Whitepaper

Today, I released the whitepaper I’ve been discussing for the past few days. I was somewhat surprised to find that it seems to fill an actual need; Nextoy’s business model actually creates real inconvenience for the people who enjoy the game they’re marketing.

Trademarks

Nextoy’s business model (as regards KenKen puzzles) seems to be pretty simple:

• Popularize a particular variant of Sudoku
• Associate the brand name “KenKen” with that variant
• Aggressively defend your trademark
• Sell the brand equity you developed in steps (2) and (3) by licensing the trademark

This seems to be a sound plan, but it’s had an interesting side-effect. The puzzle rules cannot be defended as intellectual property, so people are free to publish their own instances of this type of puzzle. If you like this sort of thing, that’s good. However, because KenKen is a trademark, and also, thanks to Nextoy’s efforts, the most well-known name for puzzles of this type, there’s no agreement on what to call them. The following names are all used:

• MathDoKu
• KenDoKu
• kenduko
• cancan
• square wisdom
• minuplu
• calcudoku
• latincalc

If you’re searching for a game online, this is a real problem. Many high-quality puzzles won’t turn up if you use the wrong term, and no common term has emerged because the most aggressively popularized term is also the most aggressively defended.

Whitepaper

In this context, my little marketing project will actually provide a valuable service; a single page listing all the online variants of this type of puzzle, under whatever name, represents a real convenience. Of course, that doesn’t mean it will be rewarded with hits, but we can only try.

The current version of the whitepaper is online at the somewhat puckish URL of find- kenken- and- square- wisdom- puzzles- online …. dot com. I’m not linking it here because my puzzles link to my blog, and my whitepaper links to my puzzles, so I’m concerned that a link from my blog to my whitepaper will look like a triangular link scheme to Google. Right now, it lists only a few puzzle sites based on a few keywords, but I’ll be beefing it up in the near future. I’ll also be redirecting my advertising to it, and we’ll see how that goes.

Printing

I also improved support for printing today, by adding a little UI, and adjusting the style sheets. The first change I made was somewhat superfluous. I added a “Print this puzzle” link below the playfield. This is the markup:

<A href="#" style="margin-right: 1em;" onclick="window.print(); return false;">Print this puzzle</A>

This doesn’t do anything you couldn’t do with the browser’s UI, but it does put the option right in front of the user.

The second change was more substantive: I added a print-media specific STYLE section to the HEAD of the document:

<STYLE type="text/css" media="print">
	div.field {
		position:		static;
		width:			100%;
	}
	div.copy {
		display:		none;
	}
	p.controls {
		display:		none;
	}
	td.active {
		background:		transparent;
	}
</STYLE>

The impact of this stylesheet is straightforward:

• Move the DIV containing the playfield back into the static flow (it’s absolutely positioned on the webpage) and make it fill the entire page.
• Hide the DIV containing the copy (on the left-hand side of the webpage)
• Hide the Ps containing the controls below the playfield
• Remove highlighting from the active cell

Future Work

My immediate plans center around incremental improvements to some of my marketing “hooks”: shoring up the solver and the whitepaper. Next, I’ll look at distributing my puzzles via widgets of some sort:

• User request: Investigate solver support for difference and quotient cages with more than two cells.
• Add more sites to the whitepaper
• Begin researching widgets

Yesterday’s Stats

I’m cutting over my advertising to the whitepaper early in the morning of the 11th; Monday’s post will include two days of traffic data from the new ad campaign. Let’s hope for something to discuss!

Follow Along

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