finish this weekend. I plan to add support for that soon.

All unpublished creations from the old system have been ported into the new system. I have quite a backlog to work through, but within a week or two, I expect to have them all processed and awaiting publication.

I hope that you take advantage of this new system to score some easy points and make your own contributions to the game! This is a long overdue upgrade, but it only works if people use it. Have fun with it! And please let me know your feedback and whether you have any problems using it.

Stay tuned for another big change to the game in the next two months...

Erik Bates | March 27, 2017
[hidden by request]

LaVonne Lemler | March 27, 2017
Great idea, Scott! To simplify things for all involved is the way to go! Can't wait to try it!

Scott Hardie | March 27, 2017
I'm so sorry! One of my very last code tweaks before launching this, after I had done all of the testing, introduced a bug that prevented it from saving submissions. Can you please re-submit if you created one already? After submission, you should see a green "thank you" message at the top of the page, and your goo will appear under "previous creations" at the bottom of the page.

It pains me to introduce any bug into the system, but especially a major launch-day bug like this, because it just erodes trust in the new system. I put a lot of work into getting this right and I hate to have it undermined like this, especially if this incident results in people not bothering in the future if they think the form is buggy. I have re-tested to be certain that the problem is solved, and I hope that this doesn't influence anyone's enjoyment of the new process. Again, I'm sorry to request repeat submissions from players who tried it out already. :-(

Scott Hardie | March 27, 2017
Thanks for the positive feedback so far! I'm glad to hear it.

Someone asked if there is a limit to how many goos you can create, and the answer is no. There is a built-in delay in publishing them: After one of your goos is published in the game, the site waits at least 15 days before another can be selected for publication. (That waiting period will probably be reduced in the future.) But please, add as many goos as you want to the queue; they'll all publish eventually.

Scott Hardie | March 27, 2017
One of the things holding this up for a long time was my effort to create a more traditional distortion effect on the server, like we used to have with Kai's Power Goo and Photoshop. The code that generates the gooed images has to use a built-in algoritm, and so we've been stuck with the same handful of distortion effects for a while. I wanted to break free of that and allow more traditional gooing by stretching one part of the image in one direction, then maybe another part in another direction, over and over, like this or this or this. To me, those will always be the "real" goos. But the software library that I'm using doesn't support that kind of stretching, and I tried writing my own effect, but it requires a calculus degree that I sadly lack. I will resume experimenting with that someday, but I didn't want to hold up this other project any longer. In the meantime, I have added a few new distortion effects to the mix, and increased the chances of multiple effects being applied to the same image, in the hopes of freshening up the mix a little.

Chris Lemler | March 27, 2017
Scott I really like this new system to the created goo's. It much easier and faster. I'm really looking forward for the changes.

Scott Hardie | April 8, 2017
I'd like to say a couple of things to Justin publicly.

First, of course, congrats on solving Russ's very difficult activist goo! I spent a long time on it, and several players spent a long time on it, but only you pulled off the answer. That was an impressive solo solution. :-)

Second, I'm sorry for not better handling your technology goo that got published on April 5. If I recall correctly, you intended it to be extremely difficult when you created it a few years ago, and I wanted it to be made easier, and you declined to re-submit it (or perhaps just never got around to that). When I imported all old creations into the new system last month, I gave your goo another look and decided to run it after all without asking you, this time writing an easier clue myself. But I didn't really write an easier clue; the clue that I wrote has only a little bit more information than yours, and is arguably even harder because its words lead to less accurate search results. I even left your image intact despite it completely obscuring the person depicted! I really bungled this goo on multiple levels. My apologies, friend.

The more old goo creations that I process from the backlog -- 37 done, 42 still pending! -- the less confident that I feel about rewriting clues. Who am I to rewrite your words? It's insulting. I may have more experience running the game than anybody, but I have less experience playing the game, and I should trust you folks to submit goos that will be fun and playable for each other, even if they're hard. ...And yet, what I try to remember is that player-created goos have been controversial numerous times over the years. I've been looking back over old goos in preparation for a 20th-anniversary project that I want to do next year, and it strikes me how many times players have complained publicly and privately about each other's goos being too hard or too obscure or too confusing or too distorted or whatever. I like variety and I like players approaching goos from angles that I wouldn't think of because it stretches all of our brains a little, but unfortunately there's no crystal-clear boundary defining what goo is too hard and what goo is just hard enough to be published; it's something that has to be sensed and judged, and as game administrator that responsibility falls to me. I'm doing the best I can to balance the needs of the game with honoring your creativity. I appreciate all of the effort players have put into creating goos so far and I hope that there are lots more to come. I also hope that you'll let me know when I'm out of line, altering your goos too much or not altering them enough. Thank you, always!

