The Color-Game-o-Scope

Cognition and Culture
It’s been six months since we launched the Color Game App.
The project will last for another half year before we make all our hypotheses public.
For us, the Color Game is an experiment in cultural evolution: we want to see how communication practices change over the long run.
That makes it important to know how our players themselves evolve: are we dealing with a rapidly changing population of fickle players, or do the same happy few come back every day?
The answer is to be found in… the Color-Game-O-Scope!
We only retained the players who filled in their personal information in ways that made sense, and then really played the game.
More players downloaded the app than are shown here. Players flooded in on the first few weeks after the launch, then our recruitment rate ebbed slightly.
Last month one feature we wrote for an online forum went around, bringing a new wave of players. What really keeps the game vibrant, though, is the assiduous participation of a core of committed players — a minority, but not such a small one.
Some of them have been with us ever since game launch!