Gizmodo has a piece on an author who is trying an interesting e-book promotional gimmick. Albert-László Barabási has put his new book Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do on-line—as a hidden-word guessing game.
Unfortunately, thanks to the mention on Gizmodo and other websites, the Burst game seems to be overloaded and not working entirely right at the moment, so I wasn’t really able to try it out to its full extent. But the theory is that you “adopt” a word, and then you guess words to gain points, which you can use to reveal or guess other words.
I think it’s a quite clever way of using electronic text to promote and tease the book at the same time, and it looks like it might be a lot of fun when traffic settles down and it is easier to play. And unlike the “NationStates” game that author Max Barry used to promote his book Jennifer Government, this game actually does have something to do with the book itself.