Scott Hardie | April 8, 2017
To be clear, there's really only three reasons why I alter goos:

- I replace missing images. There was a server glitch last year that ate the images of a few goos created by Chris and Russ, and I've been forced to make replacements, with my apologies to the guys. The new system won't save a goo without images, so it shouldn't happen again.

- I revise punctuation, spelling, and grammar. As an English major, I do that pretty much automatically. :-P

- The most common change is that I make the goo easier if I think it's unplayable. An image that offers no recognizeable details will be replaced. A clue that depends on some very obscure element of the celebrity, like a line of dialogue from some sitcom they guest-starred in ten years ago or something, will be rewritten. It usually just means adding a detail or two to the clue; it's as simple as that. I try to preserve the original wording as much as I can, but I confess to getting overzealous sometimes, as I did with Justin's technology goo; my clues aren't always better and I'm sorry for that.

I should mention that there's a fourth thing that I might possibly alter in a player-created goo, a factual inaccuracy. I have yet to notice one, but I'll correct it if I see it. That said, I don't have time to fact-check every last detail in each of your goos, so it's possible for a factual error to slip through. Consider this a warning. Given how often I personally have created goos with the wrong damn person in the photograph, a player is bound to make the same mistake sooner or later. Please do NOT take this as license to make factual errors on purpose in the hopes of your goos being harder. :-)

Justin Woods | April 8, 2017
Thank you Scott, on the congrats for solving Russ's GOO. I am a little shocked that I was able to pull that off with me not being as engaged as I use to be on the game.

For the publishing of my old GOO creation, thank you and I really did never get back around to making the changes I wanted. I understand the rules and you trying to keep the integrity of the game equal to all players. It was nice to see it make it into the game and glad to see it being solved.

I don't make it my intention to make unsolvable GOO's but do like to make them a challenge!

Thanks again for publishing the GOO and the congrats on a solo solution.

Scott Hardie | June 2, 2017
Several people have asked me how to create a goo when the person does not appear in any of the photos offered by the form, like when they're too obscure or when someone else more famous than them has the same name. I have three answers to that question.

First, you can cheat a little bit in the form. When you click [Go] after typing the name, the form searches online for images matching that phrase and offers you thumbnails to work with. You can then revise the name to be something else and continue with the form. For instance, say you wanted to create a goo of black filmmaker Steve McQueen who made 12 Years a Slave. If you type "Steve McQueen" as the name, most of the images that the form will offer you will be of the more famous white actor Steve McQueen from Bullitt and The Great Escape. You could type "Steve McQueen director 12 Years a Slave" into the name field and click [Go] to get the images that you want, then revise the name field to say "Steve McQueen" and fill out the rest of the form. The goo will save with the correct name "Steve McQueen" but you'll have the images that you want. (This cheat is a little awkward and the form should properly offer you an option to clarify your search, but it's going to be a long time before I ever get around to building that, so keep this alternative in mind.) This kind of cheat in the form won't always work, but it should help occasionally.

Second, I plan to restore the option to upload your own source image and gooed image to the site, like there used to be. What used to be there is not really compatible with the new Javascript-driven form that we have today, so it's taking me a while to finish this, but it's started and I hope to be done with it sometime this summer. That way, you can make your own images if the site doesn't find any for you.

Third, you might want to consider not making that goo if the person is too obscure for there to be good photos of them online. People who are only famous locally, or who were only famous for a day or two, or who aren't famous at all but merely got mentioned once in a newspaper, or who are only famous within a particular industry or hobby, often don't make good goos. You don't have to turn every idea into a goo; I abandon ideas all the time for being too obscure. On rare occasions, I delete player submissions for being too obscure, so you might possibly be wasting time anyway. (Hard goos are good! Goos that other players had no way of knowing, because it's someone from your local police blotter or from deep within your specialized hobby, have been criticized in the past and I prefer to avoid them.) I'm not saying that you definitely must give up on an idea just because there are no images immediately available, but it's worth considering.

While we're on the subject of goo creations, I should mention that I'm having trouble keeping up with the backlog. I have now processed all 63 goos that were already in the queue waiting for approval when we switched to the new process in March, as well as another 30 or so that have been created since then. But as of now, there are almost 40 more goos sitting in the queue waiting for review, most of them having been submitted in the last few weeks. I want to be crystal clear about this; I am thrilled that so many players are using the form and coming up with great goos! This is awesome for the game, and good for me personally. I just need to be clear that I can't process them all right away; I typically process a few each day before I have to move on, and some days i'm too busy to review any. I'm worried about the possibility of someone losing interest and giving up on creating goos because their submissions waited too long for approval. I'm open to suggestions for handling this better. For now, all I can really say is please have patience. :-) Thanks for so many great new goos!